Beijing COTO Modern Hotel (Hepingli)

... the quality of the rural chickens is better so he took the opportunity to buy them. During the 1and half hour drive back we heard the occasional squark from the boot of the chooks. Back at the hostel around 4pm we had had a good day seeing our last wonder of the world, number 7. After today Wayne was not into going out and he had some instant noddles and I slipped out down the main street to find a little café serving delicious hot pots where the pot sits on a lit flame at the table ...

... spit, horrendous traffic etc sprung to mind but Beijing was an amazing city. Beijing has many faces from the ...

... artillery from Canada, US, Russia, Germany and Japan. The Mengshi FAV was made in China, but looks exactly like a Hummer. There were F5, F6, F7, F8 Fighters and missiles. There was an Exploit Torpedo boat, a US U-2 scout plane, a P51, a F86 Sabre, a Canadian U-6A and a MIG15.

On the second floor there were swords, sabres, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, grenades, rifles, pistols, machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. The was a large model store too.

The Hall ...

... were being picked up at the main reception so we hot footed it out the door & made the few minutes walk in the bitter cold. The next hour was spent travelling through the city picking up other fellow walkers. We were then transferred to a bigger bus & started to make our way out of the city & up towards the Great Wall itself. To give you an idea of how cold it was - we had the heater on in the bus which kept the temperature just high enough for us not to be killed ...

... highrise buildings in the near vicinity of the ship. We docked early and were ready to go ashore to do our own thing for the day fairly early. As we left the ship we were handed a fan and a map by officials from the tourism board and generally made to feel welcome in Korea. We were on the first shuttle that took us to the centre of town about ˝ hour away and after much discussion decided between 6 of us that we would explore for a couple of hours and then get a bus tour of some of the ...

... The pollution is pretty bad in Beijing. First stop, the Confucius Institute. We pull up and unload, and wow, we are greeted with a gauntlet line of the employees. As we pass between the two lines, they all start to clap, and continue to clap for us until we have all passed through and entered the building. The entry hall of the Institute is where we begin. It is lined with flags from around the world ...

... the real wall. As is happened, later that day I saw photos of the wall at Simitai and, whilst it looks like it would have been a good place to trek a section of the wall, it represents the wall as it is now, not as it was. That's not to say that Badaling and Mutianyu are true representations either, but the refurbishments made to each location give visitors a sense of how the wall used to be. Except maybe for the 3D tourist trap ...

... to fight any taxi driver over charging you. The square itself is very impressive, with an area of over 440 thousand square meters (around 4,4 million square feet) and the whole area surrounding it bears some kind of communist grandeur. I loved it, that was China as I pictured it! And there I felt like a Hollywood celebrity: I could not walk more than a dozen meters before someone came to me to take a picture together! At the beginning I didn't understand what they wanted ...

... among the students in the study-abroad group. It helps a great deal when one tries to overcome cultural shocks. The more I take the training course here at BNU, the more proud I am of the CELTA training program we have at Cy-Fair. For one thing, the training topics are delivered in a carefully designed session with lots of hands-on activities, not to mention the practice teaching session every afternoon that deepens ...

... They ask for the rings on your fingers, the scarf you are wearing. But can you fault them? They must think that I am very rich, being from the West and having so many things, having the freedom to travel to a country so far from home. And they are so dirty and cold. Their cheeks are black from the frigid wind and overexposure to the sun at such a height. But they seem happy, also. Much more happy than people in countries where they have everything all the time. They ...