The Temple of Heaven is round because the heaven is round, explained our guide. It’s also painted blue, but here in the 21st Century, the sky is pretty smog-laden, and a blue sky backdrop is a rarity rather than the norm. Nevertheless, the weather Bruha (that...
We’d already had a pretty full day, what with Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City and the Silk Factory tour, and had worked up quite an appetite by midday, so we opted to eat our only “included dinner” at that time. Our guide, a 12-year veteran of customizing his...
Our guide was “required” to help us boost the Chinese economy by making sure we had a daily “factory” included in our tour. Our first day’s stop was to see how silk was made. We were shown the stages of a silk worm’s life, the intricate unwinding of the cocoons, and...
The Forbidden City is one huge maze of look-alike buildings with no trees, no grass, nothing of nature to distract the intention of focusing on the emperor being the Son of God. That’s how Peter explained it. Until 1911, the end of the dynasties, no one but the...
I was 35 in June, 1989, when military tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to quell the “student protests” of the Chinese government. Walking into the Square, my stomach felt as uneasy and unsettled as when I watched the news a full 26 years ago. This was the only...
Part of the reason Miriam and I didn’t go to Asia any earlier in the year, (when it would have been a bit cooler) was because we waited for Don and Chris to be out of school for the summer. That way, all four of us could take the tour to China together. So we arrived...
