December 16th Tianjing, Horse Rides, Houses from The Opium Wars, and Night Life
The morning of the 16th, before we left, our parents gave us a ton of tea. This is Pu-Erh tea, which is aged in these flat packages. The longer the tea is aged the more valuable it is.
Now we head to Tianjin.
Here you can see us entering the city.
Tianjin seems like a fairly modern city, but there are some dilapidated looking apartment buildings like this one.
To see the downtown area, we decided to take a ride on a horse-drawn carriage. In this photo you can see how they collect the poop from the horses.
The horse carriage rentals were done from a "mobile office", and next to it was another mobile business with some interesting art on the sides of the rv-like vehicle. The bright lights messed with my camera, but you can see the anime women for sure.
So, we begin the carriage ride.
The carriage took us through downtown, and a lot of the houses that you'll see are older. After losing the second Opium war, people from Western countries (namely Britian) came to live in cities like Tianjing. These buildings are protected, and to live in them you have to sign an agreement saying you won't modify it. Some modifications already done to the buildings include removal of signs such as "No Chinese or Dogs Allowed".
Here are some of the clearer pictures from inside the horse-drawn carriage.
After the carriage ride was over (which was electronically assisted by the way, so the horses don't get too tired), we went toi explore some areas we saw of interest along the ride. These included the street of lights that my camera poorly captures, and the "Knotty Building".
THe Knotty Building was really quite interesting, even if it was undergoing restoration while we were there.
After the Knotty Building, I got a nice piece of ass.
The restaurant we ate at was Chinese, and it was quite nice. We ate upstairs in a booth where we sat very close to the floor, and the host was very polite. The food was also good, of course.
Soon we were on the move again with our Tianjing friends, and after many attempts I finally got a somewhat acceptable picture of the Tianjing Eye with my terrible camera.
I think it was around the corner from taking this picture that I spotted this large sign - commemorating the 70th year of the PRC.
On our way to find more interesting food to try (maybe Lamb Ass?) a car sped past us at a high rate of speed. I was quite surprised about this, since it seems like a terrible idea with all of the cameras in the city. Indeed, we later saw them pulled over...
We eventually arrived at our restaurant, and before I go into the food I want to show an unrelated picture - electric vehicles in China get these green license plates.
Okay, now for the food. We got Tianjin-style Jianbing, which are similar to Crepes except actually good.
It was around this time that my hat developed an interesting feature on top.
Now we may have eaten at two places, but we came across a college town that had a large selection of street food.
Full of food and slightly more cultured, we arrived back at the hotel.
I would like to point out that the hotel rooms had doorbells, and ours sounded very interesting...
