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Published: January 25th 2009
About two hours outside of Beijing, nestled in the hills, is the Ice Festival, which is fantastic! There are all these ice sculptures, and buildings made of ice with flashing lights inside! The three of us wandered around with this Mexican woman we came with, slipping down all of the ice corridors and taking about 150 photos! At the end of the evening, fireworks went off, signaling the beginning of the new year festivities
I have never known so many fireworks go off in 24 hours - they're pretty much constant, even throughout the day, which seems a little silly to me because then you can't even see them. It's just bang bang bang. It sounds like we've gone to war. And the cats that have taken residence outside our hostel room window sound pretty terrified by it! Because it's new year, the Forbidden Palace, which is where we were going to go today, was closing early, so we decided to have a fairly casual day. We did a little window shopping in Oriental Plaza, and it felt like we were back in the Trafford Centre - it's a very westernized part of Beijing, with Starbucks, KFC, etc. We even
ended up having lunch in Pizza Hut, just to see what it was like. The menu was completely different, with all these fruit smoothies and puddings like green tea ice cream cake, etc. And then we headed over to the Olympic Park, to see the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. That whole part of the city was very futuristic - a huge, empty, white-grey boulevard with all these metallic sculptures, shiny buildings and not a piece of litter in sight. It was impressive but to be honest it also felt a little sterile, except that on these giant speakers they were playing what I think must have been the theme tune for the Olympics - a very cheesy, emotive song about imagination and 'one dream, one world'. Very very different to the part of Beijing that our hostel is in!
Anyway, Happy Chinese New Year! Pray that we don't get blown up by fireworks...
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Nana & Granddad Rowley
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From Grandparents Rowley
I hear you are having a marvelous time. Grandad says bet you are cold coz your hair is short. Grandad asks if Ceri wants his slippers Take care, keep on enjoying yourself. Hope it is not too cold for you, learn some new card games...