Summer Palace, UPS, and Sheldon Liu

This morning we were greeted by another private tour, this time in the literal sense of the word. Sheldon Liu, a family fried of the Checchi's, was in Beijing and sent us his car and driver to take us to the Summer Palace. It was incredibly generous of him, and what a relief not to take a taxi or public transportation, especially when our language barrier is so high.

The summer palace was lovely, the only problem was that neither of us were in the mood to be tourists and walk around the whle day in the heat. So we planned for 1.5 hours there and stuck to it. The two main attractions were the marble boat and great hall, of which neither were that exciting. The marble boat was pretty in its own right, but kind of pointless and odd sitting forever motionless on the water. The great hall was less than great. It was basically a 5 foot wide outdoor corridor open on all sides with wood railings and roof and painted. I guess it was long, but to be honest, I've seen better paintings and woodwork from street artists. The most impressive part of the palace was the landscaping, gardens, and lakes.

We hopped on a taxi and went home. I went to go ship our newly acquired Chinese tea and other goods home and took a taxi by myself to the UPS. The tourguide at the hostel gave me the address and when I got there I found myself at UPS headquarters, not the store. Time was of the essence, since we were to meet Sheldon for dinner at 5:30. Surrounded by workers in cubicles somebody finally directed me to a different office. I took another taxi there, only to find out that they don't do the packaging there, so the took my packages and sent them on a UPS truck to their packaging center. I followed in another UPS truck and found them packaging my stuff, but refusing to ship the Tea, citing that the Chinese government would not allow it. Looking at my watch I was already late, but since everything was packaged I asked them the price. They weighed it and told me it would be $170 USD!!! First of all I didn't have that much with me at the time, and secondly I was running too late to finish the shipment, so i grabbed the items and left without accomplishing a thing. Meanwhile kate had done laundry for the both of us and I threw on a new shirt and Sheldons Driver drove us to meet him. (Surprisingly the restaraunt was in the World Tower Hotel and Shopping complex, the same place the UPS headquarters were located!)

We sat down at a swanky restaraunt in our own private booth and were treated to some amazing Chinese food. We were accompanied by a man named Paul who was a friend of Sheldon and Sheldon's mother (who's only english was "hello". It was a wonderful dinner and great conversation. Everyone was so nice. The restaraunt's specialty was spicy fish soup, and it was delicious. In fact everything was great, and correspondingly everything was spicy. They made a bean curd tofu right in front of your eyes much in the same manner jello is made. And by the end of dinner I was not only full, but also on the verge of tears for the amount of hot peppers we ate.