Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Usually I wait a month or two to discuss my trips but this time I'm going to really shake things up and be only three weeks late. As you may have already surmised from my post about Donghuamen Market and/or the recent plethora of most excellently non-sensical Chinese signs available for your viewing pleasure, my parents and I spent Thanksgiving in Beijing , just like the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock probably would have done had they not been busy massacring Indians/having scurvy/nearly starving to death. Speaking of that, did you know the Pilgrims commies? That's why they were so hungry. Or as Deep Purple would say, they were lazy! They didn't want no money! They didn't want no bread!

Even though we were in China, we wanted to keep up our normal U.S. Thanksgiving traditions, so we went to a restaurant to order Mao's favorite pork, complete with a bust of Mao carved out of taro root. Just like at mom's. She's getting so darn good at carving those Mao busts! We also had traditional Turkey day sides such as:

Black sesame soup, a desert with a consistency similar to Pennzoil and

Spicy duck gizzard (here's me, incredulous that my mom is actually suggesting we get spicy duck tongue or spicy duck neck instead - tradition is dead these days).
We spent a lot of time in Beijing *attempting* to get around. Apparently, its useful to speak more than 12 words in Mandarin to do that. Luckily, though, the Beijing subway is very similar in size and scope to subways in most North Dakota towns so it was easy for us to navigate.
Of course you could always get around by car (4 million cars in Beijing and counting - to the tune of 2,000 cars sold per day?!?!) or taxi - provided, again, that you speak or understand more than 12 words in Mandarin and provided you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Beijing streets, since most Beijing cabbies apparently have never been anywhere in Beijing before and absolutely could not tell you how to get to such obscure tourist attractions as the Forbidden City or Tiananmen Square.
You could also go by bike - but this assumes that you're not worried about your 42% daily chance of getting hit by a car while in the process of riding one.
Seriously though, we had SO much fun. I highly recommend you skip your next trip to the Kalahari Resort and Water Park at the Wisconsin Dells and head to Beijing instead.