Preserved Eggs and Happy Buddha

May 29, 2008
Until today, we’d been rather scheduled, so we enjoyed sleeping in until 7:00 a.m. After a great phone call from dear friends and a leisurely “get-ready-to-face-the-day,” we made our way to breakfast. Another standard buffet with the exception of Chinese preserved eggs. Also known as hundred-year eggs or thousand-year eggs, this Chinese delicacy is made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice straw for 100 days. When completed, the yoke becomes a dark green, cream-like substance with a strong odor of sulfur and ammonia, while the egg white becomes a dark brown transparent jelly with little flavor or taste. I had two. Given that for the rest of the day, I found it necessary to be cognizant of the proximity and availability of Western toilets, those two will be my last.

It was a gorgeous day in Beijing, mid 70’s, low humidity and blue sky. This was a bit of a surprise. Three years ago when in Beijing, even on cloudless days, the sky wasn’t blue; rather it was a hazy grey. Smog. In preparation for the Olympics, all factories, manufacturing concerns and the like, were required to move from Beijing proper to outskirts of the city; it was believed that doing so would help improve the air quality for the Olympics. Based on today’s experience, it seems to have worked. There is, however, a bit of irony to this. Beijing is laid out in six concentric circles. All the factories, etc., were to be relocated to at least the fifth ring (based on what we’d been told three years ago by an ex-pat living in Beijing). Today, Caroline and I made our way to the Olympic Stadium; it’s located in the middle of the fourth ring. The closer we got to the Olympic site, the poorer the air quality became.

We took advantage of the Beijing subway system today. This was great as we saw a lot of the city and because it made us feel like we were truly traveling, having to find our own way rather than relying on guides.

Tomorrow we will meet some of the people in our adoption travel group. It’s getting a bit surreal; two days and a wake-up and we’ll have Ellie!

Quote of the day: Walking down Wangfujing Avenue’s pedestrian shopping zone, we take a side street into a local marketplace complete with vendors selling seahorses and scorpions on a stick (yes…to eat…kind of like state fair food!) to Chairman Mao watches. As we’re pursuing the goods, a young woman vendor in her teens calls out to me, “Ha-lo, Ha-lo, Happy Buddha, shop here, give you good price.”