Pick at day, any day:
April 5 Blastoff (from Atlanta)
April 6 - The Bund (Shanghai)
April 7 - The Suit (Shanghai)
April 8 - Paradise in Hangzhou
April 9 - The Bus (Hangzhou)
April 10 - Beer on the Balcony (Yangshuo)
April 11 - 1000 year old towns (Yangshuo)
April 12 - The Jazz Balcony (Xingping)
April 13 - Sanbu in Yangshuo
April 14 - Pagoda Hike (Yahgshuo)
April 15 - Room Atop 1000 Steps (Ping'an)
April 16 - Ensconsed (in Longji)
April 17 - To Kunming
April 18 - Kunming
April 19 - Blogging in Kunming
April 20 - Lijiang
April 21 - Snow Mountain & Yak Meadow (Lijiang)
April 22 - Inns & Outs (Lijiang)
April 23/24 Grocery Shopping (Lijiang)
April 25 - Tiger Leaping Gorge (Lijiang)
April 25 - Tim & Maite (a bonus post)
April 26 - Baisha and Naxi Customs (Lijiang)
April 27 - China by Horseback (Lijiang)
April 28 - Back to...Shanghai...again
April 29 - Shanghai Shopping
April 30 - Reunion
May 1 - The Last Day
May 2 - Home - Summary of China 2008
Slide Show
April 5 Blastoff (from Atlanta)
April 6 - The Bund (Shanghai)
April 7 - The Suit (Shanghai)
April 8 - Paradise in Hangzhou
April 9 - The Bus (Hangzhou)
April 10 - Beer on the Balcony (Yangshuo)
April 11 - 1000 year old towns (Yangshuo)
April 12 - The Jazz Balcony (Xingping)
April 13 - Sanbu in Yangshuo
April 14 - Pagoda Hike (Yahgshuo)
April 15 - Room Atop 1000 Steps (Ping'an)
April 16 - Ensconsed (in Longji)
April 17 - To Kunming
April 18 - Kunming
April 19 - Blogging in Kunming
April 20 - Lijiang
April 21 - Snow Mountain & Yak Meadow (Lijiang)
April 22 - Inns & Outs (Lijiang)
April 23/24 Grocery Shopping (Lijiang)
April 25 - Tiger Leaping Gorge (Lijiang)
April 25 - Tim & Maite (a bonus post)
April 26 - Baisha and Naxi Customs (Lijiang)
April 27 - China by Horseback (Lijiang)
April 28 - Back to...Shanghai...again
April 29 - Shanghai Shopping
April 30 - Reunion
May 1 - The Last Day
May 2 - Home - Summary of China 2008
Slide Show
Labels: baisha, china2008, kunming, lijiang, longji, pingan, yangshuo
Previous Next
These beds are like oak boards. Man are they tough on the back. I pulled the sheet back and discovered that I'm sleeping on a just a box spring. What happened to my mattress?
We have a nice console between the beds that controls our TV, room lights, and the bed lights. Trouble is the knob on my side controls Ruth's light and the knob on her side controls my light. But at least they work.
There's a hot pot in all the rooms. Ours has it's own separate shelf halfway up the wall so that the cord can reach the outlet two feet from the ceiling. Don't ask. Who knows?
But those are just cosmetic things. The disfunction is in the bathroom. As in our other bathroom the entire place is tiled and the entire room is a shower. Never mind there are three different kinds of tile. When they ran out of one kind they simply started using another. Again just cosmetic. The difficulty Ruth had was with the shower controls and sprayer. The controls are on the left wall but the shower sprayer is on the right. The water tube loops up the wall on the left, through a hole in the ceiling, across the top and then back down the wall on the right. If you don't want the sprayer to get you in the back, you have to remove it from the holder and face it away from you. But it's not quite long enough to walk over and reach the left side so you kind of spread eagle, one hand on the sprayer and the other on the knobs until the temperature is correct. Ruth learned how to do that. I heard some yells last night from the direction of the bathroom before she got it right.
For me the challenge is the sink. The faucet is loose and the hot and cold water controls are the reverse of the shower. This keeps things interesting. When I run the water it just drains onto the floor (why not?) and runs between my legs to the shower drain in the floor of the bathroom. This morning, when I ran the hot water for shaving, I nearly burned my toes off. Now I know why they provide the rubber slippers.
Just about the time we got used to these things it's time to leave. We have to leave later today.
The girls went off to Longji while I ate breakfast. I'm to meet them in an hour or so. While eating I met Susanna Thorntons who is riding through Hong Kong and China with a destination of UK on, get this, a bicycle! When you get bored of this blog check our her blog here. It includes audio too. Cool.
We took a two mile walk along the narrow stone foot path to a small village of Longji. The foot path is about two feet wide, sometimes less in places. Often there is water and mud running over the stones so it's a bit dicey. If you slip, it's a long way down. There are no handrails out here. Occasionally I get a whiff of pigs, ox, or chickens. We're in the country now.
Few tourists go to the smaller villages. Mostly they come on busses to the parking area. The tours swarm up the hill, have a beer and walk back down. But you get a better feel for the place if you stay at least a few days. Since Longji is two miles away it doesn't get the tourist busses that Pingan gets. So the people lean out their window and say hello as we pass below. We say a few things to them in Chinese. They invite us in for tea and a meal but we just sit and have tea with them. Sometimes they have a small child that is at first shy but eventually opens up when they see their mother laugh with the strangers. One small little boy of two years wanted to show me his socks. I took the picture and showed him his face on the viewing screen of the digital. He smiled. The mother is happy to see her picture too.
We walked around the village but had to get back to our waiting driver at the bottom of the hill. We had a quick lunch and headed down. Lynn took the easy way down by chair. I let the woman carry my bags this time. I knew them by now and trusted them. I paid 10 yuan ($1.50), the best $1.50 I've spent on the trip so far.
We had to fly out to Qingdao but our flight wasn't until 9:30, or so we thought. We wasted time in Guilin talking to a man that's an exchange student for NYU in January. He's leaving his wife and beautiful son for a year while he teaches in New York City.
At 7:00 p.m. on the way to the airport Lynn checked our tickets and discovered the flight was for 8:20! Yikes. Our driver, Xu, floored it and got us there 45 minutes before the plane took off.
I sat back, exhausted from all the hiking. I'm coming down with a cold so the flight didn't feel so great. But it was smooth and got us into Qingdao by 12:00 a.m. Bill and his business associates picked us up and took us to the hotel.
The room looks out into the Yellow Sea. What a spectacular view. But more about that later.
....dave
Avoid suspicion: when you're walking through your neighbor's melon patch, don't tie your shoe. -Chinese proverb
Previous Next
These beds are like oak boards. Man are they tough on the back. I pulled the sheet back and discovered that I'm sleeping on a just a box spring. What happened to my mattress? We have a nice console between the beds that controls our TV, room lights, and the bed lights. Trouble is the knob on my side controls Ruth's light and the knob on her side controls my light. But at least they work.
There's a hot pot in all the rooms. Ours has it's own separate shelf halfway up the wall so that the cord can reach the outlet two feet from the ceiling. Don't ask. Who knows?
But those are just cosmetic things. The disfunction is in the bathroom. As in our other bathroom the entire place is tiled and the entire room is a shower. Never mind there are three different kinds of tile. When they ran out of one kind they simply started using another. Again just cosmetic. The difficulty Ruth had was with the shower controls and sprayer. The controls are on the left wall but the shower sprayer is on the right. The water tube loops up the wall on the left, through a hole in the ceiling, across the top and then back down the wall on the right. If you don't want the sprayer to get you in the back, you have to remove it from the holder and face it away from you. But it's not quite long enough to walk over and reach the left side so you kind of spread eagle, one hand on the sprayer and the other on the knobs until the temperature is correct. Ruth learned how to do that. I heard some yells last night from the direction of the bathroom before she got it right.
For me the challenge is the sink. The faucet is loose and the hot and cold water controls are the reverse of the shower. This keeps things interesting. When I run the water it just drains onto the floor (why not?) and runs between my legs to the shower drain in the floor of the bathroom. This morning, when I ran the hot water for shaving, I nearly burned my toes off. Now I know why they provide the rubber slippers.
Just about the time we got used to these things it's time to leave. We have to leave later today.
The girls went off to Longji while I ate breakfast. I'm to meet them in an hour or so. While eating I met Susanna Thorntons who is riding through Hong Kong and China with a destination of UK on, get this, a bicycle! When you get bored of this blog check our her blog here. It includes audio too. Cool.We took a two mile walk along the narrow stone foot path to a small village of Longji. The foot path is about two feet wide, sometimes less in places. Often there is water and mud running over the stones so it's a bit dicey. If you slip, it's a long way down. There are no handrails out here. Occasionally I get a whiff of pigs, ox, or chickens. We're in the country now.
Few tourists go to the smaller villages. Mostly they come on busses to the parking area. The tours swarm up the hill, have a beer and walk back down. But you get a better feel for the place if you stay at least a few days. Since Longji is two miles away it doesn't get the tourist busses that Pingan gets. So the people lean out their window and say hello as we pass below. We say a few things to them in Chinese. They invite us in for tea and a meal but we just sit and have tea with them. Sometimes they have a small child that is at first shy but eventually opens up when they see their mother laugh with the strangers. One small little boy of two years wanted to show me his socks. I took the picture and showed him his face on the viewing screen of the digital. He smiled. The mother is happy to see her picture too.
We walked around the village but had to get back to our waiting driver at the bottom of the hill. We had a quick lunch and headed down. Lynn took the easy way down by chair. I let the woman carry my bags this time. I knew them by now and trusted them. I paid 10 yuan ($1.50), the best $1.50 I've spent on the trip so far.
We had to fly out to Qingdao but our flight wasn't until 9:30, or so we thought. We wasted time in Guilin talking to a man that's an exchange student for NYU in January. He's leaving his wife and beautiful son for a year while he teaches in New York City.
At 7:00 p.m. on the way to the airport Lynn checked our tickets and discovered the flight was for 8:20! Yikes. Our driver, Xu, floored it and got us there 45 minutes before the plane took off.
I sat back, exhausted from all the hiking. I'm coming down with a cold so the flight didn't feel so great. But it was smooth and got us into Qingdao by 12:00 a.m. Bill and his business associates picked us up and took us to the hotel.The room looks out into the Yellow Sea. What a spectacular view. But more about that later.
....dave
Avoid suspicion: when you're walking through your neighbor's melon patch, don't tie your shoe. -Chinese proverb
Previous Next
Next
I can tell you that 5:00 a.m. is very early when you go to bed at 12:00 a.m. Our plans were to get in bed earlier but there was so much yet to do before leaving.
Eric dropped us off at the Atlanta airport and it was then we realized that we wouldn't be together for a month, the longest our family has ever been separated. It was kind of sad to say goodbye but he'll be busy with Conyers and his Hawaii/California trips while we are gone.
We got to the gate, ate a Burger King breakfast sandwich. We'd just finished when we heard our names called out. We turned around and saw Mike, our United Airline pilot friend. We met Mike about six months ago at a Borders. Ruth was returning a Chinese language book to the shelf when Mike asked if she was trying to learn the language. That lead to a conversation about China and our desire to become fluent. Anyway, we received a few emails from Mike giving us great advice on things to do and not do while in China. (You can read more of the details here.)
Mike is now training on 747s because United has switched from the 777s on their route to Beijing. Too bad Mike couldn't be our pilot because the ride into Beijing was dicey. We bounced around quite a bit. I wished that Mike had been at the helm. He's flown to Beijing 156 times! (Well, at last count anyway.)
After a quick picture with Mike (he was boarding our first leg to Chicago), we found our seats in row 54. Our seats were so far back in the plane we had to pass through a time zone. Mikes says there are 550 seats in the thing. This thing is big and heavy. (In the pilot's communication with the control tower he referred to our flight as "flight 851 heavy." No joke.) It took us so long to get down the runway I thought we were just going to taxi into Beijing.
This is a long flight. A VERY long flight. It takes 12 hours to fly from Chicago to Beijing. The flight includes three meals, four movies, and unlimited drinks. I would helpfully remind Ruth how many hours we had left. For example, after going three hours, I told her we only had twelve more hours to go. She loved that.
The first "meal" was really a packet of pretzels. The postage-stamp-sized Fiesta Mix ain't much of a fiesta. I think I may have found three broken pretzels in the packet along with a tablespoon of salt. Ruth tells me that if the airline quit giving out the little peanut snacks they'd save 15 million dollars a year! Where does she get this stuff?
The plane was full but we still had to get up to empty the bladder. There were all kinds of people in the isles. The carts in the isles still serving the food, blocked up traffic. We have to shuffle around in the cabin like square tiles on a plastic puzzle.
Every so often our progress would show up on the projector screen. We were on our way to the North pole, it's faster to loop up to the north and then back down to Beijing than go straight due to the circumference of the globe. But get this, at 32,000 feet the temperature on the other side of our window is 65 degrees BELOW zero.
We ate, slept, read, and watched one of the four movies. At the end of the flight we heard our names called over the airplane's PA system. "Will Dave and Ruth Terry please identify yourself to one of the servers?" We did. The next thing we know the captain appeared with a bottle of Brut 1415 Champaign. It was Mike who called our pilot and asked him to give us a bottle. How cool is that? (taibuhaoyisile)
We caught a taxi to our hotel. The driver drove as if no one else was on the road. He never stayed in the lanes. Often he drove with the car straddling the line! I guess the lines in the road are just suggestions.
We unpacked and took a walking a tour around the hotel. We enjoyed some chiwanfan (dinner) at a restaurant for $2. They didn't speak any English. I know the numbers so was able to pay and get the correct change. The food was great. The tea was fantastic. (haochi haohe)
We crashed after realizing that we had never seen the sun set today. We've been up for about 24 hours with short naps in between.
This post may be a reflection of the little sleep we've had.
...dave
Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo. -Al Gore
Next
I can tell you that 5:00 a.m. is very early when you go to bed at 12:00 a.m. Our plans were to get in bed earlier but there was so much yet to do before leaving.Eric dropped us off at the Atlanta airport and it was then we realized that we wouldn't be together for a month, the longest our family has ever been separated. It was kind of sad to say goodbye but he'll be busy with Conyers and his Hawaii/California trips while we are gone.
We got to the gate, ate a Burger King breakfast sandwich. We'd just finished when we heard our names called out. We turned around and saw Mike, our United Airline pilot friend. We met Mike about six months ago at a Borders. Ruth was returning a Chinese language book to the shelf when Mike asked if she was trying to learn the language. That lead to a conversation about China and our desire to become fluent. Anyway, we received a few emails from Mike giving us great advice on things to do and not do while in China. (You can read more of the details here.)Mike is now training on 747s because United has switched from the 777s on their route to Beijing. Too bad Mike couldn't be our pilot because the ride into Beijing was dicey. We bounced around quite a bit. I wished that Mike had been at the helm. He's flown to Beijing 156 times! (Well, at last count anyway.)
After a quick picture with Mike (he was boarding our first leg to Chicago), we found our seats in row 54. Our seats were so far back in the plane we had to pass through a time zone. Mikes says there are 550 seats in the thing. This thing is big and heavy. (In the pilot's communication with the control tower he referred to our flight as "flight 851 heavy." No joke.) It took us so long to get down the runway I thought we were just going to taxi into Beijing.
This is a long flight. A VERY long flight. It takes 12 hours to fly from Chicago to Beijing. The flight includes three meals, four movies, and unlimited drinks. I would helpfully remind Ruth how many hours we had left. For example, after going three hours, I told her we only had twelve more hours to go. She loved that.
The first "meal" was really a packet of pretzels. The postage-stamp-sized Fiesta Mix ain't much of a fiesta. I think I may have found three broken pretzels in the packet along with a tablespoon of salt. Ruth tells me that if the airline quit giving out the little peanut snacks they'd save 15 million dollars a year! Where does she get this stuff?The plane was full but we still had to get up to empty the bladder. There were all kinds of people in the isles. The carts in the isles still serving the food, blocked up traffic. We have to shuffle around in the cabin like square tiles on a plastic puzzle.
Every so often our progress would show up on the projector screen. We were on our way to the North pole, it's faster to loop up to the north and then back down to Beijing than go straight due to the circumference of the globe. But get this, at 32,000 feet the temperature on the other side of our window is 65 degrees BELOW zero.
We ate, slept, read, and watched one of the four movies. At the end of the flight we heard our names called over the airplane's PA system. "Will Dave and Ruth Terry please identify yourself to one of the servers?" We did. The next thing we know the captain appeared with a bottle of Brut 1415 Champaign. It was Mike who called our pilot and asked him to give us a bottle. How cool is that? (taibuhaoyisile)We caught a taxi to our hotel. The driver drove as if no one else was on the road. He never stayed in the lanes. Often he drove with the car straddling the line! I guess the lines in the road are just suggestions.
We unpacked and took a walking a tour around the hotel. We enjoyed some chiwanfan (dinner) at a restaurant for $2. They didn't speak any English. I know the numbers so was able to pay and get the correct change. The food was great. The tea was fantastic. (haochi haohe)
We crashed after realizing that we had never seen the sun set today. We've been up for about 24 hours with short naps in between.
This post may be a reflection of the little sleep we've had.
...dave
Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo. -Al Gore
Next
Labels: beijing, china2006, guilin, longji, longsheng, pingan, qingdao, yangshuo
Pick a day, any day:
April 6/7 Blastoff
April 8 Summer Palace
April 9 Tiananmin
April 10 Great Wall
April 11 Duck
April 12 Pearl Market
April 13 Guilin
April 14 Bike Ride
April 15 Boat Ride
April 16 Village Tour
April 17 Hanging Out
April 18 Pavilion Restaurant
April 19 Lanzi Village
April 20 Longsheng
April 21 Walks in Pingan
April 22 A Walk to Longji
April 23 Qingdao
April 24 24th - Shopping in Qingdao
April 25 Qingdao Market
April 26 Qingdao Beach
April 27 Back to Beijing
April 28 Last Days in Beijing
April 29 Returning Home
Slide Show
April 6/7 Blastoff
April 8 Summer Palace
April 9 Tiananmin
April 10 Great Wall
April 11 Duck
April 12 Pearl Market
April 13 Guilin
April 14 Bike Ride
April 15 Boat Ride
April 16 Village Tour
April 17 Hanging Out
April 18 Pavilion Restaurant
April 19 Lanzi Village
April 20 Longsheng
April 21 Walks in Pingan
April 22 A Walk to Longji
April 23 Qingdao
April 24 24th - Shopping in Qingdao
April 25 Qingdao Market
April 26 Qingdao Beach
April 27 Back to Beijing
April 28 Last Days in Beijing
April 29 Returning Home
Slide Show
Labels: beijing, china2006, great wall, guilin, longji, longsheng, pearl market, pingan, qingdao, quanjude, summer palace, tiananmen square, wangfujing
