Blogs from Beihai Park, Beijing, China, Asia - page 3

(Kwesi saved these pictures before we left!) It's smokey. Hard to believe we are in a giant internet cafe with a whole bunch of smokers, but that is life! We arrived yesterday afternoon. It's been hot here but not nearly as hot as I know Beijing can be! We spent part of today at the beautiful summer palace. Kwesi had a lot of fun taking pictures (although we do not have our cameras here to upload anything...) Beijing has been good so far! It raining today. Makes me wonder if they are "practicing" controlling the weather or not. We went out this morning for a quick walk around the block and managed to make it back to our room extremely wet. Good thing we brought more than just one shirt each! ;-) We are off tomorrow ... read more

This next week is gonna be packed so a quick bullet -style rundown of the past few days, otherwise they'd be lost in the hiatus. Rest of Thursday was us running around and forming study groups and trying to prepare for test. I also woke up about 5:30 next morning to study on my own (i just study better when i first wake up). Test was hard b/c a different teacher prepared it so the format was new. However i hope for the best. Week two test was a 90% w/B+ on the speaking. Besides test Friday was pretty chill, took a walk by myself around campus, on way back ran into Tai to told me our group was challenged to a big soccer match by some Korean exchange students in the neighboring dorm. I ran ... read more

...ist es wirklich schon so spät?" Bei genauer Retrospektive meines Schaffens auf dieser Homepage ist mir soeben aufgefallen, dass mein erster Blog aus China bereits 109 Tage zurückliegt und damit die Halbzeit überschritten und keine Nachspielzeit geplant ist, auch wenn die Schiedsrichterin noch so wütend pfeifen mag und die Schlümpfe im Stadion randalieren. Abpfiff ist jetzt offiziell der 30. Juli.² Nun gut, Spass bei Seite, was kann ich neues berichten, aus dem großen, fernen Land der krassen Gegensätze? Um noch kurz das Thema "Sportgroßveranstaltungen" aufzugreifen, muss erwähnt werden, dass jetzt die große Umerziehung der Massen anläuft - auf unzähligen Plakaten wird das Nichtrauchen propagiert und das Rauchen ist in allen Gebäuden und Restaurants jetzt verboten(bei uns haben sie den Aschenbecher weggeräumt und ein kleines Schildchen aufgehängt, jetzt stehen die Raucher ... read more

Our first impression of Beijing was the new airport (only opened last week) and the sheer size of it all. We stayed in the middle of town in the Ma-or hutong, only a short distance from the Forbidden City. The hutongs are traditional narrow alley ways, and have been around for hundreds of years. Unfortunately they are rapidly being pulled down in the name of progress. They certainly are a hub of activity, and not 'westernised' in their presentation. We found our accommodation on the internet, "The Backyard Hutong" , and it came with great reviews. It certainly lived up to expectations. You entered from the hutong into a fantastic/characteristic quadrangle accomodation with four rooms for guests. Our bed was....well see the photo. Being central we did a lot of walking, and visited the local ... read more

JINGSHAN PARK After Me (Renata) pre-explored this park we have both returned here. Here we saw so far the most beautiful Buddha - "Vairocana = Universal Brightness = Buddha of five directions". As we had quite lot in plan shortly we went to our next stop. BEIHAI PARK As this was our second visit to this park we knew what exactly we wanted to see and missed last time NINE DRAGON SCREEN and we have walked trough beautiful park. Next stop NEW SUMMER PALACE We had only 3hours to cover 290 hectares of park in -6 Celsius with strong freezing wind. Move, move, faster you get warmer... scenery was wonderful and as with most of these parks in Beijing, they must look amazing in summer with flowers and lake not being frozen, however the crowd of ... read more