Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Thursday, January 05, 2006

China Trip Christmas 2000. (I found this thru my email to Rob)

I had a great time in China, here is a summary of what I did there.
The flight from LA to Beijing took approximately 12 or 13 hours. On the plane, I
saw the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. The movie, starring James Caan
and Randy Quaid?, were about two quarelling neighbors. The next movie was a
rather strange French movie, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the first one. I
fell asleep for the third movie.
The airport in Beijing was really nice. I was actually expecting an old airport,
but this one was fairly new and modern. The tour guide took care of our luggage
and check-in, so he took us directly to the restaurant. For this tour, all the
meals were paid for and there were 8 to 10 dishes/meal. Since I havn't had a
decent Chinese meal in over 5 months, I was really glad to be part of this
trip.
The first stop in our tour was the forbidden city. The forbidden city used to be
the living quarters for the emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasty. The last
person to live there was the last emperor, Pu Yi, who was there until the
1920's. After the communists took over he was assigned to be a gardener at the
forbidden city. What irony! The archictecture was really impressive, my only
regret was that we didn't get to see the palace treasures. The next stop in our
tour was the summer palace. There was a huge man-made lake which helped to cool
the temperature down in the summer. It was almost completely frozen in the
winter with a few cracks here and there. There were some really foolish people
who ventured out towards the lake. It was a pretty comical sight when we saw a
bunch of guards going in the middle of the lake to catch them. The next day, we
went to the most famous cultural landmark, the Great Wall. It is truly an
awesome sight to see first hand. I have no idea why they needed to build a great
wall, since there were mountains in the background. A few of us in the tour
decided to climb up one stretch (about a mile) of the great wall. It was kinda
scary to look down, but I tried to concentrate on the steps. When I went down, I
decided to count the steps so that I didn't have to look down. In all, there
were 1732 steps on the way down.
The next city that we visited was the ancient capital of China, Xian. Xian is
the place for the famous terra cotta figures. Xian also has the world's largest
and oldest remaining city wall. They are not done excavating the site --
according to the guide it will take another 100 years to finish the dig. Part of
the problem is that the technology is not quite advanced yet. In total, 40 years
and 750,000 workers took part in the construction of the mausoleum for the
emperor.
Gosh, this email is getting rather lengthy. After Xian, we went to Shanghai. In
a really short amount of time, Shanghai has transformed itself into a really
modern city. I think that Shanghai may have the edge in the number of
skyscrapers in comparison to Manhattan. The freeways had a lot more loops and
levels than the ones in LA.
We also went to a number of smaller cities (relative to Shanghai and Beijing).
It was really amazing for me to see all the development even in the smaller
cities. Still, there is still a large part of China that I havn't seen. Maybe in
a few years I could go back.
That's about all. Have a happy new year!
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