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| Morning sunrise in Qingdao. Since this city is on the coast, there was often a lot of high fog that limited visibility | The May 4th square, directly infront of city hall. Qingdao's waterfront will be the focus of some of the 2008 Olympic Games | Military warm-ups at the city hall. An hour of intense exercise before standing around all day guarding the buildings |
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| Qingdao's TV tower. Located in a park, this tower promises excellent views, provided there is a clear sky. It costs Y30 to get to the top and an extra Y9 for buffet lunch. There's a lot of 2008 Olympic promotional stuff on the ground floor. | Gotta hide a geocache in the TV tower's park | Wide streets and lots of space made Qingdao very modern. Although you can't see it in this picture, all traffic lights have large digital counters that tell people how long they have to wait until the light changes |
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| Off to Beijing now. The entrance to the Forbidden City, also known as Tiananmen gate | You too can dress up like your favourite historical ruler | Neat patterns on the roof of buildings in the Forbidden City |
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| Inside the Forbidden City -- a lot of walking and many gates | Urns with neat colouration | Corners of roofs have these marching dragons |
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| Finally you get to the back of the Forbidden City and the Imperial gardens | Dragon on a wall | Only in China could you get your hair cut in the city park. Apparently this is quite popular and inexpensive |
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| Bicycles rule in Beijing, but this is changing fast as more private cars pour into the streets. Often bikes have their own lanes and they are a major form of transportation and delivery of goods. Most bikes are extremely old and black | The Underground Dragon is Beijing's subway. Clean, cheap (Y3), and very efficient way to get around, but only 2 lines so far | The Great Wall at Jinshanling is a wonderful escape to an untouristy section of the wall. |
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| The Jinshanling to Simatai walk is about 4 hours and you pass through 32 towers | One of the neater towers along the way | Overlooking some of the Jinshanling hike |
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| The Jinshanling route isn't exactly easy walking! | The Great Wall at Simatai. More touristy, but still extremely impressive that they built the wall on the very top of the mountain range | Coal bricks. Coal is still commonly burned for heat and cooking, so you see these things everywhere. The locals laughed at me when I was taking pictures of this common heating material |
