Forbidden City
Splendors of Chinas Forbidden City: the Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao
From 1954 until Mao Zedong's death 22 years later. Dr. Li Zhisui was the Chinese ruler's personal physician. In this book, Dr. Li vividly reconstructs his extraordinary time with Chairman Mao.

Greatwall of China
The Great Wall was listed as World Heritage by UNESCO in 1987.

Insects as Food
The term for eating insects is entomophagy. Throughout the history of mankind, eating insects has actually been a common idea.

Maria's Musings: Part 1
Posted 20 October 2006

It seems like we are taking turns at the computer and sleeping. Both of us got up at 3am after crashing last 'night' at 6, after a full day's trudging around Tianan'men Square and the Forbidden City, and I contended myself with my diary while Ted composed his first article.

Our 'Beijing Home Lodge' is sparsely furnished but comfortable, sporting a 28 inch television with DVD Player as well as a brand new computer with flat screen monitor and high speed internet access, while the bathroom and kitchen are more basic. The furniture is somewhat 70s, but to my astonishment I looked up and discovered gorgeous molding around the ceiling. It is hard to tell how old the complex might be - the concrete, bicycle filled halls are dirty and smeared with Chines graffiti, while the elevators seem fairly new and are working very well. Most important of all, the place is warm and has very cozy beds, something we will not be able to take for granted in the teahouses at Thorong Pass.

During the bus ride from the airport on Wednesday afternoon, Ted took a nap, while I struggled to keep my eyes open: everything in Chinese, although some of the bigger, more important street signs are also in pin yin. It was, for the most part, a highway ride, that had me primarily pondering what the Eucalyptus-like trees might be called that were growing on either side of the road. I later read that the closest desert area - that is, non-arable land - is only 18 km away from Beijing, and that each spring brings fierce sandstorms coming in from the Gobi desert, with the sand landing as far away as Taipei. To stop the advance of the desert, apparently there is a massive tree planting effort underway, the 'Green Wall'. Otherwise, the ride was rather drab, somewhat reminiscent of Eastern Europe in its day: Beijing is one of the most polluted cities on earth, and on this day, the sun did not get through the yellow-grey haze (as I found out the next day, in Beijing, you can feel the pollution more than smell it - luckily, I have not experienced any respiratory problems so far although my eyes started burning almost immediately). Besides, because we hit the evening rush hour (there are a lot of cars in Beijing now, even though there are still plenty of bicycles happily - or dangerously - mixing in with the traffic, and three-wheeled cycles with all sorts of contraptions for transporting goods or passengers), it was dark by the time we finally arrived at the train station.

I was half prepared for the rush of bodies and the smells of India upon disembarking, and sure enough, the touts were there, and the bicyle rickshaws as well. We waved them all away and started walking purposefully, although we had no clue where to find the Beijing International Hotel that was supposed to be our meeting place. Finally, we gave up and showed the address in Chinese characters to one of the bicycle guys and thus an adventurous ride started that took us, piled high atop our luggage, in very close proximity to oncoming buses, other bicyclists and pedestrians (the Indians honk like crazy in such a sitution, the Chinese merely wave), down a hutong where Ted took off someone's mirror during one of those too-close encounters. The whole experience had me giggling like crazy. Finally, afer asking around a number of times - something we could not have done without our Chines rickshaw driver who charged us a premium (4 times the money for the bus ride) for just that, no doubt - Ted managed to make a phone call to the manager of the apartment suite we were to stay at. While I was sitting cross-legged in my abandoned rickshaw in the courtyard, I was developing Plan B: it seemed a number of Westerners were living there so surely, one of them must have a cell phone, and should be otherwise able to help the stranded new arrivals. But it didn't get that far, as we had soon met up with Lydia in front of the green ATM machine, and were quickly installed in our apartment.