As I write this, the local time is 12:33 p.m on Monday afternoon. At home the time is 12:33 a.m. Sunday night into Monday and I'm sure most of you are sleeping. We depart at 6:30 p.m. which will be Monday morning to you all of you as you get up for work. We will be making the 13 hour journey home to the states while you are all working or enjoying your summer vacation. We have had an incredible trip and I am so glad that I had the chance to make the journey with my son and mother-in-law. We [View Full Entry]

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No scheduled sightseeing which was a nice break from the routine. Time to explore on your own. Today, most of the participants got up early at 3:40 a.m. to meet at 4 a.m. in the lobby to travel to Tiananmen Square to see the flag raising. Walked from hotel with the group and then put Lucy in a Pedi cab to save time. She rode with Julie. We arrived at the square by 4: 30 a.m. and waited until about 4:55 a.m. for the flag raising. The members of the Chinese Army marched to the square from the Mao mausoleum and [View Full Entry]

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Since we got in so late on Friday night, we were fortunate to have a late start on Saturday morning. We were back at the same hotel in Beijing, the Jinguo Garden Hotel, and which meant we had the same food for breakfast: an array of Chinese and American cuisine. As we get ready to return to the US and because Chinese 3x a day is getting a little old I opted for croissants and fruit rather than fried rice and dumplings. Our first stop today was the Confucius temple in the city center. This was really an appropriate stop for [View Full Entry]

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In the morning, Matt and I had time for a bike ride on the city wall. The city wall in Xian is the oldest intact city wall in China and was built in 600 A.D. It is 8.4 miles in perimeter and Matt and I managed to bike the entire distance. Of course after the cobblestone ride and the lightly padded bike seats our butts were pretty bruised! We checked out of the hotel and took the bus to lunch before going to the China History Museum. The museum was a great way to gain an understanding of some the great [View Full Entry]

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Sites: Terracotta Warriors and Blue Goose Pagoda Sorry for the delay. We have been traveling and I just haven’t kept up with the journal as much. This was our first full day in Xian and the morning included a bus trip about an hour outside the city to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. The city itself is very beautiful and has about 8 million people, which is on a par with the number of people in NYC (10 million if you count all 5 Burroughs), as compared to 13.5 million people in Beijing. While we are on the topic of population [View Full Entry]

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Of course you can't come to China and experience the culture without eating different food. Everyone knows that so many cultures revolve around a meal and being in China has been no different. I have to explain, however, that there are certain distinctions with Chinese food. We have had breakfast everyday in the hotel, which is a mix of Chinese food and American cuisine. You can have fresh fruit, cereal, danish, toast, omelets, eggs, bacon or ham if you want American traditional food. If you want to have Chinese food, you can have fried rice, spring rolls, dumplings, porridge, season (as [View Full Entry]

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Today was a travel day from Beijing to Xi’an in Shaanxi Province. We woke up at 4 a.m. in order to have time to shower and pack up and be in the lobby by 4:50 a.m. We took our luggage to the lobby and received a box breakfast before we departed at 5:30 a.m. Our box contained a roll, jam, lunch meat (a lot like bologna), yogurt and a hard boiled egg. We left at 5:30 and arrived at the airport by 6:15 a.m. We said good bye to the Fulbright group who were travelling on to Chengdu. After checking in, [View Full Entry]

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The plan for today was to begin at 8 a.m. and take a bus to the Summer Palace. After a wonderful breakfast of dumplings, fried rice, fried dough and fresh fruit, we boarded the bus for our journey to the summer palace. Again the weather here was very hot, hazy and humid. We have not seen the actual blue sky for several days because of the haze and pollution in the city. The temperature was 33C, which is upper 80s but with the humidity we still find it pretty unbearable. The ride to the Summer Palace took about one hour to [View Full Entry]

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Our main purpose for the trip was to present at the US-China Educational Leadership conference held today at the People’s Education Press (known as PEP). We departed from the hotel at 7:30 a.m. in order to make it to the PEP for an 8:30 a.m. conference start time. I suggested to Jan and Jim, our guides, that some of the accompanying guests may not want to sit all day in a conference on education so Jim was able to work out a stop at the Beijing Zoo. Lucy and Monica were dropped off at 8 a.m. and had the morning at [View Full Entry]

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Today was another day of sightseeing that started out a little later than Saturday’s tour. We took a bus ride to the Forbidden City, also known as the Imperial Palace in the heart of Beijing. The palace was ordered to be built by Emperor Yongle (the same as the tomb we visited on Saturday) when he moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The palace has 9,999 rooms because it was believed that in the Temple of Heaven the emperors who had gone before had 10,000 so they wanted to be close to 10,000 for good luck but not exactly the [View Full Entry]

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