Blogs from Forbidden City, Beijing, China, Asia - page 16

We are sadly and far too rapidly nearing the end of our asian trip and China has hardly been a disappointment. Besides the obvious things like ancient culture, odd food and so on it is as always the people that make the destination. In the case of China maybe more so than elsewhere. While China is infatuated with the west in general and the US in particular what is most striking is the lack of sense of what the west is like among the multitude. The level of English speaking has been much better in Beijing and Xi'an than the smaller cities we visited before the chances of making yourself understood is still very uneven. Peopla in the larger cities seem to at least have a concept of foreign languages though and will try to make ... read more

There are dozens of must see sights in China. With our limited time, we had to pare that down to the sights in Beijing. Of those, the biggies are 1) the Olympic stadia, 2) the Forbidden City and 3) Tiananmen Square. There are plenty of others like Ming city wall ruins, Lama Temple, Temple of Heaven, the summer Palace, Beijing Zoo, the new National Center for Performing Arts and the list goes on. We saw them all. However, I’d like to get to sleep sometime tonight and you probably would too. China is a country with a population of 1.3 billion. That’s down by 100 million from 20 years ago mainly due to their One Child law. By law Chinese couples may have only one child. If they exceed that number they must pay a fine ... read more

Our China Southern A-320 from Bangkok to Guangzhou was a very smooth ride. The Business Class section had only two rows and one side of one of them was totally unoccupied. The two hour flight was uneventful and well attended. The cabin attendants did not speak much English, but helped with the pronunciation of the Chinese phrases that our grandsons provided in advance. As most of you are aware, all 10 of our grandchildren are extremely good looking, intelligent and well-mannered. Two of the boys, Dillon and Burleigh, are taking Chinese in their high school. It’s natural that they’d want to help Grandma & Papa with the language when they reach China. We arrived at Guangzhou (alternately known as Canton) early afternoon and spent the next four hours negotiating the airport for our flight to Beijing. ... read more

It is Saturday and our last day in Beijing. Mom and Dawn got up early this morning to watch the flag raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square. Thomas slept in, and I managed to get a run in, touring through the streets of Beijing. By the way, Beijing is formed from two Chinese characters: ‘bei’ meaning ‘north’ and ‘jing’ meaning capital - Beijing is the capital city in Northern China (the capital used to be Nanjing, ‘nan’ meaning ‘south’!). A common nickname used for Beijing now is just ‘jing’ which was the Chinese character seen with the Olympic logo last year. In the mid morning, we challenged our agoraphobia by visiting the Forbidden City. It was packed going in, but we spent almost 3 hours there, so the crowd had thinned out by the time we were ... read more

Well first chinese night train was ..........an experience! Although booked on to a 7pm train we were assured we should get to the train station at 5pm!! Quite why we were unsure, until we arrive there and realise that Xi'an station actually resembles an overfull 'refuge-camp', because of 'Spring Festival'- of course! There are literally thousands of people crowding/ queing in a unique chinese style, but as we all have tickets for the train, you cant enter the station without one, we are oblivious what the crush is for. When the gates open we join in and use our size advantage to push through to the front! I am glad all other seats had sold out by the time we brought our tickets so we HAVE to get soft sleepers!! bit of luxury, but everytime the ... read more