Stuff and nonsense, Beijing style

[tikistitch]

Our very first day in Beijing began badly, as we stumbled off a horrible "sleeping bus" from Mongolia at 3 am to find our hostel would not let us check in to take a nap, nor even take a shower.

Things soon improved as tiki discovered a plushie shop just two blocks down the road.



The gold Angel in the first picture was large enough that we actually spent several hours scouring Beijing for a mailing box big enough.



These were also probably meant to be UFO catchers.



Here's a cute thing about China: the girl at the shop literally insisted on wrapping the plush toys in bags tied with ribbons before she'd let them out of her shop. We waited patiently, not wanting to be rude, glad we couldn't tell her we'd just rip them all off the moment we got home. It's probable that she had no idea these were meant for an adult!



Our favorite: this one plays music (3 or 4 different tunes) and makes motions like he's crawling. Unfortunatley, we can't actually make him crawl across the floor. His legs move, so we're not sure if he's broken, or just poorly made. But really cool and weird, and we'd never seen him before, despite carefully scanning all the action toys that show up on Yahoo Japan and mbok auction boards.

We placed all our purchases into a giant orange back, and brought them back to the hostel to show our napping spouse. He just rolled his eyes.