Beijing, China Day 1

This is probably my most anticipated trip my whole life!! Going to Beijing?? How incredible is that! I've always wanted to see the Great Wall, The Forbidden City.. I've always been fascinated with all this historical things, so it was great going there to see it with my own eyes. So mum has booked us for 5 days and 4 nights tour. But last minute, Kit cannot make it. So sad :(

So our flight was at 12.30AM. Yup that's right, AM. So i was thinking, hmm so we'll reach there at 6.30am, so we'll probably go to the hotel from the airport, rest for a bit then start our tour. But I was wrong, 6.30AM we reach the airport (and I couldn't sleep on the plane, the journey was very bumpy), so with my panda eyes, I was told by the tour guide manager, Kelvin, that we're going to start our tour right NOW. So, okaaaay, haven't slept the whole night, I hope I won't snore in the van.. like I did in Hong Kong. Our tour group consist of us, a Chinese family and a retired couple. All of them are super super nice.

Okay, so our 1st stop of the tour is.....

Tiananmen Square! It's so big here!! And there were just so many many tourist here. It's really hard to take pictures. Oh by the way, it was so freaking cold in Beijing, do you know it was 2 degrees?? COLD! Great way to start your morning! Frozen cheeks!

So we wouldn't get lost, our tour guide held out a Malaysian flag everywhere he takes us. (Thank God he didn't ask us to put on a colorful cap)


We walked passed this huge Beijing Olympic slogan as we were walking towards Tiananmen Square.

In the west of the Square is the Great Hall of the People

In the center of the Square stands the Monument to the People's Heroes

Our tour guide Duncan, said that the flag is changed everyday and stored in the museum. Dunno whether true or not... Never seen a flag so heavily guarded


Meridian Gate (Wu Men). This is one of the entrance into the Forbidden City. Did I not mention how huggge it is in there?? HUGE!

The crowd!!

In the Outer Court, there are couple of cannons there. Decorations??



The Hall of Supreme Harmony, this is the largest hall among the other 2. This is where the Emperor discuses affairs of state or held ceremonial purposes. I didn't take a picture inside the hall because it was too crowded and I kept getting shoved away..



The Hall of Supreme Harmony, or also known as Tai He Dian. In every part of the Forbidden Kingdom, they have English illustration on what is what, which is pretty cool if you don't have a tour guide taking you around

See every little detail put into drawings? By the way, that's real gold..

Now we're at the Hall of Central Harmony or also known as Zhong He Dian. This is the smallest hall used by the Emperor to prepare and rest before and during ceremonies.

Oh, I remembered, this was when my camera ran out of battery :( Good thing mum brought an extra camera. So on into the inner court, is the Palace of Heavenly Purify or Qian Qing Gong. This is the place where the emperor lives. But Duncan said that instead of living here, the emperor usually sleeps with his concubines, which he has hundreds.. This is also a tactic, so his enemies wouldn't know where he is sleeping all the time


Mum and May posing

This was located at every Palace, it was used as a fire hydrant those days. Of course now it's empty.

It's heavily guarded in here too!
Okay, after playing around in here, our next stop is..

The Beijing National Stadium, or Bird's Nest! If you don't know what this is, you've been living under a rock last year!

Since our tour didn't include going into the Stadium, we just took shots of it outside. It's freezing by the way

We were there in the afternoon, at night it's suppose to look even more spectacular with the lights


Jumping

and running to keep warm, hehe, nah, just posing

And right next to the Bird's Nest is the Beijing National Aquatics Center, or better known as the "Water Cube".


Swim, swim

So after taking loads of pictures, it's close to evening, so we went to a restaurant close to the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube for dinner. No pictures, because the dinner was just normal rice with dishes. Boo! So, finally, we get to go to out hotel and rest. I was sooo tired, technically, i was up the whole day! Our hotel, was fabulous, but it's out of nowhere, me and May were hoping we would be right smack in town or something so we can walk around.

Our room was incredible.. It was so nice and cozy in there. Since it was winter, there were no air conditioner, but heater. So we had to open the window, and freeze our asses off. I was the victim here, cause I'm the one closer to the window and May was closer to the heater. Hey, she was the one who suggested opening the window!!!

Flat screen telivision in front of the beds. Shows are all in Chinese anyways..

Our sink, and the best part of all...

We have a shower and a..

Bath Tub!!! Ahhhh, blisss...

Okay, that's Day 1!

Kitty's 20th Birthday!!

We went to La Casa for Kitty's birthday

For starters, we had escargot

Mum shoving down her 1st escargot

May's pasta. Some kinda duck thing (so, so)

My dish, I had the chicken cream sauce (yum)

Hanoi, Vietnam Part 3

Hanoi, on the 3rd day.. What to do? Shopping!!!! But there isn't much things to buy. We went to the night market 2 days in a row, but just can't seem to find anything nice. So we decided to... EAT!!

We went to this cutesy little Italian restaurant called Mediterraneo.

The camera was balanced on top of a Sprite bottle

View outside the restaurant from where we are seated

Pizza, Ham and Cheese I think. Soooo delicious, much better than pizza hut and dominoes combined

Fettuccine Carbonara. Sooooooo goooood.. The noodles you can see are hand made, because it doesn't resemble the packet ones you buy from Jusco.

Before you start blasting off with, "These are terrible pictures!!". The restaurant has this really romantic atmosphere, so everything we take in here are red. (And May is taking the pictures, not me :P)

Like the 'Green Tangerine', this place is also an eatery mostly catered for foreigners.

In the afternoon, we took a stroll down the Hoan Kiem Lake. It's easier to take a picture in the day time rather than night.



Some kind of turtle temple, according to the map book, the turtles are like 100 years old and sometimes will crawl out of the lake to rest. We didn't see any..

peek a boo

So later, we went to have lunch at Pho24. It was recommended in the guide book as a must go for Pho, which is pronounce 'Furr'.

I'm not a really big fan of this... Because it's really vege.. the soup taste like vege soup, the noodle taste like vege.. It's okaaaaay, I guess. And it also comes with a plate of raw vege..

Yum?

After eating pho, we tried looking for Bobby Chin's restaurant, but we couldn't find the restaurant :( so we decided to venture to yet another restaurant. On the way, May found this really cute place, a cafe out of nowhere, it's right beside the museum (no, we were not venturing into the musuem), so we decided to hang around there till our bloated belly's calm down.


It's a really nice place to just hang out, play your laptop and just chat with your friends. The weather is really nice too. It's breezy and a little cold. When we walk in, the stares that we got are really strange. It's a mixture of, "Where are these people from" and "What the hell are they doing here??". Yeah, this is the place where the high class Vietnamese hang out. I think..

Our food and drinks. I was so stuffed I couldn't even eat a piece of that cake, but according to May it was goood.

A shop with 2 addresses. Strange??

So after relaxing at the cafe, May decides to continue our journey to the restaurant downtown. So after 10 minutes of walking, the restaurant we wanted to visit... is closed for construction..

We notice a lot of this around Hanoi. Damn scary.. no birds will dare sit there for even just a while. Electrocuted in a second.


So, disappointed after walking so far to a 'close for renovation' restaurant, we walked all the way back to our hotel, and we notice something very strange.

People are staring at us everywhere we go!!! And then we think, "Ohh, maybe because we are foreigners". So we stop at a park and saw an American walking pass a couple of Vietnamese but there were no reaction from them. But when we walk passed the same vietnamese people, they stared... What's going on??? And then it suddenly hits me, they are not staring at us, they staring at May!! This old lady, she actually stops walking to stare at May when she walks passed the old lady. HAHA, that was sooo funny!

When May finally notices that people are staring at her, she quickly runs back to the hotel and refuses to come out. HILARIOUS!

That's May hiding underneath the blanket

Since it is our last day, we can't just stay in the hotel just watching tv (there's HBO and Cineplax and Disney and AXN!!), we went down to try a Vietnamese dinner instead of eating western. We actually went to a tourist information center to find the restaurants!

So in the end, we chose to come to "Mon Ah Viet".

Another cutsie place. It's small but it's got a nice environment in there. Both Vietnamese and foreigners come here to eat.

Reading the menu

The food was realllly good. You know why? Cause it taste exactly like chinese dishes. The name of the food is in vietnamese but basically they cook it exactly the way we do it back here, so basically, nothing special. There was one thing which fascinate both me and May though.

The do's and dont's on the chopstick wrapper

The 1st one, Do not use chopsticks to drum the bowl
(Calling homeless and hunger ghost)

2nd, Do not cross chopsticks
(Bad weather for the rice crops)

3rd, Do not suck chopsticks for too long. (Too bad there's no picture illustration)

Hmm, what would Donkey Kong taste like???

The lady who took our orders was super nice! She tried to explain the 3rd don't on the chopstick do's and don't for us in English, and May ask her on where we could get tea leaves (because it's kinda known in Vietnam), and the lady marked it on our maps, and even wrote on a piece of paper translating the name of the tea's we wanted into Vietnamese so the tea seller would understand what we want! SO nice!!!

On the way back to the hotel, we saw this little store which sells some sort of croissant and it smelt soo good, May wanted to try it. So we ordered and sat inside. I told May to take a picture of the place, not of the lady's ass, and she insisted that she was trying to take a picture of the croissant's on the shelf..

This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted in Vietnam. Basically it's vege, onion, beef, pork and fried egg in there. It was soooo good that later when we went back to the hotel, we decided to go back down again to the store and get another sandwich!

It's hot, but May won't put it down till she gulps it all

So overall, Hanoi is nice, Halong Bay was nice, the whistles we get from numerous trishaw drivers and motorcyclist asking us if we needed a ride are not, the weather is nice, people in Hanoi are genuinely very nice. So yes, Hanoi is nice I guess. I miss the croissant though!