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Hong Kong, Beijing and ShanghaiApril 3 - April 8, 2008April 3, 2008
Welcome to Hong Kong!!After a quick turnaround of only two days, we arrived in Hong Kong, ready to explore.We pulled into a magnificent port, located right across from the city and attached to a huge mall, what a convenience for everyone!!After a long morning of working out passports for our students and getting things organized with our Pursers Desk, it was time for me to explore a bit of Hong Kong.Today I went to a place called Ocean Park, which is a small amusement park in Hong Kong.Before Disneyland was built, Ocean Park was packed with tourists and was doing very well.Right now they are trying to rebuild and get ready to make their park better to compete a bit with Disneyland.Our main attraction at Ocean Park was to visit the Giant Panda's!!Today I got a chance to see 4 Panda's up close as they were eating and playing in their pens.They were very cool to see and to say that I have seen them in China is even more impressive!!The panda's just play around all day and eat lots of bamboo plants and just chill, wish I had their life!After touring the panda's we hit up the dolphin show, the shark aquarium, the jellyfish aquarium and toured the amusement park.The interesting piece about this park is it built on a mountain.One side of the mountain is all of the smaller attractions and then on high land, up the mountain are the rides and other attractions.But get this, the way to get to the high land is through a 15 minute cable car ride up and across the mountain.Yep, it was so cool riding along the China Sea, up and down some mountain and to see the city from a high up.As we approached the high land we saw the rollercoaster and other rides and just had some fun around the amusement park! After we got our amusement park bug out of us, it was time to head back down to the city, but since we stood later at the park the few residents and I had to take the city bus back.So we hopped on the bus, that took us to the subway station were we then finally reached one of the tourist areas of Hong Kong.The subway ride was pretty neat, so clean, organized and fun.We arrived to a street called Avenue of the Stars, which is just like the stars in LA, but with all of the Chinese stars!!It was fun to see!!
At 8pm every night, the sky line buildings all light up and there is a light show that goes with music for 15 minutes.It was pretty neat to see the buildings light up and dance to the music!!Finally it was time for some dinner so we headed out to a Thai restaurant and had a nice meal there!!Very cheap as usual in Asia!!Well after a long day, it was time to get some rest and get ready for my trip to Beijing!!You see, I am not sailing on the ship from Hong Kong to Shanghai.My trip is going to meet the ship in Shanghai when we fly back from Beijing next week, which is pretty cool.
April 4, 2008
5 AM comes real fast… it was time to meet up the students for our trip to Beijing for the next 4 days!!We headed down to the Union to meet and get checked in and to get some breakfast.We headed out to the Hong Kong airport and we were set for our trip.The Hong Kong airport is so nice!!Easy to maneuver and very clean and organized!!Our flight was ready to board and here we go.. off to Beijing!Our flight was about 3.5 hours and we finally arrived NOON.
Beijing is a huge city with about 8 million people living there.It is about the size of New Jersey, but just like a city.The city is so big that is can take almost about 2 - 3 hours to make it from one side to the other!!The pollution in Beijing is pretty bad, and you can see it in the air right away. Welcome to Beijing!!We arrived in the new terminal that Beijing had built for their summer Olympics this summer in August.It was just opened a few weeks ago, and it is just amazing to see.The organization, the layout is just so amazing to see!!After clearing immigration andentering China, mainland, we were set to meet up with our tour guide for the next few days in Beijing.Jennifer was our tour guide and she was ready to go with the group.Our first order of business was lunch.We headed out and had a great Chinese style buffet.There is one thing you should know about the food in China, Chinese food here is so different than what we are used to eating in America for Chinese food.Fried rice is white, and they just cook things differently.Al l of the food was really good and I had a blast eating everything that was there for us to eat.After lunch we headed to our first sight, the Summer Palace.The Summer Palace or Yi he yuan (traditional Chinese: %u9824%u548C%u5712; simplified Chinese: %u9890%u548C%u56ED; pinyin: Yíhé Yuán; literally "Garden of Nurtured Harmony") is a palace in Beijing, China. The Summer Palace is mainly dominated by Longevity Hill (60 meters high) and the Kunming Lake. It covers an expanse of 2.9 square kilometers, three quarters of which is water. The central Kunming Lake covering 2.2 square kilometers was entirely man made and the excavated soil was used to build Longevity Hill. In its compact 70,000 square meters of building space, one finds a variety of palaces, gardens, and other classical-style architectural structures.The summer palace was great to see.The layout of the buildings, the lake, mountains, the Chinese writing all around was just so peaceful to see.So many tourists were there and it was fun to see our first sight of Beijing.After our visit to the Summer Palace it was time to get checked into the hotel.We stood at the Jianguo Qianmen Hotel and it was so nice, something like a 5 star hotel in America!!The rooms were nice the lobby and the staff all good to us.After our short relaxing period, it was time to head out to dinner.Tonight on the menu we were having Peking Duck!!Yep, it was so good… I liked it, don't think I would put it on the top of my list of foods, but it was good to eat.On top of the duck we had plenty of other smaller meals, served family style to our table, including sweat and sour pork, fish meals, some chicken meals and other vegetables.It was all very good food and fun to experiment all of them.April 5, 2008Well, today was the big day!!Time to visit the Great Wall of China!!After our two hour ride up to the Great Wall, we finally made it and I was excited.The Great Wall is 4,000 miles long and it took like 2,000 years to build.The wall is also built up and down and mountain range and the poor Chinese workers that built the wall must have been pretty amazing to do this.The tour guide said that they lost so many workers to the hard work of building the wall.If someone died while working on the wall, they would put their bodies into the wall and just keep on building over them.So for many Chinese people the wall is also one of the biggest grave sites for them!!Our first order of business was to get some tickets for our transportation up and down the wall, yep transportation, as I was not hiking up and down the mountain to get to the great wall.I took a cable car ride up to the mountain to reach the wall!!Here we go… at first glance you could see the great wall stretch itself through the mountain range, but as we continued to reach the top of the mountain, there she was… the longest wall that I have seen ever… going to left, going to the right and just continuing to go on and on and on!!So here I am, ON the GREAT WALL of China!!!Yep… walking, hiking, sitting, touching, and seeing the Great Wall of China!!How cool is this… you have no idea.. to be at one of the Seven Wonders of the world… to say I was here... unbelievable!!! So our first order of business was to pick which way were going to walk the wall… so we decided to head left.The steps and the path of the wall are very unbalanced, how many loose bricks and it goes up and down, slants left to right and so on, so you need to be careful walking around.It was so exhausted to keep walking the wall, but so much fun!!That is what pushed us… to see how far we could get and to count how many lookout towers we could reach and visit.As we walked, we just kept on taking as many pictures as we could zooming in and out, and just getting every moment of our experience on the wall.After walking continuously for about an hour or so, we decided it was time for lunch.We all had our bagged lunches with us so we just found a nice spot outside of the wall to eat!!Here I am, eating lunch outside of the Great Wall of China, how cool is this!!After eating lunch, it was time to walk back to our place of entry of the wall and to head down.While walking back we ran into a lot of our students and talked to them, took pictures of them and took more and more pictures of the Great Wall, you can't have too many pictures.So now it was time toget down the mountain of the Great Wall, so guess how we did this.They built a toboggan ride off the mountain, yep that is right a toboggan.So, I got on my toboggan, which as on wheels and started heading down the mountain.It was great… I controlled how fast I wanted to go and just went!!It was so cool to be tobogganing off the Great Wall of China to reach the bottom!!It was one of the best rides I have ever gone on and I would have done that all day if I knew how cool that would be!!! It was a great day at the Great Wall of China.Being there and experiencing some great history of the wall was truly a great experience.Now it was time to head back to the hotel for some time on our own for the evening.Today, we also went shopping, of course, another market of bargaining and haggling each other.I would have to say out of all of the markets I have experienced so far, this experience was by far the most extreme.I was pulled into stores, yelled at, and just purely disgusted by the way the sellers were treating us.Yes, they know it is tradition to bargain for the items you want, but they were very pushy, and very strong minded with their bargaining and how they handled themselves.I could not take it anymore and left in an hour and got what I needed!!My best shopping tonight was in the hotel lobby were they had the Beijing 2008 Olympic store.Safe, small and fixed prices, as set by the Olympic committee for Beijing.I bought some shirts, the mascots and some medals.How cool is it going to be to have Olympic items for the 2008 games, and to say it is from Beijing with the Chinese tags on them!!!After a nice little nap, we headed out to dinner and went to a Korean Style BBQ place.It was some good food and the most interesting piece was that you cooked your meet that you ordered yourself, right in front of you on your own personal grill!!!For like $10 we had some great meat and had a blast for the night.The things we did not ORDER were the dog meat, bull parts, ox brains or intestine and other interesting meats that were on the menu!April 6, 2008Another day of touring, here we go.This morning we headed out to Tianammen Square in downtown Beijing.The square is just like NYC's Time Square in a way and the Forbidden City is located there, which we also visited.Tinammen Square was so under watch, it was crazy.There were security cameras everywhere and so many Chinese Army Men walking around watching every move you made there.Being a Communist Country, everyone works for the Government, so no one, the tour guides, the locals or anyone would say anything about the history of Tinammen Square, because they did not know who was listening or watching.If you did not know, there was a huge incident on Tinammen Square in 1989 and I was standing on the square and the very street were the incident happened.None of the locals like to talk about the incident and it was creepy to be there!! The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, widely known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in China referred to as the June Fourth Incident to avoid confusion with the two other Tiananmen Square protests and as an act of official censorship, were a series of demonstrations led by labor activists, students, and intellectuals in the People's Republic of China (PRC) between April 15 and June 4, 1989. While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants were generally against the authoritarianism and economic policies of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and voiced calls for democratic reform within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which stayed peaceful throughout the protests. In Beijing, the resulting military crackdown on the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or injured. The reported tolls ranged from 200-300 (PRC government figures), to 400-800 (The New York Times), and to 2,000-3,000 (Chinese student associations and Chinese Red Cross).The Forbidden City was pretty neat to see.The emperor really lived in style in this very large complex or city as they call it for many years in China.We saw the rooms, the different places of his home and finished up in his Imperial Garden were he learned English and was taught his education!!It was very interesting to be standing in the Forbidden City and seeing what I was seeing.The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost five centuries, it served as the home of the Emperor and his household, and the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government.Built from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms[1] and covers 720,000 square metres. The palace complex exemplifies traditional Chinese palatial architecture,[2] and has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987,[2] and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.Since 1924, the Forbidden City has been under the charge of the Palace Museum, whose extensive collection of artwork and artefacts were built upon the imperial collections of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Part of the museum's former collection is now located in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Both museums descend from the same institution, but were split after the Chinese Civil War.Time for lunch and guess what we had, Chinese food… family style.It was good again, but many of the students just could not get a hang of trying the new types of food which is really sad for them.After lunch, we headed to see the Lama Temple.As usual a temple is a temple… nothing amazing here, but it was nice to see the locals practicing their worships and being a part of their traditions.Tonight was fun.. we headed to dinner, had Chinese food, of course, but then went to see an Acrobatic Show!!We had great seats, 5th row from the stage.The acrobats were spectacular and performing many great tricks.From balancing plates, to jumping, swinging, carrying each other and dancing around, they did an awesome job on their performance!!Many of the students have not seen Chinese Acrobats and it was fun to be with them for this experience!!!What a great way to end our night!!April 7, 2008Today is going to be a long day… all day of sightseeing and flying back to Shanghai!After checking out of our hotel around 10 AM, we headed to see the Temple of Heaven.Yep , another temple on my list of temple visits in the past 3 months.But the temple was not the most interesting piece here… it was the park and watching all of the locals exercise, play cards and dance around.They were just having a blast doing their daily routine of life…. And they were happy, smiling and just living up their time.Off to lunch.. yep, more Chinese food and still good to me!!!After lunch we went to see the Hutong village of Beijing, one of the more poorer areas to learn about the older generation of Chinese culture.The way of living is so different, but that is what they like and prefer, so who am I to argue.We went to a home to visit a family and the one thing I saw from this woman was how happy she was.She lives in quad of houses with all of her extended family around her.The house has been there for 150 years and 6 generations of her family and husbands family have lived there.Yeah, small, maybe not to what you would be living in, but she is happy, happy and happy.. and that is all you could ask for from her!!After the village tour, we drove around Beijing to see some other sites.The best part of the sites was seeing the Olympic stadiums.We got a nice view of the main stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the track and field games.The stadium is called the Bird's Nest and really does look like a Birds Nest.Beijing has built over 13 new Olympic venues for the games and renovated about 30 other locations to get ready for the Olympics.They are working really hard to get every detail ready to go and you can see their passion and excitement for the games!!Well after our last Chinese dinner, we headed to the airport to check in and get ready to head back to the ship in Shanghai!!We learned earlier today that the ship did not get into Shanghai until 5 pm, really late as normal, due to some bad fog out in the Shanghai river.But they made it, which is what counts.After some snack eating in the airport, we headed to our plane.The plane was a huge boeing 777, with over 300 people on the flight, just a two hour flight, on Air China.It was a neat flight, as we got to watch the take off and landing on video from the front of the plane and what the pilot was seeing.How cool was that.The plane had about 150 semester at sea students on the flight, which was fun as we took over everything!!We finally headed back to the ship and it was time to crash and burn from this long adventure away.So worth the money for this trip and I cannot wait to go back to Beijing or Hong Kong again.April8, 2008Well, the one thing we all learned today was it is cold here.It is raining and about 50 degrees, which we are not USED to at all!!I did not wake up until NOON today and it was great.There is really nothing going on in Shanghai, so I just did some work around the ship and relaxed, which is what I need to be doing!!I have some preparing of interviews to be doing and some other ship work to get done.We only have two days at sea this week before we hit Japan on Friday!!After Japan, it is many days at sea for a one day stop in Hawaii and then many days at sea until we hit Costa Rica in May.. and thenone week later, we get back home to the USA.Not fun, to be thinking about going back home… uck!!! Well, Hong Kong, Beining and China were a great trip.So much fun, so much to see and a great experience.Many students have been telling me that many of their parents have been reading my blogs, which is fun to hear.From what I know, I am one of the few that captures every day of the trip daily for others to read.So if you are reading, keep on reading.Everyone is safe, having a great time and not looking forward to going home.I do have to admit a few of us are getting a bit homesick now, as I think I am myself, but nothing major.I do miss seeing friends and family, talking on the phone and knowing what is going on with your lives, the news and the USA.Well, I cannot believe it, in about 30 days, I will be back… with a new life… and hopefully a new job to come along with that.Stay tuned for more.Keep in touch.. would love to hear from some of you soon!!-Mario
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