If China takes over the world, it could easily be for this reason: 6:30 PM, any Sunday afternoon, and the roads headed back to Beijing are clogged with construction workers, looking like they are just getting going. It never stops. Construction, 24 hours a day, buildings fly up, so much that clouds of dust rise over Beijing. Good old fashioned hard work.
Karen and I don't subscribe to that philosophy though, we're headed to Mongolia tomorrow for our monthly vacation.
Well, Karen's 20 - 10 today. I'm taking her to green tea house. We had an eventful weekend, went out to for dinner and drinks on Friday, and to a Chinese French Vinyard tour where we were the only people in the entire place on saturday. Unlike a Napa Valley we could walk through the vinyard and pick grapes. Yesterday we checked out some modern Beijing art, the Wall, which was quite interesting.
Well, you don't really need a reason to party in Beijing. But the excuse this past Friday night was to celebrate our friend Wendy (a Chinese national) getting a visa to visit her boyfriend's family in Germany. We were told that it's a big deal so it's a reason to celebrate. It took her two tries and a letter from her boyfriend's father to the Chamber of Commerce to get it approved - and she's just going for a 2-week visit!
Other activities this weekend included checking out an art gallery that's inside the well-preserved south-eastern corner tower (Dong-bian men watchtower) of the former Imperial city wall (bits and pieces of the wall still exist). We would have thought that it's a tourist spot but we were the ONLY people there! It was quite nice, so was the art. We tried to imagine what the view from this tower was like - probably clear views of the Forbidden city, Temple of Heaven and no tall buildings.
I haven't used ofoto in a while but since we filled up our uploading quota on flickr I thought I would upload some on ofoto. I didn't even realize that we have a ton of photos from previous trips and wedding on there so I added them as links over on the right hand column here. Check them out! Spanish photos will be coming soon.
It's hard to believe that we've already been in BJ for 2 months and that we'll be leaving in a months' time. July was a busy month. The first weekend we took at trip to the grasslands in Inner Mongolia for some horseback riding and fresh air, check out the photos!
The following weekend my brother, Eugene, his girlfriend Carmen, and our cousin Jackie all came up to visit and we finally got an excuse to do some sightseeing. Then I went on a work trip to Qing Dao (More commonly known as TsingDao - yes, where the beer is brewed) and turned around and headed off to Espana for our dear friend Pablito and Maria's wedding! Then a weekend of dealing with jetlag and this past weekend we took a weekend trip to Hong Kong for my mother's birthday. And then boom, it's August. Time flies.