Summer Palace

( http://www.chinavista.com/travel/yuheyuan/home.html ) for more information

10/02/2000 7:22am

We are now ready for breakfast.

We are staying at Kunlun Hotel. Indeed, it's a five star hotel. Other than Kea Lani at Maui, Kunlun is probably the best hotel that we have ever stayed at.

We had a grueling trip. We left Fremont at 1:30pm on Friday. We arrived at Kunlun in Beijing at about 1:30pm on Sunday! We did cross the International Date Line. It was a long, long trip.

Surprisingly my neck did not kill me. It seems that prior to our trip the two chair massage therapy sessions at Intel really helped me.

I have been here at Beijing for last than 24 hours. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I was delighted by how modern this section of Beijing is. Despite all the people here and especially people on a 7-day national holiday due to Oct 1st National Indedepence Day, I found the streets are not as crowded as, say, Taipei. The streets are clean. The skyscrapers at this section of the certainly are tall and modern. The newer streets are so amazingly wide!

We visited the Summer Palace. It was quite impressive. The temperature was very pleasant, but I was dismayed at the overcast weather, which made taking good scenic photos pretty difficult. Well, I have to blame my poor photos on something other than me :-)

I'm been in the U.S. for too long. It's not like that I have not seen Chinese people. I've just not seen so many Chinese all at the same place and at the same time since my last trip to Taiwan many years ago. Believe me, there were many Chinese people at the Summer Palace.

I was tempted by all these snacks being hacked by street food vendors. However, I resisted the temptation. My stomach will just die if I eat some of these items. I figure that if I cannot drink the tap water, then I better not eat the food from the street.

Lots of tourists boating on 10/1 National Day.
A male lion--see the ball under his right paw.	I have an addiction to take photos of roof eaves. :-)
We took one of these boats to get across the lake.	Pagoda of the Incense Buddha in sepia tone.
Is this a water color? Nope? I post-processed this picture.	Many flowers were blooming as part of 10/1 National Day Celebration.

The "Dragon Boat" that we rode.	Inside the boat.
	Inside the boat was painted very colorfully.
I don't think this boat made out of marble! is going anywhere.

A concrete pillar.	You often see strange rock formation as part of a Chinese garden.

Click the thumbnail to see the full image.

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