Beijing/Tianjing Trip 2009

On the 28th March 2009, all the global citizens assembled at Changi Airport Terminal 1. We celebrated Sherlyn's (T01) birthday at the food court, a plate of noodle costed us SGD$5.80 and it does not taste good at all. We boarded the flight CA 970 at 12.15am and it was Shinyee's first time taking a plane. She was so excited that she screamed. Some of the flight attendants' services were not up to satisfactory standard as compared to SIA flight attendants and I don't think they spoke English through the intercom, did they? The journey from Singapore to Beijing took around 6 hours. It was a hard night for some of us.



Reached Beijing on 29th March around 6am plus.
Upon reaching the Beijing's international airport, we took the sky train to collect our luggages. Quite a long waiting time for the sky train to arrive. The airport was huge! And there were not that many people around. The temperature in Beijing was 1 degree celsius, all of us wrapped up then. We boarded our coach to a chinese restaurant which is of 4 stories high with lift to have our breakfast. This is where we had our first foray into China's cuisine and it was interesting to say the least!

The first place we visited was LAMA temple, also known as Yong He Gong. The highlight of the temple is the 18 metre tall Buddha statue. The statue is one of the three artworks in Guiness World Records 1993.
We found out that the people there are not very civilized as they bump into people without apologizing. There were also alot of recycle dustbins found in the temple.

Next, we visited The Museum of the Chinese Revolution. We had too little time there to take a look at all the exhibits.

Lunch was at a muslim restaurant at Ox Street. There were street peddlers outside the restaurant who targeted tourists. Apparently they were desperate to sell of their items by the sudden decrease in price.

We went to Lao She Teahouse next. There we watched the Chinese performances such as a magic show, puppet show and a mask performance among others. We were also served some interesting snacks to go along with the show. Some of the non-chinese speakers may have found the performances a little boring but it was still captivating nonetheless.

A short bus ride away was our wonderful hotel, Xuan Wu Men. The rooms were quite spacious and comfortable. We were all happy with the internet access in our rooms! but to our surprised horror, there were no locks on the toilet doors! not satisfied with sitting idly in our rooms, we went to check out the surrounding areas. Did some supermarketing in the end, buying plenty of bottled water!

For the 1st dinner of the trip, we were brought to a chinese restaurant. It would be the first of many more to come. Today's dinner was special as it was graced by 3 special guests. All former TP students, they shared with us their experiences about living in Beijing. Questions were asked about their transitioning into Chinese life and the whole session proved to be very insightful and informative for us. After this, it was back to the hotel for some eagerly awaited sleep........or maybe some debrief & tutorial before that :)


On the video front, we're making some progress. Managed to get our classmates to join in the dancing! Also, on our first insight into China, it actually clashed with our stereotyped impression that we had. Beijing was really a very modern city, yet traditional. A lot of us had difficulty acclimatising to the weather, having to put on layer after layer. Though tired, our first day was still fun, especially with TO1 taking lots and lots of pictures!