Blogs from Beijing, China, Asia - page 470

while i write this, i am extremely upset. today, i went with yellen and jill to watch my big chinese television debut, all prepared to face mobs of fans and piles of fan mail. we go into the room as excited as can be and sit down to watch BTV 1 on the big screen in one of the classrooms. we wait through twenty minutes of chinese television, which by the way is the worst programming in the world, and then hear the word jing shan from the mouth of the broadcaster, anxiously awaiting our segment. so they go through the thing about how we communicated with this hong kong school and the camera pans the crowd in the room, giving all of the people in our group some face time. then, after a couple of ... read more

The topic of today's blog is...well....odd. So, strap yourself in for a fun tale fit for "Ripley's Believe It Or Not." My host family seems to have a love affair with fish. That doesn't mean they take particularly good care of them or anything, just that they are everywhere. In my house there are two tanks....one in the kitchen and one in the host father/brother's room. In their other apartment there is also a giant tank. This being said, since my arrival several of them have been flushed over to the "toilet bowl in the sky" with little or no fanfare. Recently some of the giant goldfish in the kitchen had been moved to cozier accomodations in order to make more room on the counter. The large tank was disposed of, and the four less than ... read more

So yesterday of course was the Ides of March. The fateful day in 44 BC where Julius Caesar met his untimely death. Some 2000 years later, yours truly entered the world. Well, this year my birthday would be spent in Beijing. This was extremely weird for those back home sending me birthday wishes because, given the time difference, they would have to do so the day before. Many seemed confused why they were wishing me a happy birthday on March 14th. From my perspective it was "Brett-fest '06" in that when I talked to some of my family the next day....it was still my birthday. Two full days of birthday....crazy! However, when I mentioned my birthday to Chinese people...they usually had the same reaction....March 15th is an important day in China. "Oh yeah," I would reply, ... read more

Well, you'll notice that this entry is missing something. That's because we're missing something. Last night in the hutongs of Beijing, someone got into Justin's pocket and nabbed our camera. Fortunately, we had uploaded all of our pictures up until Beijing onto our snapfish account, but we lost everything that we had taken of Beijing, including (so sad, so sad) the pictures of us at the Great Wall. You'll just have to take our word that it was stunning, and we looked great up there. Beijing will look beautiful for the 2008 Olympics. Right now, just about every building and tourist site is under scaffolding. Also, someone is going to have to rewrite every guidebook and map because nothing is right anymore. We spent hours (literally hours) looking for buildings that we eventually found our had ... read more

We are about to leave Beijing for the train station. This place is pretty wonderful. We saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Lama Temple, a Taoist Temple, Tianamen Square. We ate pizza for 25 cents, pork kidney and liver (surprising yet tasty) with beer and fixins' for $5, sushi for $15, and some delicious Peking Duck. We met people from Canada, Britain, India, and China. We only got duped into one "Art Exhibition" and we can now count to 9,999 in Chinese. We also know the symbol for beef and we are working on mastering the phrases, "No thank you, I don't want to buy anything," and, "Can I have the check please?" Things are going well. We are now off to Xi'an en route to Shanghai through Zhengzou. This short little summary doesn't ... read more