Scott Shots

The storms should be over for awhile and in between these hurricane watches I have been able to finish the China blog with all our excursions. I have many of the pictures in Shutterflys so it may take awhile to see them all.

To view the Shutterfly’s with my captions follow these directions:

Click on the blue title of Shutterfy. Once the page shows up, scroll down the page and click on View Album.  Then click on Play Slideshow. In the top right hand corner click on Options. Last, put a check in the boxes Show Titles and Show Captions. (you should only have to do this once!) When it is finished you can go back to the blog by clicking your back button on your browser menu.

A town of 10 million people was hard to vision before we arrived for our trip to China. From friends that had visited Beijing many years before, I thought I would be coming to a dirty, unincorporated town that had just experienced some modernization to prepare for millions of world-wide visitors to the Olympics. We were transported by bus our whole trip, and I am sure we were only allowed to travel on certain streets. So through the windows of our speeding coach I tried to capture some of the sites we were seeing as we traveled around these 5 days. I do apologize that some of the pictures are blurred, but under the traveling  were the best I could get. Here are a few slide shows for you to see.

The streets of Beijing that we saw were very wide, with many lanes. Some of the newer roads had lanes just for the bicycles, but the older one the bikes would weave in and out of the buses and cars. With so many people living in this area, most reside in apartments that are rented from the government. Prior to the new government, people lived in the apartments for free and worked for the government for very little money. Now, the citizens are encouraged to get out and make their own living and support themselves. What I found as we rode along the apartments were high rises, stacked one behind the other. Usually the one facing the street had a fresh coat of paint on it, and the ones behind did not to give the appearance of a clean, proud city. I have several pictures of apartments-look at them closely and you will see they are really old and run down except for that new coat of paint. I also caught shots of several businesses that you would not have expected. I did not get the pictures of the Wal-mart, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds, but we did see them.

Town of Beijing Shutterfly

Most of the streets that we traveled were very clean and had wonderful shrubs and flowers. Many of the decorations were centered around the Olympic theme. It would be interesting to go back in two years and see if they still have all these beautiful flowers, or was this just down for show for the millions of visitors for the games. I found out that the workers that prepared the gardens and painted the buildings were migrants brought in from Mainland China. They were housed in tents and shipped out until the majority of the visitors are gone. I was pleasantly surprised at the beauty of the town and really enjoyed our bus rides observing the Chinese people.

Landscape Shutterfly

We did travel outside the city for just a few miles and once again we found the fronts of the building all with the same color of fresh paint. We did see more rural types of bikes ridden by the locals and animals running loose on the streets. There were many cornfields along the roads, but we were only served a limited amount of this vegetable. So maybe, it is grown for animal food. I know we only traveled through the better places, but the pictures should give you an idea how some of the Chinese live outside the city.

Countryside Shutterfly