Located in Beijing’s district of Feng Tai is MaLianDao Tea City. It houses about 100 different tea vendors in a four storey building. It is one of the largest tea markets in Asia with a huge selection of teas and accessories such as teapots and tea sets. This market is only a tiny part of [...]
Twenty minutes bike-ride from our place there is a morning market where you can get your dentures fixed right on the street. You can buy five inch long things that look like lobster, fresh seaweed, live turtles and fish (killed for free). You can watch a man hitting himself with a snake, another man making [...]
Today the smog is very bad which is surprising because last Friday we could see the mountains from our window. It is the first time I noticed them even though they are only a thirty minute bike ride from here. There are no foothills, they just rise right out of the flat-lands. It was the [...]
Saturday morning we woke to an orange sky and very poor visibility. We later learned that it was a dust storm blowing from the desert. Beijing’s weather bureau gave a rare hazardous air quality ranking. A sand storm in 2006 dumped 300,000 tons of sand on Beijing- yes 300,000 tons!! These four photos were taken [...]
Paul and I went to visit the Forbidden City last Saturday. Paul had been there before but I was unable to go because I was teaching. Below are some of the pictures we took. Enjoy!
Today we thought we would publish some photos of the daily sights we see on our walks and outings in Beijing.
Yesterday we went to Wumart and bought our new bikes. The first ones we had were very cheap and had no gears so they were very hard to ride. Paul pretty much wore out his with all the riding he did during the first term and Kathy gave her’s away so we could both have [...]
We arrived in Beijing too late for the Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year) on February 14, which is the start of the Spring Festival. It is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. The origin of the Lunar New Year can be traced back thousands of years involving a series of colourful [...]
A new bakery has recently opened a fifteen minute walk from our place or five minutes by bike. It is located next to the entrance of the new Merry Mart grocery store. They even have a website and the address is www.bjxqs.com.cn. Our friend Mike introduced us to the owner Barry who gave us free [...]
North American style fast food is infusing itself into the Chinese culture. The first and most popular was K.F.C. followed by McDonald’s and Dairy Queen. A meal deal at KFC costs about 25 RMB or $4.00 Canadian. Yesterday at Dairy Queen we paid 41 RMB for two large blizzards, about $7.00 Canadian. By Chinese standards [...]
