Day 3, my first view of Beijing

Yesterday when we were sitting in the restaurant, it started raining. I looked at Klaus, and reminded him that we were on bikes and 20min away from home. It poured down, for at least 3 min, then it stopped. Beijing style I was told. During the night though, it was raining with lightning and thunder, which meant that this morning the air felt very clean and I could see further than just the buildings across the street. I even saw some spots of blue sky!

With "clean" air and sunshine, I took a stroll around a huge park nearby Klaus's place. For some reason, it had opening hours and it cost money to enter as well. I had my trusty GPS in the phone with me, only to discover that the position calculated from the satellites was not where I really was - or the other way around. Turns out the Chinese government has some kind of algorithm to mess up the map data with the actual position of things. It is almost 200 meters off, so navigation can become quite interesting at times. Especially for me as I have absolutely no clue where things are yet, so had to start finding landmarks that are not to miss in order to find back to the apartment.
Turns out this place has an amusement park as well, and was in fact more like Copenhagen's Tivoli kind of park. I was there just after lunchtime, and didn't really see too many people around, but then again was reminded that most people have to go to work to get paid :-)

Got to meet more of Klaus's friends, having a little hard time remembering and telling the names apart though. We went to a fish restaurant where we had some very good big Sichuan style fish, with some other strange foods as well. It is very similar style to some of the foods we can get back in San Diego at the China Chef restaurant, stuff cooked in spicy oily chili sauces. They have these Sichuan peppercorns that when you eat them, the tongue will go numb and start tingling, funny. I am not a big tofu person and probably am not going to change either, but I have to say that they do have the tofu in many different shapes, tastes and styles.