Our last morning in Beijing we hightailed it over to the Temple of Heaven, you know, the one featured in the Chinese pavilion at EPCOT? WEll of course Disney has done it again and reproduced it exactly, with the exception that the Orlando version has iced tea on demand and Western style toilets nearby. (Enough […]
View post →The Hutong are a very distinctive part of Beijing. It’s said that a quarter of the city’s residents live in the hutongs, narrow alleyways made up of somewhat crumbly one-story stone buildings and courtyard homes. A lot of them are being demolished to make way for the new large buildings popping up all over Beijing, […]
View post →The great, greater, greatest, fantastico Great Wall! It really does deserve its name. There is a saying attributed to Mao that you are not a man until you have climbed the Great Wall - ã®OK, so now we are men! That phrase `climbing the wall` really applies, you really do CLIMB it. It seemed like we […]
View post →Beijing. I can’t say that I love it or that I hate it. I will say it is different from any city I have ever been in, and that China is like no place I have ever been. This drawing is the Gate of Heavenly Peace – the famous one with the Mao portrait, huge, […]
View post →Tokyo is a very interesting city. Evidence of a long cultural history exists side-by-side with a craze for fads and new things. The drawing above shows a Tokyo McDonald’s next to what looks like an old Japanese tea house. I love that mixture, it’s so positive. You can get by with very few words of […]
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