Sunday, December 04, 2005
My adventure with TLE (Part 2), Part 1 was of course the shanghai trip....BEIJING TRIP 2005
"bu shang chang cheng fei hao han"
Dao le Shanghai jiu yao kan ren tou, dao le hangzhou jiu qu kan zhi tou, na dao le suzhou jiu kan dao le ya tou, zhong yu dao da le Beijing ye kan dao le cheng tou......
TLE...The Little Entrepreneurs....twice in a row they provided me with a ultimately most unforgettable experience both in Shanghai and Beijing.....this time had to come up with an invention and not a business plan..... in the end our group came in second overall, not a bad result considering I gave my best, my group????? let me think I say only some gave their best but others juz slack and slack......
Forget about all this and lets go into the trip proper, overall I think Shanghai is a way much more better city than Beijing, I don't know why but I just feel it, maybe I see more skyscrapers there????? But I muz say that the first three days was totally a bore..... Day 1....... Tiananmen which was totally huge, The Hutongs and Drum Tower and the Song Ching Ling house.... OMG... history, history and more history which i hate, but I still managed to get some wonderful shots of the city and these places...
Day 2 was the school visit which provided us with boring lessons that I almost feel asleep......lessons on tang shi song ci and bai jia xing...then off to the Urban planning centre we go...not much diff. from the Shanghai one, but what I liked about it was that we saw the olympic venues, which shows us the diff. places the olympics would be held in 2008 and also the model of the city of Beijing...what i learnt there was that the city of Beijing is split up into 5 sections circularlly (a new word i invented???) with the centre being the onld city of beijing which is like super small....anywae it was quite interesting learning more about how the city of beijing is planned and built.....that night we had home stay....I could not believe my eyes when i saw Zhao Nan's house also, OMG, almost the same as Singapore's renovated HDB flat one leh... didn't noe their living standard was dmn high, but still it was super cold lar... close window, close door also still have an air-con room....
Model of the Beijing Olympics venue found in the Urban Planning Centre
Day 3, school visit again....lessons today was way much more interesting, a lesson on Peking opera and another on chinese art..... it was definitely not easy to fall asleep in these two lessons comparing it with the previous day..... and o..k... after today the boredom of school is finally over... and we went to the Forbidden City/Gu Gong/ Zi Jing Cheng, this is one of the cheng tou i mention earlier, the other one is the great wall/ wan li chang cheng mah!!! anywaes this place is not as big as I thought.... but still many things still amaze me..... they only have small vats of water which are made of iron and steel(i think) and coated with gold, which are all around the palace and guess what they are used for.... i don't think u would find out....they are used to put out fire if it really occurs in the palace.... OMG... imagine how big the fire would be if there was one and imagine how little water it is..... also the enclosiveness (yeah another invention of mine) of the place can also be felt...i don't think the emperor left or anyone entered....
Day 4, start of all the fun, went to a company to visit, the chairman of DIANJI KE JI talked to us.... Obviously when such a big boss come and talk I would be all ears and picked up one thing about entrepreneurship that i would never forget..... In the business arena, the real competition is not product vs product but employees vs employees, which means the product is juz the lowest level of competition, it is the employees that count, even if you have a very good product but lousy employees everything would still fail... after that went to Liu li chang the cultural street of Beijing where my shopping spree in Beijing began.... bought a seal as a birthday present for Marcus here and another for myself anothe still got alot more which i forget... in the afternoon was the scavenger hunt, honestly, it was not as fun as the Shanghai one but still I managed to go on a shopping spree then from Xi dan-Xiu Shiu Jie (the Xiangyang lu of Beijing)-Wang Fu Jing (the orchard road there)... forget about the bad things that happened.. but bought alot of cheap cheap stuff from Xiu Shiu Jie which J helped us bargained for...... juz watch him pissing off everyother shopkeeper, but anyway still got what I want and guess what Xiu Shiu Jie is a building dedicated to selling Fake Stuff OMG.....to think the government supports that.....
Entrance to the Forbidden City
Day 5 was the day THE GREAT WALL and the summer palace, let me talk about he summer palace first...stating the fact that it was definitely a beautiful place if we had time to roam about, but instead we were rushing to find our way out of darkness in the end through the "forests", regretted not being able to see Suzhou jie which was superb in photos that i saw..... but anyway the great wall was the highlight, we started off in the morning which was then bloody cold, but as time progresses the temperature was not that bad after all...... just imagine winds pushing you off the ground and making you fall down and you can imgaine what it is like on the great wall, some parts are indeed bloody steep and i was wondering won't the soldiers fighting on the wall be exhausted first while fighting as I think I was like having anothe Physical Training section with Jon Tam up there, my legs were hurting after 3 hours on the wall, even the part which was easier to climb was also super tiring...... but anyways it was quite fun going to one of the seven wonders of the world and one down six to go to achieving perfect target.... the next one may be the Taj Mahal which I really hope to go....
The Great Wall, look how long it is!!!!
It can be really steeper then what you are looking at!!!!!
Ok the last and final day Day 6..... nothing much happened juz that my group got second for our presentation and we went to hard rock cafe for lunch and from then i started to buy hard rock cafe stuff... and the it was a bye bye to Claudine, Kathleen and Karene, a second goodbye to them, the last time was Claudine, Kathleen and Grace, but still it was not a good feeling but I feel that the did their best and but in every effort to give us pleasant and unforgettable memories to bring back home...... Thanks!!!! :)))))
____________&{ memories within here.
