Blogs from Olympic Park, Beijing, China, Asia - page 2

Today was a more low-key day and I (and my legs) am thankful for it! We started off by heading to Olympic Park. We had driven by the Bird's Nest, as the Stadium is called, several times already, and were looking forward to seeing it close-up. Olympic park is HUGE and was completely built in about four years to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. At the height of construction nearly 17,000 workers worked on the stadium. The 100,000 tons of steel used to construct the stadium was all manufactured in China. 7800 square meters of grass for the field was laid in 24 hours. The Bird's Nest cost $423 million (US) to construct and was designed by two Swiss architects based on studying Chinese ceramics. The stadium currently seats 80,000 people (321 less than Camp Randall). ... read more

So its my turn to write the blog, so beer in hand and with Tomo on the opposite bunk getting Chinese lessons from our very nice and helpful Korean room mate here it goes! Today was has been much more successful than yesterday but this is probably down to our state of mind more than anything. Tomo apologies for his negativity, but our success did in fact start last night. After the blog had been written and finally uploaded we headed out for some food. The area near our hostel in Beijing had been transformed for the evening with many vendors selling street food in which you snack, buying many dishes from different sellers who shout franticly to attract your attention. An hour or so was enough and we were still shattered from the travelling so ... read more

Here's a video of Tom's niece singing and a video of one of my students reading her letter to her other teacher, here's what she is saying: "Dear Mr. Fry, you are Mr.Hotdog. I like you. I want to swim in your milk, here's a drawing of poop." hahahahha!! so funny and cute!... read more

So even tho we LOVE our students at Changzhou we can't deal with how flaky the staff and people are anymore! They don't tell us when we are working or when our holidays our... etc etc, plus some other annoying stuff. So we gave them our two weeks notice and lucky for us our two weeks notice falls on the two weeks that the freshmen have military training, so we are thru with that school. I have very mixed feelings because I felt very attached to my students, I will miss them. We are moving to Beijing and living with Tom's sister Wentong, which is great because lots of family is close by, we eat with them 5 times a week if not more! Soon I am going to cook for them, they requested mased potatoes ... read more

The Hutong area of Beijing represents the old residential district. The houses are hundreds of years old and are designed in a grid pattern, with 9 houses, three across and three down, forming the basis of the grid. Each set of nine houses shares a well. There are very few of these houses left. Although the structures are extremely simple and ten families must share a bathroom (yikes!), they represent some of the priciest real estate in Beijing, due to their rarity. Silk making, is of course, an ancient craft in China, and for many years, the beautiful silk produced was reserved only for imperials. Many people don't realize that silk is actually processed from silkworm cocoons and it is a long and laborious process for the people who make it. Natural silk ranges from a ... read more