We're pretty much packed and preparing to say goodbye to China (for now).


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The weather has been rather nuts today. When I left, it was just starting to look a little ominous so I made sure I brought my umbrella with me. By 11.30am though, when I looked out my window - the world seemed to have gone completely black.( Read more... )

The Canadian Mimi and I visited the Silver Mountain Pagoda Forest (银山塔林） on Friday, 29 May 2009. Silver Mountain is approximately 60km outside of Beijing and Mr. Zhao our driver, picked us up at 9am. He's always super-conscientious and was actually already waiting at 8.30am for us ( Read more... )

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Today, Mimi, her dad, The Canadian and I went and visited the 光爱学校Guang Ai School for Orphans. It's a privately run school for orphans. The website is here. While the intentions of the school are very noble, the school itself was very sobering to visit.

This page sets out specific donation requests so we showed up with garbage bins, ( Read more... )

Yesterday, Singapore Girl II, DC Gal, British Chap, French Gal, Dutch Guy, The Canadian and I hopped into a rented minibus to go to 爨底下村 Cuandiaxia Village, 90 km outside of Beijing.

爨底下村 Cuandiaxia Village was first built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and apparently preserves about 70 courtyard houses built with stones and wood. It's a ( Read more... )

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Continued from Part 1. ( Read more... )

In 2006 when I was going to a meeting with a colleague, we had to walk up to the seventh floor of the office block. There was no lift and I was half dead by the time I got up there because I have no lungs. It was at that time that I noticed that Beijing was incredibly unfriendly to those who had mobility problems. When I pointed this out to my ( Read more... )

We have National Day holidays in October. From memory, we get a week off... Ordinarily I'd rather kick myself in the head rather than go travelling in China during a Chinese public holiday, but my friend Alice mentioned 阆中 Lángzhōng to me when she was here and it caught my fancy and made me want to go travelling again.

It's in Sichuan Province. ( Read more... )