May Day Holiday

May Day Holiday
Hey folks! The last week of April we had a week off from teaching to celebrate a combination of spring break w/ the PRC national holiday called May Day. We went to the nation’s capital and neighboring cities (Beijing & Tianjin). Both places were MARVELOUS! We experienced the best air quality month in 20 years & beat the crowd that came on the 1st of May. We saw the major sights like the Forbidden City, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, etc. You never see an entirety of any one item or place. Each of them is so large that you cannot see everything at one time. So you take a bite of the Summer Palace, the Drum Tower, or the Olympic venues & move on.

The Summer Palace was Eileen's favorite with all the weeping willow trees around the lake. We also, rode in a bicycle rickshaw around the hutongs (alleyways of old neighborhoods.)


Getting around Beijing is pretty easy if you don’t mind a nasty taxi driver now & then. The subway is efficient & well used. I mean well used as I think I met a million people crowded in each car & that was a slow day! We ate a variety Chinese food by regions, all of them very tasty. It was my first time to have Peking Duck & to be honest not one of my favorites. One afternoon we saw the Legend of Kung Fu Show. Wow! It is a fictional story with kung fu specialists acting out the story with some modern dancers & plenty of smoke & lights. It was ancient marital arts meets Hollywood.

The entire time there was great, but the two most stunning things we saw was a mini-van engulfed in flames on the freeway while we were heading to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. The other one was the leftover of the 60 story Beijing Mandarin Hotel which caught fire in February this year. You should search the net for photos & it will take your breath away. Get this, only one person died.

We had dinner with a friend & his future wife. He is from the States & she is from Mexico. They both have been in Beijing for a number of years & speak the language quite well. They told us many things, but one thing they told us was that China, especially in the big cities, is where things are happening in the world. There is an excitement for the future in this place despite all the difficulties the culture is going through.

Later we took the slick high speed train to Tianjin which is by the coast. It was heavily influenced by the Europeans in the early 19th century. The center of town has many European style buildings that are being renovated into very nice restaurants & shops. Tianjin is the home city of the first Chinese born Olympic gold medal winner, Eric Liddell. His story was made famous in the 1981 Oscar movie of the year, "Chariots of Fire" about himself & Harold Abrahams. Because Mr. Liddell was born in Tianjin, we went to see his home. When we were there I found out that Mr. Liddell proposed to his wife at the Kiessling Restaurant which is over a 100 years old & still in operation. It is a great series of restaurants with a bakery, Russian, German, & French restaurant each one a separate floor. The French restaurant was fabulous where Eileen & I recreated the proposal scene.

We also went to an art museum that had a collection of blown up photographs from a British photographer, Thomson from the 1870's. It was fantastic.

So you can tell we really enjoyed our vacation. Now it is back to work to finish off the school year. It will be a mad dash to the end. There is much more to say but I hope this summer to see most of you to tell you all other details I cannot here. Take care!