Commune Great Wall Kempinski Beijing

... I purposely said that) and I know my OWN MONEY!! they looked at each other again and continued to deny it, they even said they can show me the money again. I said to them 'yeah show me the money' and they were just like 'trust us, it's Euro, it's not USD'. This is just so bullsh*t.

Anyway, so I told them no (given that $10USD is around 80RMB, and they're offering me 400RMB) and they asked me to give a price. I wanted to ...

... to make the best of it.

In Beijing, they’ve done a lot of work to repair the wall. The first part of the wall was laid down sometime in the BCs. The large complex north of Beijing was fully utilized during the 14th century. And in 1989, a lot of work was done to fix up the area that we were in. It’s actually a 4000 meter loop. It allowed the defenders to guard the outer wall, and fall back to the inner wall if it was ...

... br>
My interesting translation of the day:

Contact solution is 隐形眼镜水 ; or yῐnxíng yănjìng shuĭ.

Literally- this means invisible glasses water. Lauren and I had to figure this out when we were shopping for random stuff at the market.

Quote of the day:

“Why is he here?” “He’s got yellow fever.”

... day," PingPing said. A bit off from there we sat on a wooden bench to muster some strength after four or five hours of almost continuous walking and have a short snack along the way. We knew the largest part of our sightseeing was now behind us and there was no need to rush anywhere. On this, west Kūnmíng Hú side there were significantly fewer people. Those who found themselves here were mostly jogging or intended to catch some fish somewhere. After PingPing and I had discussed ...

... hot. This is why you need to go in the morning because they choose to go inside late morning because of the temperature. We then went into the area where the young pandas were. They had already come inside and loved the aircon unit which you can understand when you see how dense their fur is. Not made for 30+ degrees! They were sooooooooooooo cute. A lot more agile than I thought, climbing all over everything and rolling all over each other. Then they would take a little break, crash out ...

... have spared no expense in building the world's grandest sporting arenas, irreversibly altering the face of the capital city, leveling ancient neighborhoods to add the shiny "modern" luster of blocky high-rises over old Beijing, and displacing an estimated 1.5 million people in the process. While it is commonly quoted that the 17-days of the Games will cost approximately $40 billion -- this in a country where the cost of manual labor is written-off as "immaterial" -- with ...

Today, we again slept in quite late. We planned to get on a train and go to a bit further away. It turned out to be a 40 min train trip. We bought the train tickets and went dtown to the platform. We got on the overcrowded train, just managing to squeeze through the door. It was so squishy, but we made sure that we wore our bags on our front so that nobody could grab anything from our bags. We managed to get to the right station, feeling quite proud of ourselves ...

... country in the world. Grand hotels, huge corporate offices, restoration works and on, and on .So much development and cleaning up that is happening in preparation for the olympics as well. The gardens in the city makes this place look quiet fantastic. The air is surprisingly clean. You really have to look cloesly in order to find anything that is wrong with this place. Where is the evil? I don't see it just yet. And this monday in Beijing began ...

... there are no doors, so if people are talking outside your compartment you can hear everything being said. But, our car had all people from the school in them, so it wasn't as bad. On the ride over there 12 of us sat in one tiny compartment playing mafia, which, it turns out is also a Chinese game, played almost the same way. It was pretty interesting playing and trying to communicate seeing as most people were the Chinese roommates or some of the more fluent ...

This internet cafe won't allow upload of photos so let words do the talking. Left Lhasa for 10 hours drive to Samye monastery, amazing scenery - huge hill sized sand dunes, blue river with catkined willows along banks. There were 3000 monasteries before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, now 300 remain. Samye is the oldest monastery in Tibet (8 century), and off the beaten, dusty track. We had ...