Beijing Hotel

... are no words to describe the homes we passed other than deplorable...you will see me use that word again.<br><br>This school, also, is considered a "private" school. Students who cannot go to the public school attend this school. For those who live outside of Beijing, there is a high cost to attend the public schools. This is a rural area and parents make very low salaries. Parents do pay tuition and it amounts to $200 per year<br><br>We entered the gate of the school ...

... More surprising even is the Summer Palace, the emperors' little getaway on the outskits of the city. They needed a place to escape the heat of the city, so they built a lake here. Ten kilometres around. And then they decided it wasn't big enough and doubled its size. Couple that with about a hundred temples and living quarters and you've got a pretty nice little cottage. I swear there are ...

June 14th-After arriving in Beijing I had to unpack and repack to get read to go to the hotel for the NSF EAPSI orientation. The hotel took us forever to find it b/c its in the mining and technology campus, which the taxi driver couldn't find. Luckily, Matt was with me to help me find it. When I got there I got my key to my room in 331. The room, to be honest, leaves a little to be desired. Besides the dead mosquito carcasses on the wall that had clearly ...

... Took Jason and Peter to our "local" place for something to eat. When we walked in the woman looked really pleased that we had come back and then we gestured that we had brought two more friends and seemed really happy and was telling other Chinese people in her lingo obviously). There were lots of Chinese guys in there and groups of teenagers coming and going and they all looked bemused that we were in a local place but were all ...

... everywhere telling us where to go next. Beijing mobilised a million volunteers to help out for the Olympics and it was really impressive, although not all of them spoke much English! It became quite squashy on the subway trains, but we had lovely chats to all the other people who were heading to the Olympics, many from overseas, but also many Chinese who were equally excited to be there ...

... avion de dos pisos, la clase economica era de 3 4 3 puestos. Todos estabamos en puestos diferentes regados por el avion, por lo que estaba tan lleno, algunos de nosotros quedamos en clase economica plus que era aprox. $100 mas, pero nos pusieron ahi por que la economica ya estaba llena. Irme sola en un asiento de la mitad (q era el q me habia tocado) hubiera sido terrible, pero obviamente eso no paso. Con Paulis y Chris (2 amigos de FAU, paulis es la colombiana ...

... tourist activities if you want to see everything! For those who plan to come I advice you to visit "the Lama Temple", amazing Budhiste temple! The biggest statue is 18 meters high! http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10 &amp;um=1&amp;complete=1&amp;hl=zh-CN&a mp;newwindow=1&amp;q=lama+temple+&amp;a q=f The forbidden ...

... knew the word for "voetsak", but she shook her head and gave me the toothless smile we had come to expect. She slipped down the wall after tower #14 and produced a bag as if by magic, filled with "tfee shirts, poscaads". She got quite irate when we said she could have a tip (no Dad, not the tip of our boot), a 5 yuan tip. She demanded we buy postcards for 20 yuan, but she didn't know she was dealing with stubborn Jules. Jules held her ground ...

... again pretty cool but I'm well templed out at this stage and was pretty tired anyway after not sleeping well on the train the night before. I crashed for a few hours and then went looking for food at about 9pm. There was a night food market up the road so I check it out. There was all sort on offer including fried scorpions, grass hoppers and cockroaches !! I was tempted to try them but I was really hungry and decided to kick for touch with some ...