IMHO In My Humble Opinion

Today was our last day in Beijing, and since the second half of the day was a trip to Xian (and all the fun that getting delayed at the airport entails), this entry will be a little short.

The morning was a trip to the Hutong neighborhood of Beijing. It is so named because "hutong" means narrow street, and all of the streets in this neighborhood are quite narrow. Apparently, back when they were standardized (which is still mostly, but not entirely true), a hutong was 9m wide, a street was 18m wide, and an avenue was 36m wide.

When we arrived at the neighborhood, we took a quick rickshaw ride through the neighborhood:
Rickshaw Ride

This felt exceedingly touristy to me, especially since we were a caravan of tourists in rickshaws, but it was still a pleasant ride. After that we had 45 minutes to wander one of the main hutongs. It's interesting to me that there were hutongs that were more important than others, but this is the one with all the shops and bars:
View down the Hutong

It appears that my worries about having continued internet access were thus far unfounded; there's an ethernet plug in this hotel room as well. (There's also quite a bit of noise from both out the window and the next room over, so we'll see how well I sleep tonight.)