Andrew Drake's life stories...: December 2008

Wohoo, I'm finally back from China and I have plenty of pictures to share with all of you but due to high amount of pictures that I'm going to upload, I will make things short and explain what I did on each day ok? We went to Beijing with 24 other people and some of them are cute girls and some of them are heavy drinkers.... I met a few new buddies there and get to know a few leng lui plus get advise on how to live my life in KL as well. Here is the list of what I did and some photos I took over there:

Day 1:

Arrive at China at 7.00 a.m and we meet our nutty tourguide Mr. Xiao Li or a.k.a Jerry.

And no, he's not Andy Lau. He's has been our tourguide throughout the whole vacation.

Once he took us to the coach, we started off heading to the Forbidden City. It's the place where Emperors and royalty people hang out and commoner is not allowed to go there during the past.
Now everyone can just walk in and out of the so-called Forbidden City like their grandfather's house and take photos here and there. Here are some of them.

This is the view at the back entrance cause our tourguide said that less people will enter into the
Forbidden City through the backdoor and we can use this oppurtunity to see more nice stuff. and for those who don't know who am I, I'm the dude on the right. (Just got there so didn't solek nicely...)

This is one of the building in the Forbidden city, if I show you all of them then I will never get to the second day... On to our next destination... Once we exited the Forbidden city, we arrived at Tian An Men square (not sure if it's spelt like that but it's just outside of the Forbidden City). The is the place where China's 1st founder of the Peoples Republic of China lies.

Group Photo!!! The front view of the Forbidden City with Chairman Mao Zedong face on it...

Then we head on for our lunch where we ate lots of nice stuff but I can't show it all because there's just too many. Usually the food over there is quite the same the same as ours but if it's interesting, I will post it here. Anyway, we move on to the temple of heaven where old people group over there and have fun while tourist like us get to see the Temple of Heaven (duh...) The elderly will go to the park and sing as a group while most will play with gambling cards. (No money was used to gamble because it's against the law) Some even did acting and one of the elderly showed me that they still have some cool activities they could do. This is one of their balancing activities...

They are just too talented for me to try lol. Anyway, we moved on to see the famous Echo Wall in the temple where the wall are specially done to reflect the sounds produced by us to travel from one place to another. We have proven it and was amazed by the echos produced, it was crystal even when we are far apart from one another. Here is another photo I took for myself.

I didn't look so good because I was tired, cold and feeling lazy. Anyway, there are 3 temples like the one on top and I will not show all of it. We then head on to the China's no.1 most popular place which is the toilet. (If I counted correctly, there should be about 27 toilets that we have visited in total...) While waiting, I took myself another nice scenery just outside the toilet.

The scenery (not me!) looked nice if you ask me. The toilet is just on the left if you want to know.
Around 4.30 pm, the sun was setting down in beijing and we left the Temple of Heaven and went to see the ice carving where creative people carved magnificent objects through thick ice. Here are some of it.

A bridge made out of total ice!!! How cool is that??

A giant boat of ice dude!! The temperature in this room is around -5°C and you should give me a clap because I'm in there without extra jacket (those white jacket was provided by the people working there) and no hood to cover up. And when I said it's cold, I meant it!! After watching the carvings, we went to our last tourist spot of the day which is an acrobatic show that is really amazing. All of the crazy stunts were done by teenagers just like me and I was like OHMYGOD!!
The funniest thing was these people used live audience to perform with them and one of my tour member was taken for a crazy stunt...

The giant pot itself was super heavy and together with the heavy uncle, the teenager girl could still manage to lift the two of those giant loads up. How cool is that??? The night ended with a nice dinner and we went back to the hotel where I can get to use FREE INTERNET!!! WOW!!!
That was one of the best hotel that I've stayed if you asked me...

Day 2:

The first place that we went to was the jade factory. Like all shops, the people over there always persuade us to buy their jade and told us the benefits we could get with their stuffs. I didn't take any picture of the jades because i'm a guy and guys don't like jades or shiny stuff , get me?? However, once we left the factory, we went to main attraction in China which was the Great Wall of China. It may look like a short journey but in fact it was very far away and it took all my strength just to climb up to the 1st station. I even have a video of myself climbing it but it wasn't really clear...

Eventhough the journey was hard, I managed to get myself a certificate on top there and get my name printed on a metal cert and a gold medal. the gold is of course fake but the effort was real.