part 1
part 2



We also hoped to purchase some inexpensive kites which we had done six years ago, but there were no kite vendors out today. Instead, there were people hawking fake Olympic souvenirs everywhere you turned. I went ahead and bought a ski cap with the Olympic logo for 10 yuan and no sooner did I buy it than we walked past a vendor who offered us 2 for 10 yuan. You could see that the sewing on the logo was an inferior quality and I knew they were not authentic Olympic materials because we had seen some in the Silk Market at an Olympic booth that had signs posted everywhere stating that the prices were set by the government and that they could not accept any lower offers than what was on the item.

We tried hailing a taxi back to our hotel, and this proved to be harder than we thought. We had to walk far enough away from the square where there weren't fences along the road, and then once we did that, we found a pull out that many buses used, but no taxis.
Many taxis were passing us, but they all had passengers and I was beginning to worry as the clock was ticking and we had no way to contact Simon to tell him we might be late. He wanted to meet us at noon and it was already noon.

We finally got one taxi to pull over and he was less than thrilled when all seven of us needed to pile in. He didn't want to take all of us, but we feared we wouldn't be able to find another taxi, and we only had directions to the hotel on one business card, so he took us, quoting us 3 yuan. We thought that was a fair price since it was only about a 5 minute taxi ride, and the driver who took us from the silk market the night before drove us a much longer distance and only charged us 7 yuan.

Well, this guy couldn't hardly find our hotel since the front of it is in an alleyway. Jeff kept trying to tell him where to turn, but the driver ignored him and was almost hostile. I started worrying when he turned the wrong direction, and Jeff finally said "We just need to get out and walk the rest of the way since he should have turned the other way about 50 yards back."


continued...