Glorious Villa Hotel Beijing

... there with them. It was really weird sleeping and hanging in the houses which I normally just check as part of my work duties. I realized that the house seemed so much nicer now when I was actually there as a guests, I really enjoeyd staying there! They were in this village for three nights and then we continued to Beijing. We had amazing food during their stay here. And I got amazing Finnish candy and bread from Finland and guess how much I've been eating them! The first ...

... charge my mp3 player. I knew that I'd have no opportunities for it in North Korea, so if I wanted any music there, I'd have to make sure now I'd have it. They freed some USB sockets for me at the PC in use for guests and then gave me two birthday messages I had received during the day. I just wanted to return the calls, when I spotted a guy whom I recognised.
He recognised me, as well. We smiled, nodded to each other and shook hands.
"So you're staying here?" I asked.
"Yes."
Beijing, China the_wayfarer

After crossing the border and experiencing the lights, music and Olympic symbols that greeted us, I soon slipped into sleep, waking in the morning to see that the garish lights had been replaced with rolling hills and my first sight of the Great Wall. When the train reached Beijing I had my first taste of the sheer number of people - fighting to get out of the station and into a cab to the hostel. I hadn't planned how long I'd stay in Beijing but it turned into almost 2 weeks very ...

... English being spoken in the police station, no English on the signs on the walls, there were no other westerners, we were really immersed in Beijing life! That was another big moment for me, and quite a feeling. In fact, we have seen no other foreigners in our neighborhood, none on the streets near our host family's apartment, none in the grocery store. We are really getting a glimpse of life in Beijing for an average family. It is awesome! Thank goodness for our wonderful ...

... re not the ones making the choices. The security and propaganda ministries are famous strongholds of keep-the-lid-on thinking. (Think: China's neocons.) Presumably the foreign ministry understands some of the problems the policies are creating. And the international business community lives in the real world of trans-border interaction all day long. But the ones who know the outside world have no leverage over the hardliners. The US has had its versions of ...

... car pulling into the gap to turn around...etc. Now that we are facing the right way, we start to drive out, but cars are coming in and blocking the road. One of the peasants stops traffic for a moment and directs us to drive forward. We go about 50 yards and we are now up to where they stopped traffic, but we can't pass and the on coming cars can't get around us. We can't move back because all the outgoing traffic is backed up behind us, and the oncoming ...

hello(ni hao), On our first day in Beijing and China for that matter we got on the wrong bus from the airport and ended up having to take a cab to Tian'anmen square. The cab did not know where our hostel was, so we told the rickshaw driver that surrounded us after we got out of the cab what it was called. They knew the hostel! They told us 3 yuan when we got in and upon ...

... believe him, given the tight security in the States. So he pressed the red button. Within two minutes he got a call from the FBI saying that 10,000 Chinese immigrant laborers had descended on the White House and took it down." tee hee. We went to the train station after that to get our tickets to Chongqing, and goodness was it dubious. All of us were flat out from the jet lag by 9pm at night, watching hilariously bad wuxia shows on tv - Billy ...

... Pier for wonderful Lijiang River Cruise. Lijiang River, the river of poems and paintings, is the soul of Guilin scenery. From Guilin to Yangshuo, the 83-km-long waterway forms a gallery of landscape painting, which is a fairyland in the world with "Nine Horses in Picture Hill", "Places of Interest in Xingping", ?ellow Cloth Shoal ? etc. After 4.5 hours we arrived in Yangshuo. Yangshuo is probably the most westernized backpackers' town that I've ...

... no idea where my flight had gone. I questioned the word 'gone'. There are still several hours, it hasn't gone but it will go....I hope! Thankfully a switched one guy overheard us and ran over quickly tap tap tapping things into the keyboard. It seemed my flight had been cancelled just after I booked it and it was now tomorrow. Why she couldn't see that I really have no idea. She was ...