"Meeting with Ben" After we got down from The Great Wall, we had dinner with Ben, my contact in Beijing, and his friend David. Ben is a businessman who lives part time in China, part time in California. He is Chinese, and it was very interesting for us all to hear his opinions on China. David is an American, married to a Chinese girl and working in Beijing now. He has studied Chinese for one year, thought English for six months, and spent a total o...

"Heart shaped Mao Zedong necklace" Today there is not much that indicates that China has recently been a communist country. Capitalism is even more evident here than in Norway or even the USA. In Beijing you cannot go down any street without having people trying to sell you whatever they have (Even their babies!). What follows is a serious round of bargaining and negotiating as you look through the different stores/street vendors. Then you settle o...

"Cell phone translators are amazing!" One morning while eating breakfast at a local restaurant, (Not the cozy small ones in the back alleys, but one slightly more expensive, on one of the main streets) they tried to trick us with the bill. They did of course not speak English, and we tried to solve the dispute. As we were doing this, they started cleaning the table, and everyone got very upset. We paid what was more than reasonable and got out of th...

"The Great Wall of China" As US President Nixon said as he visited The Great Wall of China in 1972 during the Ping-Pong diplomacy conference. "It reallyis a great wall." I thought this comment was quite inadequate before I went there myself. With all the branches of the Wall, they have figured out that it is 8,851.8 km (5,500.3 miles). The sight when you are up there is just not possible to describe it. And in Nixon's defence, millions o...

"1644 to 1911..." The Forbidden City lies in the city center of Beijing. It covers 720 000 m2, and was built during the Ming Dynasty. The complex served as the Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing dynasty, and is now to find on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The construction of this gigantic palace city, of about 1000 buildings (980 are still remaining), took only 15 years. Over one million workers were needed to complete the city, which were built...