Monday, July 21, 2008

不到长城非好汉

The title says it all, "Not a great man if you don't visit The Great Wall"

That was why, we took all the trouble and opportunity to step onto the once-considered, 7 wonders of the world, or is it still one of them, not sure though. It was drizzling and it somehow proved a challenging task for us.

We also visited the Forbidden City (crazily huge), Temple of Heaven and Tiananmen Square!

We also visited The Place, a place where you find lots of youngsters hanging out at night. They have a super gigantic screen right on top of your head with plenty of audio visuals to entertain visitors.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Enjoy some of the pics taken during my visit to some of the interesting places around Beijing.








Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Greetings From Beijing!

Today is my 4th day here in Beijing. Starting to adapt to the weather and perhaps, the local food here. According to my Beijing colleagues, weather here has changed since the last 1-2 weeks. It's supposed to be summer here, but we are still getting rain every now and then, and overall it's kinda cooling here, as if the beginning of winter. Weird!

Anyway, arrived here on Saturday, at 6.35am after a 6 hours flight from KL. Thought we could have a day out since our deployment activities were scheduled to begin on Sunday. Spent the whole morning in the hotel room doing some last minute configuration and core software upgrade.

However, we managed to find our way to the famous peking duck, in a restaurant near our hotel, 10 minutes' walk away. And we spent the evening visiting the Silk Street (something like Petaling Street back in KL, but this one's in a building!). Lotsa stuffs there, garments, accessories, electronics, but you really need to bargain your way for your desired items.

Visited Wang Fu Jing Street (Pedestrian Old Town) as well. It was really 'people mountain, people sea' there. Lots of shopping again. A mixture of new and old shops in different part of the street. There were a number of Beijing Olympic flagship stores there. Prices for these items are fixed and controlled by the governments, so no bargaining required!




Started working on Sunday till today. It was like, waking up early in the morning, heading for DHL office, work-work-work, then lunch, after that work-work-work again, and then head back to hotel. The very reason that kept us going was dinner! We really enjoyed walking around the streets looking for food, trying different local dishes each time. And of course, helping ourselves to the wide range of local beers in China. **slurps**

Things have been good so far, and I hope we would be able to get a sign-off from our end-users come next Wed/Thurs without any major issues.

Cheers!