Hutong

Just to make sure everyone slept this night, we added an evening event to our itinerary: a tour of the hutongs, the small alleys that remain from ancient Beijing. We rode around in pedicabs, a sort of bicycle rickshaw and took some time to learn how the doorpins above the courtyard door along with the stones on either side of the door signified the status of the family that lived there. We also entered a courtyard and saw some of the rooms of one hutong family. Each room was built around the perimeter of the courtyard and you had to go outside to move from one room to another. At one time the courtyard would have been a central garden for the complex, but during the Cultural Revolution, they built additional rooms in the courtyard so now there was a maze of smaller alleys and leading to those additional rooms.
For dinner we ate at a food court in the mall below the Grand Hyatt hotel. For 14Y to 25Y you could get a large dish of Chinese food from any of 30 or so vendors. I had calamari in fiery pepper sauce and it was delicious.
As expected, there was no need for midnight tai chi this time. I fell asleep as soon as I crawled into bed around 10 PM and slept soundly until 5 AM.
In China I weigh the same as Nicholas, about 75. Of course the scales are in kilograms and Nick weighs 75 pounds, so it's sort of cheating. I am going to have to go back on my one serving per meal diet because I'm eating too much good food, and contrary to Grammy's assertion, you can get fat eating Chinese food.
4/11 72.3 (after time trial)
4/13 75.2 (after first dinner in China)
4/14 73.3 (before breakfast)
4/15 73.9 (after dinner)
4/16 73.5 (before breakfast)