Sunday, July 31, 2011

Beijing Beiby

Hello to all our faithful readers. All two of you. We have finally gotten beyond the Great Fire Wall of China and now have regular access to our blog and face book. So over the next few weeks we will catch you both up on our new adventures.

The first stop on our exit from China was the big, beautiful and busy Beijing. With 19,000,000 people crammed into it's ever expanding borders, it has become a very, very, very, very, very busy place and that sadly, will be it's downfall. It is too busy. No matter where we went, there were lines, jam and crowds. We did experience a couple of blue sky days that appear so infrequent in Beijing. Nonie and I took this exact same picture from the exact same spot in 2003 except that then we could barely see the Forbidden City because the smog was so thick. On the positive side, we did not have to line up to take the picture in 2003. I swear, there were so many tourists on that hill that it must have shrunk a couple of metres. ( 6 feet for our American readers)

Sadly the smog, crowds and heat increased with each day of our stay. It hit a high 0f 36 with a nasty humidex reading on the day we visited the Summer Palace. As you can see in the picture, the smog was back. The Summer Palace is our favorite place to visit in Beijing. All you need to do is find the nearest hill, climb the stairs to where ever and you escape the crowds and the noise. The Chinese seem to hate stairs and prefer to stay grounded and near the huge man made lake that inhabits a good part of the Summer Palace grounds. It was a lovely day until we tried to board the subway back to downtown. I believe that it will not be long before they start using pushers on the trains to ensure that every square meter (9 square feet for our American readers) of the subway car is filled to maximum. Tip to those of you planning on using the subway, try to find a spot just inside the doors as that is where the ventilation fans blow and if you are really lucky the air conditioning will also be working.


We were able to enjoy one last meal with Edoardo and Karen, along with Big Terry. As I reviewed our pictures for this blog, I realized that we did not take any pictures of what was a lovely feast of Chuanr (pronounced shwar) in a houtong (pronounced hootoong) near their new apartment. It was a steamy evening made much nicer with copious bottles of Hopi and good conversation. Karen and Edoardo seem to fit so neatly into the Beijing life style. To quote them and Big Terry, "Beijing is best lived at night. The darkness hides so much of the ugliness and brings out much of the beauty that is Beijing." Sadly Nonie and I are day people and we missed much of what Beijing had to offer. Perhaps next time but right now we are ready to leave.

A quick contest for our regular readers. FIND MAO! Count the number of Mao's you can find in the above picture and send us your answer. Only one guess per reader. We are looking forward to gettin outta Beijing.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

FRAUD EXPOSED


IMPORTANT NOTICE

We here at Blogspot.com are very vigilant in assuring that our bloggers are kept to a very high standard and when we discover that one of our bloggers has perpetrated deceit and fraud on our valued family of readers, we feel that it is incumbent on us to expose the fraud and to set the record straight. (Ed. Note. Excuse the run on sentence)






It seems that brettandnonie have claimed in several past blogs that they have visited Africa, specifically a safari on the Serengeti. Based on our research and some judicious hacking into brettandnonie's computer, we have discovered the following. In fact they were never in Africa. All their pictures were posed, edited and photo shopped from a visit they made to the Beijing Zoo. We apologize to our readers and rest assured that we will be watching future blogs written by brettandnonie and they will be scrutinized with the utmost care. Should they be found to be again fabricating spurious stories, they will severely dealt with.