Blogs from XiCheng District, Beijing, China, Asia - page 7

Straight from Wikipedia (I apologize, but I've started getting lazy). Sam actually told me most of the Mansion's history while we walked through it (together initially) and translated a few displays for me! Prince Gong's Mansion (Chinese: 恭王府; pinyin: Gōng Wáng Fǔ) or Gong Wang Fu Museum is located in the western part of central Beijing, China, north of the Shichahai Lake. Consisting of large mansions in the typical siheyuan laylout and gardens, Prince Gong's Mansion is known as one of the most ornate and extravagant residence compounds in all of Beijing. It was constructed in 1777 for minister He Shen (和珅) during the Qianlong-reign in the late Qing Dynasty. From a young age, He Shen got the trust of Emperor Qianlong, and was able to make large promotion in the imperial administration. In this way ... read more

Aight, first and foremost, I want to apologize for the delay in between blogs. The train ride from Hangzhou to Beijing was, of course, without internet, so it kind of threw me off my blogging schedule. Additionally, blogs will start to be written less frequently as the days go on because I now have stuff I gotta do in the evenings. So, day two in Hangzhou. GO. We got to wake up kinda later because we only had two things to do that day. Everyone was pretty sluggish. Tucker and Greg had stayed out late at the club and were recovering a bit. Our first stop was to a traditional Chinese pharmacy. It was an interesting stop, to say the least. One major reason it was so interesting was because this pharmacy had several original several-hundred ... read more

...yes, they did. Deliver. Don't you remember??? Ok. So we ended our last blog, somewhere in october, somewhere between arriving back in Beijing from Fujian (the tea place!) and waiting to find out if the super coolest pizza bar in town delivered to our house. And yes they do. And all we eat now is super cool pizza. And don't our tummies love us for it. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! And Happy 'Niu' Year as well! Niu means cow. (cos the new chinese year will be year of the cow). And it's currently the funniest joke in Beijing, possibly China. We're not sure who makes it funnier, the Chinese who like to show off that they can speak minimal english, or the expats that like to prove they can speak a little mandarin. Come ... read more

Right, firtly apologies for the extreme lack of posts since Moscow but we've had a little trouble finding internet...! So I guess I'll take off where we left in Moscow. Well, we made it to the Red Square on my birthday and saw St Basil's cathedral which was everything to be expected... except a little small... Still pretty big in terms of ordinary sized houses, but not cathedrals. Glad we saw it because now we feel no need to ever travel to Moscow again! Not that we didn't like the place you understand - it was no Minsk - but as far as places we hold dear to our hearts - unfortunately this is not one of them. As they say it is the people that make the place, and scowling, muttering old ladies ain't our ... read more

Jon's turn Hey y'all greetings from Beijing This place is amazing. Real culture shock. As soon as we got off the train it hit us. At the customs station I needed extra I.D. and with that four people to make sure I was me. A little nerve racking, not to mention the heat. Once through we tried to get a little help with transportation to our hostel. No one spoke English. We found a Texan who had been teaching in Hong Kong and he seemed just as lost as we were. As a group we decided to try and maybe figure it out but our map didn't have the train station on it and taxis tried to rip us off($150 yuan, yeah right). So we walked for a while until we found a subway. They at ... read more