Guosheng Hotel Beijing

... bugs. They also had a lot of Chinese trinkets for sale. All the sales people would say “Hey lady come look come look”…“very pretty, I have the best price!” It was really pretty at night with all the Chinese lanterns.

Yesterday we took it easy and went for a work out at the gym we signed up for that is located across the street. It is a pretty nice gym with a lot of treadmills. I was so happy ...

... of mind. (Figure of speech, punch-free zone here. Fighting is against the law.)

Never did such a lesson hold true than when I was registering for classes on Monday. The whole process was a bit of a discombobulated sort of anarchy, with a smidgen of awkwardness, panic, and general apprehension. Overall, quite memorable.

Believe it or not, I am becoming quite the subway guru, or at least my handicapped directional senses do not dominate my subway navigations. We ...

... girls, myself and an Australian couple so 9 girls and 1 guy - poor him! Even our tour guide Lucy is female so its going to be 10 girls and 1 guy for the next 21 days. Went to a local cafe near our hotel and had a group dinner, Lucy ordered lots of different chinese dishes and we all tucked in, yummy and only worked out at around 3 euro each including beer! Its nice because our hotel is located in an old style chinese hutong ...

... was the peak of the hill we could only go down, so we made our way to the Marble Boat on the shore, this was a misleading title as stone doesn't float so we found ourselves looking at a boat shaped building poking out of the water/ice. We were also greeted by the sounds of tourist groups and hacking Chinese who filled the whole area, so we moved on to a road that imitates a famous Chinese canal town (which we haven't seen, so this place is ...

So what is the take home message from the Olympics? Was it a genuine success or something of a facade? Beijing gloss fades after going through the wringer By JACQUELIN MAGNAY - SMH The Beijing Olympic Games will go down in history as the Games Made In China. Beautiful to look at but put it through a couple of washes and the shiny, glossy facade is stripped away. Or like a new toy, it works well for a month and then it cracks. These were the Coming Out Games for ...

... and her mom. Mama talked about how much she feels her life was wasted because of the Cultural Revolution. She was just finishing high school when it went into full swing. She said that she would have been able to go to Beijing University (arguably the best college in China; the argument comes from Shanghai's Fudan University which is Yale to Bei Da's Harvard) and I believe her. We talked about all the trouble in life, but had to ...

... excuse to expose various South Americans, North Americans, Europeans, Scandinavians, and a random Asian to intense 3 day jet lag and overloaded sensory stimuli, before packing them up with a ham sandwich and shoving them back into a shady China Airlines plane for minimum 13 hour flight home. My little piece of the puzzle is to provide communications for the simulated Sports Broadcasting Exercises. At the end of the festivities, the Broadcast ...

... a giant piano key. Between climbs, we stopped to take pictures. The morning was rainy, and the clouds obscured the hills and pooled in the valleys, making for some challenging, moody photography. I and my camera got soaked to the skin, but I loved it. At one point, we could couldn't see the next guardhouse, it was so foggy. After midmorning a group of vendors waiting like vultures at ...

We woke up much earlier today because we were going out of the city to the Beijing suburbs where Amanda's grandmother, aunt, and cousin live. Amanda's dad drove and we got to see a different part of China that we had yet to see. It was a little less crowded and urbanized, but still did not meet our definition of a typical suburb. However, one indication of our arrival into Chinese suburbia was our stop at Sam's Club. The store was fairly similar to the one in the US, but as with ...

... involving complicity between the communist government and the Chinese mafia is common knowledge. It's the only way to get ahead. After all, China is still a dictatorship and the people have few democratic rights: no freedom of speech, no free press, no freedom of assembly or travel, and no court of justice to represent them. Nature reserves were established in China in 1958, and the first panda reserve in 1963 ...