Dog on Roof: Spread 'em

Little facts that are pretty much common knowledge: Beijing is a huge city with a huge population (over 11 million). It contains many significant landmarks, buildings and historical sights.

The Bird's Nest

But for as massive of a place as Beijing, we were surprised by how spread out and spacious many areas were. Still, tourists were everywhere and would pretty much stack on top of one another just to get one inch closer to whatever monument or performance was in front of them. But with all the space available in and around the city’s sights, they could have chilled out a little more and enjoyed the comfort of a little something known to westerners as “personal space.”

And our next destination, which was just as spacious as any of Beijing’s other bustling sights, was the Olympic stadium where the 2008 games were held.

My advice if you visit this place: wear sunblock and a hat, be prepared to walk a lot, and don’t bother visiting the Water Cube unless you have a really good reason. Sure, it’s a cool place. And we can say we stood in the stands where people watched Phelps take 8 gold medals. Plus the Water Cube also contains a massive water park, which looked like great fun for children of all ages. But for the price of admission just to get in and walk around, it’s really not worth it to just see a pool.

But it's cool.

The rings aren't the only round thing in this picture

Gettin' his swole on

The Water Cube

Just pretending we're watching the Olympics and not a
bunch of workers covering up the pool for some other event.

Our final Chinese tourist stop was at the Summer Palace. We somehow decided that we hadn’t seen enough palaces and temples yet, so this final site really rounded out our vacation. Again, this was a wide-open space that demanded a lot of walking out of us. One of the tour guides milling about the entrance mentioned that place was four times the size of the Forbidden City…and that was almost the size of 180 football fields. Needless to say, we did not see every corner of the Summer Palace.

But we walked about, rented a boat, fought the current on the way back (don’t underestimate the appearance of calm-looking water!), got ripped off for Chinese theme park food, hiked a few more flights of stairs, and overall had a very enjoyable time looking at the beautiful ancient designs of all the buildings and objects at the Summer Palace.