Cheryl's China

Are you a Dragon?

2012-01-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Chinese zodiac consists of 12 animals, including the rabbit, dog, pig, rat and the dragon. Monday the Asian world celebrates the Lunar New Year. In the Chinese zodiac, it will be the Year of the Dragon. It has been 12 years since the last Year of the Dragon and it will be another 12 years before the next Year of the Dragon.That's because the animals rotate annually.

People who were born in a Year of the Dragon will have good luck this year. It doesn't mean they won't have good luck, in say the Year of Pig, but legend says their luck will be even better in years of their birth animal.

Certain personality traits are associated with people born under an animal's sign. Characteristics of a Dragon personality include non-conformity, flexibility, lacking tact, conceited and being quick-tempered. Dragons also like their solitude. They make good lawyers, engineers and politicians. Does this describe you? You can read more about the Year of the Dragon personality on Chinese horoscopes.

I was born in the Year of the Dog. What year were you born in?

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China.

New York Times China picks

2012-01-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

While places in Asia rated highly on the New York Times list of places to visit in 2012, only two locations in China made the list.

The newspaper's annual list starts with Panama and circles the globe, even including space this year. As a region, places in Asia received numerous mentions, including Vietnam, Myanmar, Japan, China and Malaysia.

The first place in China to make the list was Lhasa, Tibet, which came in at No. 9, but apparently not for its rich Buddhist history or its stunning scenery. The Times' reasons for visiting Tibet started with listing the new luxury hotels the city boasts. While I have no problem with staying in luxury hotels, I doubt most travelers base their decision on where to visit based on accommodations, but rather choose their destinations based on cultural, historic or artistic features, cuisine or maybe just a desire to learn more about a destination.

Unfortunately, staying in a luxury hotel in Lhasa is not something I have to worry about, nor will I have to worry about staying in a no-star hotel there. As much as I would love to visit Lhasa, I can't because I do not handle high altitudes very well.

Moganshan was the other listing for China. The reason for visiting the mountain resort again started with luxury hotels; I noticed this was the case for many Third World countries. The blurb also noted that Moganshan, which is about a three-hour drive from Shanghai, was a former hideout for Shanghai gangsters back in the 1920s.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about traveling in the Middle Kingdom.

Beijing Musuem Pass

2012-01-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

Big bell at Great Bell Temple

If you're going to be in Beijing for more than a few days and like off-the-beaten path attractions, as I do, the Beijing Museum Pass could be just what you're looking for.

Major international cities like Seattle and Paris have city passes that are good for one to three days of admissions to a city's major attractions. To get your money's worth, you have to rush around to a lot of museums.

Not so with the Beijing Museum Pass. You've got a whole year to use it. And, unlike the other city passes where each person has to buy one, the Beijing pass is good for free or discounted admissions for one, two or more people.

The 2012 pass covers 115 museums, art galleries and other tourist attractions; you can even use it to go strawberry picking.

The pass only makes sense if you're going to be in Beijing a week or longer, or are making a return visit to the Chinese capital. If you're on your first visit to Beijing, you need to see the major attractions: Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Summer Palace, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, etc. The pass does not cover these major sites. Instead, it covers admissions to lesser known sites, some of which are among my favorites in Beijing, such as the White Dagoba Temple at Beihai Park, the Ancient Bell Museum at the Great Bell Temple, Drum and Bell towers, and Soong Ching Ling House.

Some museums allow free admission for up to two people, others allow half-price admission or similar discounts. The packet also comes with tickets to museums that are free to begin with, but having this ticket means you don't have to stand in line to get the free tickets.

The Beijing Museum Pass for 2012 costs 120 yuan (approximately $19) and, sponsors say, represents a savings of 2,500 yuan (approximately $400) if you were to visit each museum in the program. Of course, only a tiny percent of people will actually do that. But two people only have to visit five or six museums for the pass to pay for itself.

The pass, known as bowuguan, can be purchased at post offices in Beijing.

Pair the museum pass with an yikatong, available at subway stations, and you're all set to see the sights of Beijing. This is a pass that allows you to move around on Beijing's subway and bus systems. You don't save any money on subway rides, but do get a slight discount on bus rides. The main benefit to the yikatong is you don't have to stand in line to buy subway tickets or worry about how much bus fare will be -- Beijing buses charge fares based on distance. We've used yikatongs on our last two trips to Beijing, and they are really convenient.

Are you going to China?

If a trip to China is in your travel plans, please check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China, especially Beijing.

Celebrate two New Year's in January

2011-12-26T23:13:00.000-08:00

This year we will celebrate two New Year's Days in January. The first is January 1, the start of a new calendar year. The second in January 23, which is Chinese New Year's, also known as Spring Festival. The date is flexible, as it is based on a lunar calendar, occurring on the second new moon after the winter solstice. Some years the holiday is celebrated in January, other years it takes place in February.

My husband and I celebrate Chinese New Year on the night before by having a few friends in for a home-cooked Chinese dinner. It's not as elaborate as the dinner we would have if we were in China at this time, but then I am not talented enough to cook 10 dishes on four burners. I marvel at how friends can turn out a veritable smorgasbord in just a short time on two burners.

I lived in China during the years of the pig and ox, and have visited for the years of other animals. I always enjoyed the decorations for an animal's year. Huge displays of the animal in all sorts of activities. During the Year of the Pig, I decided to specialize in taking pictures of pigs, and came home with hundreds of pictures of stuffed pigs, balloon pigs, real live piglets, pigs formed by pruning shrubs into that shape and so on.

I also enjoyed going to temple fairs held during that time, and hope to be able to do so again in the future. The fairs are like ours, with games for the children, parades and entertainment. I watched in awe as a man teetering on high stilts did a somersault, landing standing up on this stilts.

I've pulled together a few articles written by Suite101.com writers for my Chinese history page. The collection includes foods that are traditionally eaten for China's biggest holiday, the Chinese zodiac, history of Chinese New Year, and activities for kids during this time.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in the Middle Kingdom.

On a slow boat to China

2011-11-28T21:11:00.000-08:00

That's what I feel my letters and packages to China are on!

When I lived in Beijing in the mid '90s, letters from home reached me in as little as three days. which was a heckuva lot quicker than the Postal Service could move them cross-country, to the other side of the United States. Only rarely did a letter take longer than two weeks to reach me from the Pacific Northwest. However, recipients did tell me it usually took two to three weeks for my letters from China to reach them.

I am not sure what the hold up is these days on mail to China. The post office says a letter or package sent by air will take five to 10 days. Ha! Months is more like it.

Last year it took four months for our Christmas card to reach friends in Shanghai, even though it was sent air mail, and you can fly from here to Shanghai in about 15 hours time, including layovers. The year before we mailed a small package for Spring Festival (Chinese Lunar New Year) which is a big gift-giving holiday for the Chinese. Even though it was sent airmail, it was almost five months before they received it.

When we returned from Yellowstone in early September, I mailed -- again by air -- a souvenir of our trip, as that is one place our Chinese friends want to visit on their next trip to the USA. It's not been received yet.

Our friend is pregnant and will have her baby in June. Since I wanted to be sure she received the gift before the baby's first birthday, I mailed it last week. The post office again told me it would take five to 10 days; the clerk seemed shocked when I laughed.

We'll see.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, check out my website and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Chinese knots date back to ancient times

2011-11-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of Chinese knots, as their macrame is known. I have wall hangings and

jewelry made into knots using bright red silk string and cord. What I didn't know is that this lovely folk art originated back with prehistoric man.

Archaeologists have found evidence that the early Chinese used knots as far back as 100,000 years ago. The knots weren't used to create wall hangings to decorate the cave homes. Instead, they were used to fasten clothes made from fur together, as buttons and zippers hadn't been invented back then. It was not until the Tang Dynasty that the knots started being used for decorative purposes.

You can read more about Chinese knots in this article on them that I wrote for my Chinese history section at Suite101.com.

Our Chinese friends had wedding knots made for my husband and I when we got married. They hang in the hallway between the living and bedrooms in our house. This hall is also known as the Great Hall of China because it contains numerous examples of Chinese arts and crafts.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about traveling in China.

What's your favorite Chinese folk art?

Planning a trip to China

2011-10-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

A moment to the Silk Road in Xi'an,
where the trade route started in China

We hope to go to China next fall - my husband wants to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary there. (We celebrated it there in 2008 with dinner at our friends' house, as well as with a trip to the Great Wall and dinner the next night at Peking duck restaurant.)

I've already started doing research on things we want to do while we're there. My husband's never been to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta warriors, so that is a high priority for him. I've been there twice and - gasp! - think they're overrated, but Xi'an has a lot of other things to see and do. I've never been to the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, but have heard it's quite fabulous. I've also enjoyed my visits to the city wall, Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Muslim district.

Ctrip seems to have very reasonably priced packages for a four-day trip to Xi'an which includes airfare from Beijing or Shanghai. Ctrip is a Chinese version of Expedia, and also has an English site. Has anyone ever used it? I'd be interested in your comments. As Xi'an's airport is so far out of town (about an hour's drive) I was hoping to take the train. There's an express train which makes the trip in under seven hours, though an overnight train ride isn't that bad, and you arrive in downtown Xi'an. I'm thinking we'll fly to Shanghai from there because I'm not too keen on a 15- to 24-hour ride on the train, especially when flying is not that much more expensive.

But getting back from China already is proving to be a challenge. Our preferred carrier is United which has non-stop flights from Pasco, Washington (our nearest big airport) to San Francisco, where you catch a nonstop to Beijing. Coming back, the nonstop from Beijing gets in about a half-an hour after the morning flight to Pasco. The next one isn't until night. Last year, United wouldn't let us spend the day in San Francisco. Instead, they routed us to Los Angles, where we had a couple of hours layover, and then to Denver, where we had another layover, before flying us to Pasco. I am not willing to go through that again, if schedules haven't changed by then.

A few tunes in the past, we've driven to Portland or Seattle because of the better connections. Going isn't that bad, but a four-hour drive coming back is tiring on top of the very tiring trans-Pacific flight. If the planes landed in late afternoon or evening, we spend the night in Seattle or Portland, but when they land in early morning, it seems stupid to get a motel to sleep for a few hours, so we hit the road, taking turns driving while the other person sleeps.

Which brings us to Delta, a carrier we hate to fly, but is the only other option for us if we want to leave from Pasco. It has beautiful connections: Seattle and then non-stop to Being both ways. Delta also still doesn't charge for the first two bags, while United only allows one free bag on trans-Pacific flights. One bad isn't a problem going, but my husband does so much shopping over there, he has to buy a suitcase to carry it all back.

I was looking at Delta's website last night, and one thing concerned me: their notice that fares change constantly, and that the price you see may not be the price you pay, as fares could change between the time you hit "book it" and your credit card is charged. Has anyone had this happen to them? Tell me about it! I'm assuming fares will only go up with this process.

Of course, all of this may very well be a moot point by the time we're ready to make our trip. I probably won't do any more planning until next summer when I start looking at air fares again. I tend to overplan in advance, but I think it makes it easier when it's time to do the real thing.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please see my website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China.

Meeting the locals

2011-10-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

New friends in Chengde in 1995

I was writing an article for a client on how to meet local residents when you travel, when I was reminded of two young people I met while I was touring Puningsi (Puning Temple) in Chengde back in 1995. I was used to descriptive signs at attractions that were written both in Chinese characters and English in Beijing. At this temple in Chengde all the signs were in characters.

I would have had no idea what the signs said if this young man and young woman had not approached me wanting to practice their English. They showed me all around the temple grounds, translating the signs as we went. They were medical students, so I learned a little about the study of medicine in China -- more than I wanted to know and enough to scare the heck out of me.

They explained that most students had only two years of medical school and then are considered doctors. Apparently there are few general practitioners in China. Students specialize in the study of one body part. so conceivably if you hurt in your leg, stomach and head at the same time, you will need to see three doctors, one for each area of your body that aches. This part didn't bother me as much as they were only required to spend two years in medical school, which means doctors as young as 20 years old could be treating patients.

Luckily, for me, I was never seriously sick in China, just the normal colds and flu. My personal experience with Chinese clinics was limited to the health exam all foreigners who will be living in China for a year must have and getting a gamma globulin shot for Hepatitis A. That was an experience in assembly line medicine, let me tell you. I'd had a gamma globulin shot before I left for China, but a few months had elapsed so it was time to get another.

My language tutor took me to a Chinese clinic, one that didn't cater to foreigners with English-speaking doctors. She told the nurse what I needed, and we were sent to stand in a line. Nurses went down the line, giving injections as fast as they could. When the nurse came to me, my tutor told her she had to use a clean needle. Clean needle? What's that! The nurse was unhappy because the line ground to a halt, but my tutor kept insisting on a clean needle. Finally, another nurse appeared with a new syringe, and I got my shot.

AIDS wasn't a big deal in China at that time, so reusing a needle apparently was quite common. Privacy in treating patients also wasn't common. I survived the visit, which is all that counted.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, please visit my website, Cheryl's China. If you have questions about travel in China, please email me.

Chinese in Yellowstone

2011-09-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

Old Faithful

Yellowstone National Park is like a mini United Nations. As the first national park not only in the United States but in the world, it draws millions of visitors every year from around the globe. The National Park Service doesn't keep statistics on the nationalities of park visitors, but from personal observation, most foreign visitors to the park seem to be from Europe and Asia, especially China.

We just returned from a 10-day camping trip to Yellowstone, and were totally amazed by the number of Chinese we saw at the park.At every major attraction that we stopped at, we encountered literally dozens of Chinese tourists. This shouldn't have surprised us because Yellowstone is where our Chinese friends want to go when they visit us again.

I'm guessing that Yellowstone gets a substantial number of Chinese visitors because we ran into many young Chinese women working at the concession stands, My husband bought an ice cream cone from a young woman who, noticing he was wearing his "I climbed the Great Wall" sweatshirt, told him she was from the Beijing area. Plus, the National Park Service publishes its trip planning guide in Chinese. 'Nuff said.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to the Middle Kingdom, check out Cheryl's China, and please feel free to email me if you have questions about travel in China.

The math is mind-boggling!

2011-08-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Marble Boat

As part of my duties as topic editor for Chinese history, I wrote an article on how Express Dowager Cixi embezzled money from the Chinese navy to renovate the Marble Boat at the Summer Palace. The boat was built by Emperor Qianlong in 1755 and destroyed by foreign forces in the Second Opium War. Cixi wanted the boat refurbished for her 60th birthday. Work started in 1888 and ended in 1893.

OK, here is where I get overwhelmed by the math. One credible source says she stole 30 million taels of silver to pay for the project, which also included work around Longevity Hill at the Beijing historical site.
From research, I learned that a tael is 1.3 ounces of silver, so that would work out to 39 million ounces of silver.

Back then, at least in the United States, silver had a set value of $1.29 per ounce, though the market value was somewhere around 60 cents an ounce. If I have done my math correctly, that works out to $22.4 million. I cannot imagine any construction project costing that much money back then, even if the project did take five years to complete.

But wait: It gets better. The price of silver today is about $42 an ounce, give or take a few dimes. Multiply $42 by 39 million, and the figure is an astronomical $1,638 trillion. Someone please tell tell me I didn't do the math right.

By contract, the Chinese government spent only $17.7 million to renovate the Summer Palace and two other major parks for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

Are you going to China?

If China is in your future travel plans, check out Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me with any questions about travel in the Middle Kingdom.

What I like about Xi'an

2011-08-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

Silk Road monument in Xi'an

When I lived in Beijing and talked with my Chinese friends about visiting Xi'an, all advised me to take the overnight train there, go see the Terra Cotta Warriors, and take the night train back. While I've never been overly impressed with the Terra Cotta Warriors, even if it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I did find a lot of other things to like about the city.

I really liked the Muslim quarter with its narrow alleyways and colorful meat markets. I enjoyed walking on the wall surrounding the old city. And the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was an interesting temple. I especially liked the street snacks I sampled, including a honey-nut bar and a persimmon dripping with honey.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Xi'an, however, I came across by accident as I was wandering around the city. In a residential area, where a grassy median should have been, was a marvelous monument to the caravans that traveled along the Silk Road of yore. Depending on your perspective, the Silk Road either started or ended in Xi'an, an early capital of China.

The stone monument was made up of massive men and camels. It was surrounded by rose bushes, though I doubt the trip centuries ago was anything but roses.

One of these trips to China, I ope to get out to Kashgar, which was the official end or start of the Silk Road in China.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to the Middle Kingdom, please visit Cheryl's China and feel free to email me with any questions you may have.

Chinese history

2011-07-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Terra Cotta Warriors represent an
important of Xi'an's history.

I took on a new task related to China this week when I was appointed the topic editor for Chinese history for Suite101.com. I've been writing for Suite101 for more than two years, and have contributed many articles to the site's China travel section, as well as about Chinese food and tea, museums and the like. While I've always tried to include a bit of history when I'm writing about sightseeing attractions, concentrating on the country's history will be a new challenge for me.

Besides writing articles, I'll be editing articles on Chinese history written by other Suite101 writers and choosing the best articles to feature on section pages.

I'm really looking forward to this new assignment. China has a history which dates back thousands of years, and is rapidly assuming the role of a super power today. I believe it is important for us to understand China's past so we can better understand it's future.

Join me on the site as we travel back in time.

Are you going to China?

If a trip to China is in your travel plans, please check out Cheryl's China and feel free to email me if you have any questions about traveling in China, especially Beijing, which is my specialty.

Think sweet!

2011-07-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Sophia, who was born and grew up in Asia, makes fabulous ethnic desserts, so I was quite thrilled when she agreed to give me a cooking lesson on how to make a couple of them. The first dessert was Indonesian, and involved mixing grated coconut, grated cassava, butter, eggs, sugar and flour together, spreading in a pan and then steaming for 40 minutes. Sophia has made this dish so many times, she doesn't use a recipe.

A Malaysian dessert made with sticky rice flour.

While this was steaming, she showed me how to make a Malaysian dessert with glutinous rice flour. It was even easier! She adds salt and Pandan, a Thai flavoring which turned the flour green. Next you mix in water and sugar, and then form a tablespoon or so of the dough into a ball. Flatting the dough to a round circle, then plop a small chunk of brown sugar cane on the dough and form a ball around it. You then drop the ball into boiling water until it floats to the top. Remove the ball from the water and dredge in grated coconut. It's best to eat these slightly warm, as the sugar cane melts into a liquid that explodes -- delightfully -- in your mouth. Yum!

The Chinese have a very similar dish, called tang yuan but is stuffed with a sweet bean paste instead of sugar cane. This treat is served at the Lantern Festival which occurs 15 days after Chinese Lunar New Year.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website, and feel free to email me with any questions.

Thank the Chinese

2011-07-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

You can thank the Chinese for giving us one of our most enduring Fourth of July traditions: fireworks displays.

The Chinese invented fireworks even before they invented gun powder. According to the website Pyro Universe, fireworks may have been invested accidentally, when chunks of green bamboo were tossed into a fire around 200 B.C. They burning bamboo snapped, crackled and generally scared the Chinese and their animals. After awhile, a tradition developed of throwing green bamboo on fires at Lunar New Year to scare away the evil spirits for another year. Later, after the Chinese had invented gunpowder, they put this concoction into bamboo tubes. Thus the first firecrackers were born.

Ironically, some places in China ban fireworks today because of the dangers and serious injuries caused to people who don't know how to use them properly. They're also messy. During my first year in Beijing, a friend and I went to Tianjin on Chinese New Year's Day. The streets and sidewalks were covered with red paper remains of fireworks.

Probably the most extravagant display of fireworks I saw in my time in China was the celebration in Beijing after Hong Kong was transferred back to Chinese ownership by the British. That night, the Chinese put on a spectacular celebration involving 18,000 performers at Workers' Stadium in Beijing. One of the things I remember most about that night is sitting maybe 25 feet away from Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his cabinet. It was indeed an awesome night.

Peanut brittle -- Chinese style

2011-06-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

Shanhaiguan peanut brittle

I've been going through all my China pictures lately, looking for the best/my favorites to use on the remodeled website I am working on. It is long past due to update my website, Cheryl's China, but the process is taking me longer than I expected. The present website is 14 pages; my updated will have about 50 pages with a design that I hope is easier to read.

Anyway, as I was going through my pictures, I came across this one I took when we were in Shanhaiguan last fall. The makers put a bunch of raw peanuts, a little flour and sugar on a wooden block, and then use a big mallet to pound the heck out of the peanuts. The end result is similar to peanut brittle, but not as sweet.

I'm an addict when it comes to street food, so, of course, I bought a bag. It was wall worth the 10 kuai (about $1.50) I paid for it.. And even if I hadn't liked it, it was worth the money to watch them make it. Some stands had two smashers wielding mallets, and I wondering how many times they swung the mallets down at the same time.

What's been your favorite street snack you've sampled in China?

Are you going to China?

Check out my website and feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China.

Exciting developments for Chinese trains

2011-06-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

A lot has been happening in China these days when it comes to train travel.

A shopping mall in Shanghai

First, the long-awaited high speed train between Beijing and Shanghai is starting up. This will cut the time from 12 to 15 hours down to four, making train travel very competitive with flying between the two cities. I actually think taking the train will be the way to go since trains run from downtown to downtown. No 1-2 hour pre-departure check-in at the airport or a long trip from the airport to downtown.

China still plans to run its regular trains on this route, and those who want the speed will pay substantially more for express trains.

We took an express train to Shanhaiguan from Beijing last fall. It was pretty cool, only taking two hours non-stop. The first time I went to Shanhaiguan, the city where the Great Wall ends, the trip took six hours and had many stops.

Another China Daily story in the last week was about online train ticket sales. I am really looking forward to this for getting tickets on our next trip to China. When I lived there, getting tickets was such a pain as ticket clerks usually didn't want to deal with foreigners and kept referring them to other windows. Once I went to seven windows, standing in a long line each time, before someone would sell me a ticket. I finally wised up, and paid my hotel's travel desk a couple of bucks to get my onward tickets. After all, a Chinese person will almost n ever be standing in the wrong line.

I anticipate the website will be in Chinese, which could be difficult, but I think I'll figure it out some way or perhaps get some friends to book our tickets.

The new system will start with just a few routes, but is expected to be systemwide by the end of the year. Yippee!

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website, Cheryl's China, and please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Papercuts: a traditional Chinese art

2011-06-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

Papercuts are one of my favorite souvenirs of China. They are so colorful, not to mention especially fragile. They're made from very thin paper and tear easily, but that doesn't make them any less fun.

Papercuts are traditionally made from red paper and cut by hand. Traditional papercuts are of Peking masks, Chinese maidens, birds, flowers, the Chinese zodiac . . . the list of topics is endless. But, in recent years, a Western influence has been creeping into the designs. Stuff like Disney characters and Santa Claus, with some of the papercuts being made in several colors.

The Chinese put papercuts in their windows or frame them for wall hangings. Mostly papercuts are small, maybe 3" x 5", but I have seen some as big as 3-5 feet square. I don't put mine in windows or frame them. I use them on the greeting cards I make, using double-sided tape to stick them to the front page.

If you're looking for unique souvenirs from China, consider papercuts. They're inexpensive and come in small, lightweight packages of eight or 10.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out Cheryl's China, my website about traveling in China, especially Beijing. and feel free to email me if you have any questions. Also, check out my Amazon Kindle page for my travel guides to Beijing.

Contrasting the old and the new

2011-05-25T19:35:00.001-07:00

Local Chinese youngsters perform a traditional lion dance.

A couple of things brought home the difference between the old and the new this week.

First, on Saturday afternoon, we went to an Asian Awareness program sponsored, among others, by the local library and the local Chinese association. The program consisted mostly of youngsters performing traditional Chinese cultural activities, such as a lion dance, a demonstration on using a Chinese yo-yo, and singing traditional Chinese songs as well as playing them on musical instruments.

I found it quite ironic that Chinese in the United States are teaching their children about their cultural heritage while in Beijing kids that age aren't interested in such cultural activities. They are too busy trying to become Westernized.

When I lived in Beijing, I used to listen for the beating of drums in the evenings and on weekends. It meant Chinese women were doing yanko dancing somewhere, and I'd go look for them. Mostly older Chinese women would dance around in a circle waving colorful fans and scarves while older men beat the rhythm on drums. It looked like a simple dance, until one time some women talked me into joining them. Whew! Two rounds and I was exhausted, yet these women did it for extended periods of time. One time I watched for 45 minutes, and there was no break, no one dropped out. I remember debates taking place because the young adults wanted the yanko dancing stopped because the drums were too noisy.

Then the other day China Daily ran an opinion piece by columnist Chen Weihua who had just returned from a visit to Mexico City. He detailed all the things Mexicans were doing to preserve their heritage and history, then contrasted it to Beijing and Shanghai where historical buildings are being bulldozed, all in the name of progress.

So which culture is going to survive?

Are you going to China?

If China is in your travel plans, check out my website, Cheryl's China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Peking Duck: Yum!

2011-05-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

Carving Peking duck

Peking duck is my very favorite Chinese food; I like it even better than gongbaojiding (chicken in spicy peanut sauce, sometimes called kung pao chicken in the United States.)

I took a cooking class in Beijing where I learned to make gongbaojiding, but Peking duck isn't on the instructor's menus. Of course, if I learned to make it, I would make it all the time and grow tired of it.

At my insistence, we usually eat Peking duck at least two or three times when we return to China for visits. If you have cholesterol problems, you probably shouldn't eat Peking duck as it is very greasy, both the meat and the crunchy skin. But it is just too uberdelicious to worry about that.

Most restaurants will carve the duck at your table. This is fun to watch. These days the carvers wear those thin plastic throw-away gloves when they carve. I know this is a more sanitary way to carve the duck, but somehow it just doesn't have the same atmosphere. Oh well, it doesn't affect the taste of the duck . . .

Peking duck is known as kao ya or roast duck in Beijing. If you're in Beijing and want to sample Peking duck, just look for restaurants which have a huge plastic duck outside the entrance. Quanjude is premier Beijing's Peking duck chain, but the duck is just as good at other restaurants.

Going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, please visit my website for helpful information. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have.

Chinese "accessories"

2011-05-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

I am always intrigued with the foods that decorate dishes in Chinese restaurants. Once I was served a plate decorated by a huge carrot that had been carved into a dragon.

On our trip to Beijing last fall, we ate at a small restaurant across the street from Prince Gong's Palace. One of the dishes came with "roses" that were actually Chinese turnips sliced thin and then fashioned into roses. (I apologize for the quality of the photo, but this at least gives you some idea of what you'll find eating out in the Middle Kingdom.)

I have always thought the Chinese turnip was a particularly beautiful vegetable. The inside is this beautiful fuchsia-colored flesh, while the outer peeling is a lime green. The color combinations work very well together.

What intrigues me is restaurants which serve food like this aren't always the five-stars. This was served to us in a simple neighborhood eatery. Attractive decorations like this add a lot to the enjoyment of meals, don't you agree?

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please see my website and feel free to email me if you have any questions. Need a guidebook to help you get more out of the Chinese capital? Check out DIY Beijing: a guide for the independent traveler and Parents Guide to Beijing: a kid-friendly city. Both are available in print from GuideGecko and Amazon Kindle.

Wangfujing night food market

2011-05-01T17:33:00.000-07:00

Deep-fried grasshopper kebobs

Whenever I return to Beijing, one of the first places I go back to is the Wangfujing night food market. It has an amazing array of foods you can snack on. I used to eat there about once a week when I lived in Beijing, and could put together several snack dishes for a dinner that cost the equivalent of $1.

Back then, conditions weren't as sanitary as they are now, but it didn't bother me. Now, every stand has electricity, covered stands and everyone wears the same uniform. It's a lot cleaner, but still a lot of fun even though I don't usually eat there any more. I just like to go see what's the latest, greatest snack.

If you're traveling in Beijing with your kids, they're sure to like this market, located just off Wangfujing, Beijing's famous shopping street. Just about everything imaginable shows up as a kebob: scorpions, seahorses, tiny birds, snakes, crayfish, beetles, silk worms, and even the traditional pork and chicken chunks. A few years ago, a friend tried the deep fried scorpions, and said they tasted like popcorn. I'll take her word for it, I'm not that adventurous of an eater. My motto is look, but don't touch/eat, and take plenty of photos.

You can also get the more traditional jiaozi (dumplings/potstickers), ciao mian (chow mein), bean congee and assorted fruits, to name a few of the food items on display. I visited the night food market when we were in Beijing last fall, and saw a new beverage I hadn't seen before: large plastic glasses filled with a colored beverage of some sort that were steaming at the top, almost as if someone had dropped a chunk of dry ice in them. They looked beautiful, but I am way of drinking anything that's not bottled when I'm in China.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to the Middle Kingdom, please visit my website and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Doing business with China

2011-04-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

Here's the scenario: You have a product you'd like to sell and are thinking about having it made in China, but don't have the slightest idea how to go about it. Well, have I got just the book for you!

Find a Manufacturer in China is a new book that will get you started. It's filled with basic information you'll need to get on the right track. It was written by M. Vacisin who has 15 years experience in international supply and freight moving. The short book is filled with tips on how to find a manufacturer in China to make your product as well as how to avoid getting ripped off by said manufacturer. The ebook also contains information on middlemen and freight forwarders.Vacisin also gives websites so you can find the indepth information you need to protect yourself before you get too heavily involved with one company. It was written for U.S. customers.

How do I know about this book? Well, I was asked to edit it because of my expertise of China.

The book is available now through the Amazon Kindle store. Purchasers of the book also get one of my ebooks, Chinese visas demystified, when they buy Vacisin's book. What a deal!

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

A visit to Qingdao

2011-04-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

Downtown Qingdao as it was in 1997.

When I worked at China Daily in the mid '90s, there were two work weeks: Monday through Friday and Sunday through Thursday, and everyone workd both of them. While it was no fun swtching from M-F to S-Th because you only got one day off, it was worth it because when we switched from S-Th to M-F, it meant we got a three-day weekend. I developed the habit of catching an overnight train after work on Thursdays to somewhere, coming back on the overnight train Sunday, showering and then heading to work on Monday.

One long weekend, I chose to visit Qingdao on the East China coast. It was almost like a quickie trip to Europe. At one time, Qingdao was a concession of Germany, and the architecture reflected this. Off the main drags, you could find narrow cobblestone streets and German styled gardens. Even the local beer, Tsing Tsao, was based on German brewing methods.

I don't recall that I ate any German food that weekend. I ate very little, as a matter of fact. In my wanderings, I came across a food stand where I was about to order something, when I felt something brush my feet. I looked down. It was a rat the size of a fat house cat. It wasn't afraid of people, so I'm assuming the food vendor must have fed it leftovers. There went my appetite. Later that day, I stumbled across the local food market, where buckets of live scorpions and snakes were on sale. Boy, was Qingdao sure good for my diet!

I did enjoy visiting the naval museum -- Qingdao is a port city for the Chinese navy. At the museum, you could climb on the exhibits and pretend you were shooting guns. Of course I did this, pretending that I was shooting fat rats while wishing I didn't have to pretend.

Rats and snakes aside, Qingdao makes a good trip out of Beijing if you have a few extra days. Train service is great and the city boasts accommodations in all price ranges. It's a very pretty city with some of the most amazing parks I've seen in China.

Perhaps the best meal I had that weekend was on the train back to Beijing. I struck up a friendship with two young Chinese men, who turned out to be oncologists making a run to Beijing to get a replacement knee for a patient. When they saw I was going to eat a bowl of instant noodles for my dinner, they immediately insisted I share their roast chicken dinner with vegetables they'd brought with them. I felt bad that I didn't have anything decent to share with them until I remembered the package of Oreo cookies I had in my backpack. They were delighted with the Oreos as they'd heard so much about out "national" cookie but had never had any. I couldn't believe they'd never had Oreos before -- they were popular in China, but then I considered that when someone is only making $30 a month (even an oncologist!), spending $1 for a dozen cookies wasn't in the budget. After that trip, I never traveled anywhere without Oreo cookies.

Going to China?

If you're going to China, please visit my website for some insider information. And feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.

My books on Amazon Kindle

2011-04-10T10:19:00.000-07:00

Cover for my Cuandixia guide on Kindle.

I love to read. There's just something about holding a book in my hands, turning the pages one by one as I get deeper into the plot. Reading a good book, whether fact or fiction, was just so important to my generation.

Today, books are being replaced with mobile devices such as IPads, Kindles and Nooks. You download a book and you can read it wherever you are. No more worrying about overdue fines at the library! I must admit these mobile devices have revolutionized the way we read. That's why I'm in the process of converting my travel guides to a mobile format.

I eventually will have all my Cheryl's Guides converted and plan to write new ones. These are the ones I have for sale now at the Amazon Kindle store:

Motorcycle Museums of the United Kingdom: an enthusiast's guide to British bikes
China Travel Tips
Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China
Beijing: off-the-beaten path

The Kindle guides do not have pictures, other than an initial cover pictures. Supposedly you can have pictures on Kindle; I'm still working on figuring out how to do this. But the pictures that I do use are converted to black-and-white, and to me are not as appealing. If you want pictures, which I think are an important element in travel guides, Motorcycle Museums and Cuandixia are available as ebooks on GuideGecko. I'm told the ebook versions also work on Kindle. Motorcycle Museums also is available as a print book.

Keep watching my Amazon Kindle page for new additions in Kindle format.

Visual Travel Tours, which specializes in travel guides for mobile devices, has converted two of the podcasts I did for them to Kindle format:

Imperial Beijing, which is a tour of Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City and Jingshan Park.
Great Wall of China, which is a tour of all the sites I've visited on the Great Wall. This is my best-selling VTT tour.

China travel

If you have questions about travel in China, please check out my website, or feel free to email me.

Top 41 list

2011-04-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

Around the first of the year, the New York Times travel section ran a list of 41 places we need to see in 2011. Two of those places were in China: Pingyao and Hangzhou.

I have not been to Hangzhou -- it's on our list of places to visit on one of out trips to China. But I have been to Pingyao, and long before it was a popular tourist destination.

I went to Pingyqo in 1997 on the recommendation of my Chinese co-workers. The trip started with an early morning express bus ride to Taiyuan, where I spent the remainder of the day looking over the city. The next day I caught a mini-bus to Pingyao, about an hour or so away.

Pingyao is one of the best preserved Ming Dynasty cities in China. It also was the site for the Chinese movie, Raise the Red Lantern. Residents weren't that used to seeing foreigners wandering the streets, and I soon attracted a following of curious children. This was much better for my ego than having a toddler take one look at me and run screaming for his mother.

Mostly I just wandered through the walled-in old town, and then climbed the city wall where I took this picture.

China is hell-bent on modernizing everything, and I wonder how Pingyao has fared in this process. Pingyao was on the short-list of our places for an overnight trip when we were in Beijing last fall, but Shanhaiguan won. But now it seems like Pingyao has become a hot destination for independent travelers to China. I'm sure I'll find many changes when I return.

U.S. appoints new ambassador to China

2011-03-10T08:46:00.000-08:00

President Obama has named Gary Locke as this country's new ambassador to the People's Republic of China. How cool can you get!

Locke, who is currently Obama's Secretary of Commerce, is a former governor of Washington State, the state where I've pretty much lived since 1978.. The appointment continues a line of firsts for this second generation Chinese-American. He was the first Chinese-American to be elected governor in Washington. He was the first Chinese-American to be appointed Commerce Secretary. Now he becomes the first Chinese-American to serve as ambassador to his grandfather's homeland. You can't get much cooler than that!

It will be a good match. The Chinese people really love Gary Locke, or at least they did in 1997 when he was governor of Washington. I have first-hand experience with this. I was living in Beijing in 1997 when then-Gov. Locke traveled to China to promote trade between Washington and China.

At the time of this visit, I was traveling in southwest China. In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, I wanted to tour the provincial museum. When I arrived at the museum, there was a big banner welcoming Luo Jia Hui (Locke's Chinese name) as he'd visited the museum recently. The museum was closed due to a power outage, but when I indicated I was from Washington State, they let me in for free. The inside of the museum was dark, so unfortunately I couldn't see very much. Plus, the museum staff was very embarrassed that I was seeing the museum under those conditions. so I ended up leaving after about 15 minutes. If I ever get back to Chengdu, this museum is on my must-see list.

I was visiting the zoo in Guiyang in Guizhou Province when an elderly man carrying a badminton racket stopped to talk to me so he could practice his English. He was delighted to learn I worked for China Daily because he has a friend who worked there but I thought he would have a heart attack when he found out I was from Washington. He immediately started talking about Gary Locke. He decided to skip badminton with his buddies and insisted on showing me around the zoo. When our tour was finished, he invited me to his home for lunch with his wife. I was coming down with a cold, so I declined. He then wanted to pay my taxi fare to the hotel; we compromised and he did pay my bus fare back.

The picture here is one I took at a Chengdu temple. While temples in the north burn incense sticks, in Chengdu red candles were burned at the temples I visited. An interesting cultural difference.

Are you going to China?

If you plan to travel to China, please see my website, Cheryl's China. I've also written several guides to travel in China so take a look at Cheryl's Guides. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me.

Do you have questions about travel in China?

2010-11-29T16:44:00.000-08:00

If so, send 'em my way!

Travel in the Middle Kingdom can seem intimidating because it's such a mysterious, alien culture with customs we aren't familiar with, foods we don't eat, and a language we can't speak or read. Many travelers find the combination too daunting so they sign up for packaged tours where you get a Westernized version of the country.

But independent travel is possible in China, especially if you've done your homework and have some idea of what to expect. That's where I can help you. If you have questions about traveling in China, especially Beijing, I can help you or, if not, tell you where you can find the help you need. One of the things I like to do is help people make sure their trips to China are a success. China is one of my favorite countries (good thing, because I lived there two years and have made about a dozen other trips there!) and it's important to me that people like China.

People email me questions frequently -- maybe I'll start an FAQ on my China travel website of the questions I get asked a lot. Sometimes people will send me several emails, such as one lady from Texas. We emailed frequently for more than a year after her initial question about independent travel versus a tour. She and her husband decided to travel independently. The following is an excerpt of the email I received from her when they got back:

" I wanted to let you know we had a wonderful, marvelous trip and experience in China. I am so grateful that you gave me the encouragement and confidence I needed to go by ourselves. I can’t remember how many people we talked to while we were there who told us “how brave” we were for being on our own (and people at home thought we were crazy), but we have never felt safer on any of our travels, even in our own neighborhood at night! And the lack of being able to verbally communicate wasn’t the barrier I expected. Travel around the country was no problem at all. "

Emails like this really make me feel good.

So if you have questions about travel in China, email me and I'll do my best to answer them.

Give a Cheryl's Guide for Christmas!

If you hurry, there's still time to order a Cheryl's Guide for the traveler on your Christmas list:

Parents Guide to Beijing is filled with Beijing sights and attractions your kids will enjoy.
DIY Beijing expands upon the information in Parents Guide but is geared to adults.

Motorcycle Museums of the United Kingdom has information about all the museums that I could find in the United Kingdom that contain at least one motorcycle.

More information on the books and how to order them is available from Cheryl's Guides. But you better hurry. The guides are printed and mailed from Singapore, so it could take two to three weeks before they arrive. If you order one and you don't get it by Dec. 23, email me your order confirmation, and I'll send you a stocking stuffer PDF notice to give your traveler.

Cheryl's China: the newspaper

2010-11-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

Oh, the things we do when we're bored! Or looking for something a little different to do. This afternoon, I was looking through some clippings of newspaper articles I'd written in another life -- the 25 years or so I was a reporter. I began feeling nostalgia for those bygone days when I interviewed presidents, actors and farmers in their fields. What a wide array of interesting people I met and fascinating experiences I had.

And now I'm a newspaper publisher -- again. This time I don't expect the work will be as hard or as time-consuming as the eight years I owned a small weekly newspaper in Eastern Washington. Now I'm the proud publisher of my own online newspaper, and it only took about a minute to create, thanks to the wonders of such modern technology as the Internet.

My newspaper is called Cheryl's China and will feature news articles about China from a wide variety of news sources. It's on a website called newscred.com. All I had to do was enter the topics I was interested in, and they do the rest. It will be nice to have all my news about China in one place not just for my benefit, but for anyone else who cares to follow China news.

Going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, please check out my website and do feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China.

President Oba-mao

2010-10-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Buying souvenir t-shirts when you're in a foreign country is one of the fun things about traveling internationally. And my husband and I certainly buy our share. But we were surprised during our recent trip to Beijing to find t-shirts sporting the picture of President Barack Obama. He's wearing a Mao cap at an angle that is faintly reminiscent of Che Guevara.

Of course, we bought a bunch of them as gifts for friends, especially those who are anti-Obama. (One friend sends me 6-8 anti-Obama emails each week.)

Unlike in this country, the president appears to have a good image abroad.

On at least two occasions, Obama and his politics were discussed. The first time was when I was taking a cooking class. Besides me, there was a young woman from Singapore, a young couple from the Netherlands, and two middle-aged couples from Australia. When I mentioned that I was not an Obama fan (I am not a fan of any Democrat), these people were aghast and wanted to know why some Americans did not like him. As I explained reasons why some were against him, they strongly defended him and his policies.

The next day, at lunch with two friends I knew from my China Daily days, we again discussed Obama. They could not believe there were many Americans who did not like him or his policies. My husband used as an example that Obama wants to cut benefits to veterans (my husband is one) and how this would affect us financially. They were surprised to learn this and felt maybe the rest of the world was not being told the whole picture.

Going to China?

If you plan to travel to China, especially Beijing, please check out my website. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me. For Beijing guidebooks written from a different perspective, check out Cheryl's Guides for information on Parents Guide to Beijing and DIY Beijing.

Life in the hutongs

2010-10-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Beijing, I spent a lot of time exploring the hutongs on foot and by bicycle. It was a way of life that fascinated me, though I wouldn't want to live like that. While the hutongs are picturesque, most of the homes there don't have indoor toilets, which is why you'll see public toilets on almost every block.

But as Beijing upgrades and modernizes itself, the hutongs are giving way to tree-lined avenues and high-rise office and apartment buildings. There are some hutongs left in central Beijing but just how much longer they'll remain is any one's guess.

One of the things I wanted to do this trip was walk from Dazhalen, south of Tiananmen Square, to Liulichang, a walk through the hutongs I'd taken many times in the past. When we got to Qianman the McDonald's was gone as were all those neat little food stands we used to buy snacks at. They were replaced by a park and a multi-lane boulevard dividing the area. We did not do the planned walk.

With so much going on in Beijing right now, the hutongs remain my lifeline to a bygone era. Two years ago,we stayed at a hotel on Guloudongdajie, not too far from the Drum Tower. The location was great but the hotel was pretty bad. We gave the area another try this time and stayed in the Beijing Hutong Culture Inn which is tucked away in the hutongs around Gulou. It's a budget hotel that was very clean and with friendly staff that spoke good English. At first we weren't particularly fond of it because it was very difficult to find, but after we discovered a good route out of it, we thought it was a great place. I would get up early every morning and spend an hour or so just wandering through the neighborhood, shooting pictures and eating freshly made youtiao -- a greasy, but delicious, fried breakdstick.

If the hutongs are still around the next time we go to Beijing, we'll stay at the Beijing Hutong Culture Inn again. I've reviewed the hotel more in depth here.

Going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website and feel free to email me with any questions you have. If you're looking for guidebooks that show Beijing from a different perspective, check out Cheryl's Guides.

Sharing my travels

2010-10-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

This blog is one of the places I share my travel experiences with others, such as our recent trip to Beijing. More blogs are coming on that! I also share my travels on my website and in my guidebooks. And this week I shared them with Andy Hayes, managing editor of Sharingtravelexperiences.com.

The interivew was posted live on his website Thursday afternoon if you'd care to take a look. I enjoy doing interviews like this, and hope you enjoy reading them, too. The photo above is one I "shared" for the interview. It's about the different kinds of bug kebobs you can find at the Wangfujing night food market in Beijing. It's one of my favorite places to go in Beijing, though I must admit I'm not adventuresome enough to try insect kebobs. I'll stick to pork and lamb, thank you very much.

Great Wall Ends at Shanhaiguan

2010-10-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Beijing in the 1990s, one of my favorite getaways was to Shanhaiguan, at that time a sleepy farming community that is famous for being the eastern terminus (or start, depending on your perspective) of the Great Wall of China.

I loved wandering through the town that was inside the city wall, as well as outside the wall where I once saw a farmer herding about a dozen pigs through dirt streets. I loved the city wall with its massive stone statues of Chinese warriors, philosophers and scholars. I loved the Sunday market.

They say you can't go home again. This was brought home on our recent trip to Beijing. My husband wanted to see the ocean and the Great Wall, so i suggested Shanhaiguan so I could kill two birds with one stone. Oh! the changes that have been made since I last visited. I spent the first few hours there in a daze, wandering out saying, 'Holy cow! What have they done now?!?"

Gone was the quaint sleepy town of 100,000 people. It was replaced by a bustling town of half a million people. Gone were my dearly loved statues on the city wall, only to be replaced by souvenir stands selling, among the shells, cigarette cases bearing pornographic pictures of Caucasian women.

Even the walls have been restored. Laolongtou, or Old Dragon Head as the translation goes, was still there, jutting out into the Bohai Sea. I was amazed at how much shipping traffic you could see in the distance; my husband counted 30 ships before giving up.

I was shocked at the changes, but then I realized I'm not the same person I was 15 years ago. Shanhaiguan still makes a great getaway from Beijing for a few days. The article, Great Wall Snakes Across Northern China to End at Shanhaiguan, gives a better look at what was one time my favorite haunt.

Going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, my website contains some great information about things to see and do. And feel free to email me if you have any questions afterwards.

Tea Drinkers' Heaven

2010-10-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

I have always liked Chinese teas and have four tea sets (all given to me by my Chinese friends) which I use when I have one of my Saturday's ladies' lunches. So I was really excited to visit Maliandao Street on our recent visit to Beijing. It is a tea drinker's paradise.

Maliandao Street, also known as Tea Street, has hundreds of shops selling Chinese teas and tea accessories. I was looking for a specific tea, a Twinings that I bought in London, which has a fragrant smokey smell and taste. In the process of looking for this tea, we sampled several teas. I never found what I was looking for, though I did buy a package of single-pot servings.

You can read about our visit to Maliandao Street in an article I wrote for Suite101.

Going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website which deals with travel in China, especially Beijing. Or email me with your questions. Also, please feel free to check out my line of Beijing guidebooks at Cheryl's Guides.

Give Gaobedian a miss

2010-09-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

BEIJING – If you’re in Beijing, give Gaobedian a miss unless you’re into expensive classical furniture.

I had heard about Gaobedian in east Beijing which was described as an ancient village and Beijing’s version of Cuandixia. I’ve been to Cuandixia twice on earlier trips and really loved it. It’s a 500-year-old village in the mountains about 90k from Beijing.

So one day on our recent trip to Beijing we set off to go to Gaobedian. It was a long trip, starting with a bus ride to the ditie as the subway station is known in China. We then took three different subway lines, with all changes involving going up and down dozens of stairs, to get there. We left the subway station at Gaobedian and followed the signs for a 10-15 minute walk – in the rain no less. What we found when we got there were numerous new buildings constructed in an old style. It looked more like a shopping mall than an ancient cultural street. Modern as it was, it didn’t have a Starbucks (they’re all over Beijing) where we could get something warm to drink.

Gaobedian, as it is now, is essentially a place to buy classical Chinese furniture, and shops had some very nice pieces, but I didn’t go there to look at furniture. It was a big disappointment for me.

The day, as well as the weather, did improve. From Gaobedian we took the subway back to central Beijing and then changed to another subway which took us out to TianTanYuan where we had a very lovely lunch with our friends. The menu included Peking duck (my fav!), chunks of sweet potato dipped in a sweet syrup and then rolled in corn kernels and deep fried, pumpkin sticks and quail eggs pictured above. I wasn’t adventuresome enough to try the eggs, but Jon said they were good.

Going to China?

If you’re planning a trip to China, check out my website, or you can email me if you have questions about travel in China, especially Beijing.

The terrible TOEFL!

2010-09-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I was born a native English speaker.

It got me out of taking the TOEFL. TOEFL stands for "Testing of English as a Foreign Language." If I'd been born in, say, China, and decided I wanted to attend college in the United States, I'd have to take the TOEFL. The purpose of the test is to see how well foreign students understand the English language. If their writing, listening, reading and speaking skills in English aren't that good, students will likely not succeed in college.

It's a dreaded test for international students. And it's dreaded for a reason: It's hard! A student's TOEFL score can affect the college he'll be admitted to. The higher the TOEFL score, the better the college that will admit him.

And how do I know the TOEFL is hard? Well, for starters, my Chinese friends have told me this. Secondly, one of my recent freelance writing gigs has been doing TOEFL test practice questions. The assignments mostly involved editing an existing passage on various subjects, and then writing additional questions in a pre-set format. Just for the heck of it, I tried to answer the existing questions and missed a few more than I'd care to admit. This was assuming, of course, I could even understand the articles! I sat at my computer thinking that if I, as a college-educated native English speaker had problems, how is someone for whom English is a second language going to get through this test. That may be the $64,000 question!

Academic writing admittedly is a different genre for me. I've spent 40 years as a journalist and writer making my articles simple and easy to understand. Now I have to make them more difficult One assignment involved inserting tougher vocabulary words in a passage. It was very hard for me to do this as I felt I was ruining a well-written understandable passage by making it significantly harder to understand. I do understand the need to make it harder to read so it will be more in keeping with textbooks the students will use in college. But I am just so darned glad my future doesn't depend on the results of a TOEFL test!

Are you going to China?

If you're going to China, take a look at Cheryl's China about travel in China, particularly Beijing. And for more information about my China travel guides, including DIY Beijing, Parents Guide to Beijing and Cuandixia, check out Cheryl's Guides. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me.

The things that parents say!

2010-08-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

Those things that parents tell their children! My parents always laughed about the time when I was three years old and swallowed a cherry pit as I was eating the cherry. My dad told me a cherry tree would grow out of my stomach. They tell me I got hysterical and didn't believe him when my dad told me he'd lied.

I remembered this incident this week after reading about a man who swallowed a pea. It went down the wrong way and ended up in his lung where it promptly sprouted. I wouldn't have believed that except the article showed his lung x-ray with the pea shoots growing.

I got to thinking of other things my parents told me, like whenever we'd go to the Oregon coast and I started digging in the sand. My dad would tell me if I dug deep enough I'd reach China. But no matter how deep I dug the hole, I never reached China. Could have had something to do with a 5-year-old's arms only being so long.

And then I went to live in China. On an outing to Beidahe, a summer resort on the Bohai Sea, I started digging in the sand, wondering if I dug deep enough I'd reach the United States. Nope. My arms were still too short. (And, no, I wasn't talented enough to build this sand structure.)

Beidahe was an interesting town, with people crammed on the beaches and in the water. There were a couple of interesting markets in town . About all I remember was that it was raining so hard, you quickly became soaked. I bought a colorful umbrella which I still use to this day. I also remember the day trip we took to Shanhaiguan which is where the Great Wall meets the ocean. I'd been there a few months earlier, in February, and it seemed like I had the Wall to myself. Not so this time, when thousands of people were packed into the guard tower that extended into the sea.

We hope to get back to Beijing next month, with plans to make a quick trip to Shanhaiguan. I'm not sure, however, if I'm looking forward to seeing how this sleepy little city has changed in the last 15 years.

If you're planning a trip to China, please see my website for ideas. Also, please feel free to email me if you have any questions about travel in China, especially Beijing. And do check out my China guides that are available for sale.

Is this imaginative or what!

2010-08-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

A news article on Chinese buses caught my eye the other day. It seems the Chinese are developing a super bus that will drive over two lanes of traffic. The bus, which can carry more than a thousand people, is being designed to alleviate rush hour traffic. Construction is supposed to start this fall in Beijing's Mentougou district, a western suburb which doesn't have the traffic that central Beijing has. Hopefully, if it works, the Chinese will expand this futuristic bus system to areas which really need help, like Second and Third Ring Roads.

When I lived in Beijing in the '90s, rush hour traffic wasn't as bad it is today, but still I could get somewhere faster on foot or bicycle. Taxis started imposing traffic jam surcharges; passengers could get zapped the extra fee in as little as two blocks. The surcharges are still in effect. When we were in Beijing two years ago, we didn't feel like walking 15 minutes from the subway station to our hotel, so we hopped a taxi. Forty-five minutes later we made it to our hotel.

The photo above was taken at Deshengmen on Second Ring Road. The buses are waiting to take people to the Great Wall at Badaling.

Beijing has done a lot to improve and update its bus system while still keeping fares reasonable, Buses are bigger and more comfortable. Buses used to break down frequently, and I remember one time while I was biking down Wangfujing, a bus broke down in the middle of an intersection. Passengers got off and pushed it out of the way. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me that day. Darn! But I did have my camera with me the day a bus caught on fire and burned while driving on southeastern Third Ring Road.

This new bus concept intrigues me. I especially like it that the Chinese aren't afraid to think outside the box. One time when I was working at China Daily, I edited a story about air pollution problems in Lanzhou, a major industrial town in western China surrounded by mountains much like Los Angeles is. One proposal to solve the problem was to blow a mountain to smithereens so the polluted air could escape through the new pass. The article did not say anything about implementing tighter air pollution controls on the industries responsible for the poor air quality.

A plug for me

If you're thinking about traveling to China, especially Beijing, please visit my website. Feel free to email me if you have questions about travel to the Middle Kingdom.

Church services abroad can be cultural experience

2010-08-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Even without looking at the calendar, I can always tell when the weekend is approaching in Beijing. That's when an article I wrote about church services in the Chinese capital gets heavy hits at Suite101.com.

I went to Sunday Mass sporadically when I lived in Beijing, mostly because of a Catholic co-worker. After mass at St. Joseph's Cathedral on Wangfujing, we'd head off to the big flea market at Jingsong, then held in a huge dirt field. That market has now gone pretty upscale in its new location and is known as Panjiayuan. St. Joseph's, pictured at right, has been restored. Sundays in Beijing will just never be the same!

I look at attending church services as part of the cultural experience of travel. On my first trip to England, I discovered Evensong services one late afternoon at Canterbury Cathedral. The service, in such an old historic building, was so moving it soon had me in tears. I've since went to Evensong in other English cathedrals, and find them truly uplifting.

One of my fondest memories of Belgium is the Saturday evening I spent in Brussels. I went to mass at St. Michael's Cathedral then headed down to the Grand Place for dinner in a sidewalk cafe. The night was marred only by the fact someone tried to break into my hotel room in the middle of the night.

I enjoy touring temples in China, and once wandered upon a Buddhist service in full swing in an ancient temple in Chongqing. Worshippers made room for me beside them. My Chinese wasn't good enough to know what they were saying, but it was still a moving experience for me. I marveled at how the Buddhist priests, in this very old cathedral, adopted modern technology of microphones to broadcast their message. When the service was over, the worshippers broke out snacks and began eating. And I thanked God for allowing me to become lost while walking around Chongqing, otherwise I would have missed out on another wonderful experience.

A plug for me!

If you're planning a trip to China, please visit my website for information or email me if you have any questions. I've also written some mini-guides to travel in Beijing. My Beijing guides are geared to independent travelers, but people with free time on a tour will also find them useful.

Farmers Markets

2010-07-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

CNN had an article listing the 10 best farmers markets in the United States that are good for travelers. I was surprised to see that Seattle's Pike Place Market, a major tourist attraction in the Emerald City, wasn't on the list, though a smaller Seattle area farmers market was.

I used to love to go to farmers markets, seeing the produce all fresh and gleaming. But that was before I moved to Beijing. If you wanted fresh fruit and vegetables, you bought from a produce stand on the street: tomatoes at one stand, celery and carrots at another, apples here, bananas there. At each stand, because you were a foreigner, you had to bargain hard to get a price that was anywhere close to what the Chinese paid. Produce shopping was no longer fun; instead, it became a dreaded chore.

The picture is a veggie stand in Chaping, a suburb of Beijing, where we visited friends on our last trip to China. Most veggie stands don't have this variety of produce. Here's a link to an article I wrote about the vegetables you can find in China.

I occasionally go to our local farmers markets, but I don't enjoy them as much. Once in awhile, we might go to the Pike Place Market, but mainly because my husband likes a couple of magazine shops there.

If you're planning a trip to China, please check my website for ideas and information. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me. Looking for Beijing guidebooks written from a different perspective, check out my guides, available in both print and electronic formats.

China's picturesque money

2010-07-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated with Chinese money, even going back to my first trip to China in 1984. At that time, and for many years afterward, foreigners were required to change money for Foreign Exchange Certificates, aka FECs, Foreigners were restricted to shopping only at places which accepted FECs, usually the Friendship Store in any city. The exchange rate was two FECs for $1US.

When i returned to China 10 years later to work in Beijing for a year, FECs were on their way out. Foreigners could now exchange their currency for real Chinese money which literally came in all sizes and colors. The smallest denomination is a fen, worth about a tenth of a cent. It came in both coins and bills.The largest was a 100 renminbi note, renminbi means "people's money. Renminbi is also known as yuan and, in street slang, as kuai. Each note has a different picture on it, usually of a historical place in China. Each note also is a different color and size. I'm so intrigued with Chinese money I even wrote an article about it.

Recently the Chinese government announced plans to strengthen the value of the renminbi. So far it doesn't appear to have made a lot of difference since we were last in China. In 1994, the official exchange rate was about 8.3 yuan to the US dollar, though it you changed with a reputable black market dealer (yeah, I know that's an oxymoron, but there are reputable dealers out there), you could get about five yuan over the official rate. Where I lived in Beijing, the nearest bank that would exchange dollars was several miles away, while money changers were just half a block away. They were there day in and day out, and made their profit by charging the Chinese 1,000 yuan for $100US.

When we were in Beijing two years ago, we exchanged (only at banks this time) our dollars that got us about 6.8 yuan per dollar. China's money had grown in value over the years. The rate today however about 6.7-6.8.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, please take a look at my website, Cheryl's China. If you have questions about travel in China, especially Beijing, please feel free to email me. And don't forget to check out my mini-guides about traveling in Beijing.

China for cheap!

2010-06-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

I like to plan trips, even if we don't take them. Last night I was tinkering with the idea of going to Beijing for a couple of weeks in the fall. I got to checking airfares and hotels on the list of websites I check when I'm in the planning stages.

I found a deal on Expedia that was really reasonable, in fact the cost of two weeks in a budget hotel and airfare was just slightly moe than airfare alone. We sometimes fly out of Portland, Oregon, when we go to China because it's usually so much cheaper the savings more than pays for our gas and airport parking, not to mention the schedule is almost always more convenient.

Anyway, I priced a trip to Beijing from Portland for just over $1,000 which includes round-trip airfare and two weeks in a budget hotel. This is per person double occupancy. This dates I used were departing Nov. 3 and returning Nov. 17. Airfare alone is running about $1,000 per person at that time. The weather will be cool in Beijing, but the cold winter winds shouldn't have started by then. And because it's off-season, the sights should be less crowded. Play around with the dates as well as other reputable online travel agencies to see what turns up; I didn't do this, though I frequently do, and go for the best deal regardless of who has it.

We went to Beijing two years ago, returning in late October and the weather was really nice. Just a little rain on one day. Believe it or not, the Expedia price is almost $300 per person less than what we paid for that trip. That trip was one of the few where I booked airfare and hotel separately -- it turned out to be cheaper that way, especially since I negotiated a discount with the hotel.

If you book a trip to Beijing, you may want to take my mini-guide, DIY Beijing: a guide for the independent traveler, to help you get around the the city. Check out Cheryl's Guides for more of my China guides. If you have questions about travel in China, especially Beijing, please see my website, Cheryl's China, or email me.

The picture
Rubbing the gold knobs on the entrance doors to the Forbidden City is said to bring good luck. Thousands of people do it every day.

The fine print
Because I mentioned Expedia in this blog, the FTC requires me to disclose if I will receive any payment from Expedia for mentioning them. I won't.

Two Beijing podcasts are now available on Amazon

2010-06-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

Two of the nine podcast tours I did for Vusual Travel Tours are now for sale on Amazon.com. They also arefor sale through Magellan's as well as the Visual Travel Tours website, where you can find all of my tours.

The tours are:

Imperial Beijing which is a walking tour that starts at Tiananmen Square, continues through the Forbidden City and ends at Jingshan Park for a stunning look back at what you've just seen.
China's Grat Wall: Walking on History is a visit to several sites on the Great Wall, all of which I have visited, some several times. This tour focuses on Badaling, because that's the site most tourists will visit from Beijin. It does give tips on how avoid the crowds at Badaling.

Other tours I did for VTT include a visit to Western Beijing, which includes the very beautiful Summer Palace; Beijing for Kids, which I later expanded into 52-page book, Parents Guide to Beijing; Cuandixia: China's Village That Time Forgot, which also was expanded into an ebook, Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China; a visit to Beihai Park and the hutongs, my favorite places in Beijing, and tips on where to find peace and quiet in Biejing. Yes! It is possible.

My non-China podcasts are on Maryhill Museum, a fabulous little museum overlooking the Columbia River Gorge about a hundred miles from where I live, and British motorcycle museums, which was expaned to an 88-page book, Motorcycle Museums of the United Kingdom: an enthusiasts' guide to British bikes.

The podcasts are designed to be downloaded to mobile devices such as iPods wo you can view them while touring a sight. Handy? Yep!

If you're planning a trip to China, please visit my website for more information. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about traveling in China, especially Biejing.

The fine print:
The FTC requires me to let you know that if you purchase one of my books or podcasts, I will make a little money on the purchase.

Joan Hinton: an American in China

2010-06-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

I frequently browse the online edition of the New York Times, and am generally stunned when I find mention of someone I know or, in this case, met briefly many years ago. The article in question was the obituary of Joan Hinton who died recently in China.

I was working as a foreign expert copy editor for China Daily in Beijing at the time. The paper's first foreign expert had just died, and a couple of us went to the memorial service China Daily hosted for him. I never met this man, but mainly went out of respect to the person who paved the way for my job there a couple of decades later.

China Daily had set up a large square table in a conference room. Everyone sat around it, and people at the head section talked about the expert. Ms. Hinton was one of the speakers. She and her husband wee introduced as long-time China residents who had done a lot for the dairy industry in China. Without them, the nation's dairy industry would not have made such rapid advances. She appeared a pleasant woman and a good public speaker. All the foreigners who spoke were long-time residents of China, as was the deceased, another American.

Based on comments made, I envisioned Ms. Hinton coming from a farming background. Was I surprised to learn that wasn't the case. The NYT article notes Ms. Hinton worked as a physicist on the Manhattan Project, which created the atom bombs the United States dropped on Japan to end World War II in Asia. She became disillusioned with the United States after that, and in 1948 left for China where she became an avowed Maoist. During the McCarthy era she was accused of being a spy and giving nuclear secrets to the Chinese, but the article notes this was never proved.

During my time in China I met several people -- mostly Americans -- who had spent most of their lives in China. While I enjoyed my two years in Beijing and have fond memories of China, I don't think I could spend my whole life living there. What I got most out of my time there was how fortunate I am to be an American.

China travel

If you're planning a trip to China, please see my website for some great information about things to see and do, especially in Beijing. Questions? Please email me. If you're interested in seeing the world from a different perspective, you might be interested in a Cheryl's Guide.

Where's the wildlife?

2010-06-09T00:44:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a camping trip to the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington. We saw a lot of elk and deer, including two which wandered through a campground not too far from ours. Seeing deer and elk in the forest isn't that unusual. My husband has also seen a cougar, a wolf and a bear as he rides his dirt bike over the trails.

On the way home, it struck me that I've never seen wildlife in China, except in a zoo. (I don't count cows, sheep and goats in farm fields.) Granted I haven't traveled in the really remote areas (yet), but I have been out in the country and moutains over there. Heck, we live in the city here, and I see more wildlife on our street every day than I've ever seen in China. I enjoy watching squirrels scamper over the power lines or play tag on the fence outside my office window. Sometimes driving down our street we have to slow down for a Mama Quail and her babies. We've even seen a racoon or two.

But the only non-domestic animals I've seen running loose in China are rats. And those I could do without!

One day I'd like to travel to the Woolong Nature Reserve in southwest China and maybe see a panda or two munching on a bamboo stalk Or maybe down to the jungles near the border with Laos. I know there are wild animals in China, I just have to go where they are to see them in their native habitat.

If you are planning a trip to China, please visit my website. If you have questions about traveling in China, please feel free ro email me. I've also written mini-guides to travel in China; check them out on Cheryl's Guides.

Cheryl's Guides

2010-06-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

See the world from
a different perspective!

Cheryl's Guides is the line of guidebooks I founded last summer. I call them Cheryl's Guides because . . . well, I wrote them and my name is Cheryl.

I wrote my first guidebook, 17 really neat things to see and do in Beijing and after good stuff I learned the hard way, after returning home after my first year living in Beijing. I updated the guide over the next several years, but then got away from it when I got married and no longer went to China as much.

Last summer, I resurrected my Beijing guide, calling it DIY Beijing: a guide for the independent traveler. About the same time, I also published Parents Guide to Beijing: a kid-friendly city. Since then I've added Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China and China travel tips: 26 ideas to help you survive the Middle Kingdom. And I just published last month, my latests guide, Motorcycle Museums of the United Kingdom.

The name Cheryl's Guides covers just about any travel guide I could write, and I've got a lot of ideas for more books simmering on the back burner. Most of them will be about China, but some will be about other places, including my own back yard of the Pacific Northwest.

I've just recently set up a website for Cheryl's Guides which gives more information about my books, including feedback from my readers.

All my guides are for sale at GuideGecko.com, a Singapore-based publishing company which only sells travel books.

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website, Cheryl's China. If you have questions about China travel, please feel free to email me.

P.S. The picture was taken outside the Gulou subway station on Second Ring Road in Beijing. The subway station has several of these whimsical children playing at the entrance.

My favorite travel gadget

2010-05-23T16:33:00.000-07:00

My Energizer battery charger is one item I never leave home without. I go through batteries like crazy in my digital cameras. Because I shoot high resolution photos, I can get 10-15 pictures before regular batteries die. (My husband shoots low res photos and gets 200-300 photos per battery set.) On a trip I might shoot 2,000 to 5,000 photos, so rechargeable batteries and a charger are a necessity if I want to avoid bankruptcy. OK, so maybe I wouldn't go through batteries so fast if I didn't walk around with the camera on all the time.

I tried a couple of different rechargers before I found this Energizer, pictured above. It's small, lightweight, and will charge both AA and AAA batteries. The tray retracts when the batteries are removed. Best of all, it works on international current. Just plug it in, pop the batteries in after a day of sightseeing and they're ready to go the next morning when I am. I just plugged the charger right in when we were in Beijing -- China has about five different plug types, so I was lucky. I did have to get an adapter to use it in England.

I paid about $10 for it at Wal-Mart. Rechargeable batteries cost about another $10 for four. I have eight batteries because I travel with two digital cameras plus my husband has a camera. I always carry spare batteries with me in case the ones in the cameras run out of juice. I find I can get about 300 photos on a single charge. This charger paid for itself abut halfway through the first trip I took it on.

China

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website about travel in China, especially Beijing. For a list of my China guidebooks, please check out Cheryl's Guides. Or you can go direct to GuideGecko.com and buy them there. If you have questions about travel in China or my guidebooks, please feel free to email me.

The fine print: When bloggers endorse a product now, the FTC requires them to disclose if they make any money from the endorsement. I don't. This battery recharger is such a great product, I think everyone should have it!

UK Motorcycle Museums

2010-05-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this blog about travel in China to bring you news about . . . travel in the United Kingdom.

The latest addition to my line of travel guides, Cheryl's Guides, was released this week. It's about British motorcycle museums. Motorcycle Museums of the United Kingdom is my first non-China travel guide, and contains information about every museum in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland I could find that has at least one motorcycle on display. The book's table of contents is almost two pages long, so you know I found a lot of museums! The book also gives tips on other things to see and do when you're in the area.

The book is a result of the two-week trip my husband and I took to England last year. He is a motorcycle afficionado so this was his dream trip. And we saw our share of them, visiting five museums over the course of our trip.

For several decades, the British manufactured the best motorcycles in the world, and we went right to the heart of the industry: the West Midlands where we visited three museums: the National Motorcycle Museum, (pictured above) which is the world's largest; Coventry Transport Museum which features all transport modes; and Black Country Museum, a living history coal mining town that has an excellent collection of vintage British bikes made in the area.

The book is available in both electronic and print formats at GuideGecko, the same publisher of my Beijing travel guides.

If you're planning a trip to China, rather than Britain, check out my website on China travel. And please feel free to email me if you have any questions about traveling in China, especially Beijing.

Cheap calls to China

2010-04-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

With good friends in China, we'd occasionally like to talk on the phone with them, but charges for calling to Beijing and Shanghai can be obscenely expensive. Our local phone company wants $6.60 per minute. No way! If we have a monthly international calling plan, we can call more cheaply, but we pay the charge even if we don't make any calls one month.

It would cost 89 cents a minute to call on our cell phones, but then my husband and I can't be on the line at the same time.

I searched online for cheap calls to China, and found some services that charge a couple of cents a minute. Now we're talking! But on closer investigation, I found they charge a connect fee which can be up to a dollar (or more) per call, and a monthly user fee to maintain your account. Plus, you have to buy a minimum $25 calling card. This is all certainly better than what our local phone company charges, but the plans either don't allow you to call cell phones or want more money. Cell phones are all our friends have.

But I found something even better, and at Walgreen's of all places. I usually buy refills there for oiur pay-as-you-go cell phones because the reloads are easiest with their system.

On the rack, tucked in with dozen of cell and landline phone cards, was Walgreen's very own international phone card. There are no connection or monthly user fees. The card comes in $10 and $25; I got the $10 just to see how it works. Wow!

The card says it costs 8 cents a minute to call China, but I'm wondering . . . We've called Beijing a couple of times already, and talked for several minutes each time. The first call was 35 cents, and the second call, which we thought was longer, was only 20 cents. Heck, it costs us 10 cents a minute just to call Seattle and that's only 200 miles away!

If you have need to call China or other countries, I'd recommend looking into the Walgreen's card to see if it will work as well for you. (Note the photo above is a pay phone booth in Beijing.)

If you're planning a trip to China, be sure to check out my website. And if you have questions about travel to the Middle Kingdom, email me and I'll try to answer them.

(NOTE: Per FTC regulations, I am required to report if I earned or will earn any money by endorsing this calling card. The answer is no.)

Kaifeng, China

2010-04-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Kaifeng is an ancient city in central China about an hour or so from Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province.

Kaifeng was an early capital of China, but it's more well known today as being the Jewish capital of China. It was the first city in China where the Jews settled when they arrived after journeying along the Silk Road during the Song Dynasty.

I've been to Kaifeng twice, the first time with a Jewish friend who wanted to see what remained of the city's Jewish heritage. Very little, as it turns out. A Chinese co-worker in Beijing made arrangements with a friend who worked for the tourist office in Kaifeng to show us around. Mostly he pointed out spots where Jewish buildings used to be, such as a hospital now standing where once stood a synagogue.

The New York Times' travel section has just published an article on Jewish Kaifeng,w hich is worth reading. Also worth reading is Peony, a novel by Pearl Buck, about a Chinese Jewish family.

Kaifeng is worth visiting even if you're not making a pilgrimage to Judaism. It has lovely parks, an ancient shopping street where you can identify the merchants by the statues about his door, and wonderful hui mian or mutton noddles, which is a local specialty dish. The picture above is a close-up of tiles on Kaifeng's Iron Pagoda.

For more information about traveling in China, especially the Beijing area, please see my website. If you have questions about China, please email me. I've also written several guidebooks on Beijing; be sure to check them out at guidegecko.com.

China Travel Tips

2010-03-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

Each time I've been to China I've learned something new that has made future travels to the Middle Kingdom earlier.

On my first trip to China way back in 1984, I was a wide-eyed innocent who didn't know I should have gotten protection for Hepatitis A before I left the United States. Heck, I only found this out when our tour group was eating one day and someone asked whether it was safe to eat the snails in water. My second time in China I got a gamma globulin shot that was good for four months. Now I've had the lifetime vaccination. But even on my first clueless trip, I ate street snacks and, luckily, never had any problems. And still don't. While I've gotten sick on restaurant food (even in a four-stat hotel's restaurant), I've eaten my way across China on street food without a single problem.

China hands recommend vaccination for Hep A to keep you safe in China. Even the CDC recommends everyone get vaccinated for Hep A even if we never plan to leave the United States.

Getting vaccinated for Hep A is just one of the tips I write about in my latest Cheryl's Guides: China Travel Tips: 26 ideas to help you survive the Middle Kingdom. It's a compilation of things that I mostly learned the hard way in my 14 trips to China, including living in Beijing for two years. I'm hoping the information will be of use to other travelers, too. China Travel Tips is for sale as an e-book on GuideGecko.com.

Other books in my series of China travel guides are:

Parents Guide to Beijing: a kid-friendly city. If you're taking your children to Beijing, you need this book. It's filled with things your kids will enjoy seeing and doing while visiting the Chinese capital. It's available as both an ebook and print book from GuideGecko.

DIY Beijing: a guide for the independent traveler. This is a nifty book telling you how to get to Beijing attractions by public transportation and things to look for while you're there. It's basically a compilation of things I like to do in Beijing as well as those I take people on my private tours to. It's a mix of the must-sees and places that are off-the-beaten tourist path. It's also available as both electronic and print books from GuideGecko.com.

Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China. This is the definitive book on Cuandixia, a village nestled in the mountains about 90k from Beijing. It's perfect for a day trip, and gives visitors a sample of daily life away from the capital's hustle and bustle. It is only available as an ebook from GuideGecko.com.

If you're planning a visit to China, please visit my website first. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me, and I'll do my best to answer them.

(Note: the photo is one I took during a walk through the hutongs on my last trip to Beijing.)

My take on a top 10 list of places to see in China

2010-02-14T14:06:00.000-08:00

National Geographic recently posted a top 10 list of places to see in China on their website. Woo hoo! I've been to the first eight. Here's their list and my take on them:

1. Forbidden City: I find this former imperial palace cold and austere, but every time I go I find something different that I hadn't noticed before. And I really love this this picture of the entrance I got on our last trip to Beijing.

2. Tiananmen Square: Across the street from the Forbidden City. It is huge! I like to get off at the Qianmen subway stop at the south end, then walk north to the Forbidden City.

3. Temple of Heaven: This is probably my least favorite place in Beijing. The temple is pretty, but for me, once is enough. I don't take people in my private group tours there either, and no one has complained so far.

4. The Great Wall: The Great Wall is . . . well, uh . . . great! I've probably been a couple of dozen times to eight sites in all. I usually go to Badaling because it's the easiest to get to from Beijing, and it also has the Great Wall Museum, which is pretty cool.

5. Xi'an: I've been to Xi'an twice. I like visiting the Muslim quarter, which is very colorful, and the city wall. My first time in Xi'an, I came across giant concrete statues of a Silk Road caravan. Very neat. Depending on your perspective, Xi'an was either the start or end of the Silk Road in China.

6. Army of the Terra Cotta Warriors: This is another place that's not on my favorites to visit. I've been there twice (once when I was a tour director and it was on the itinerary, so I had no choice). Once was enough. One the way home from my first trip, I detoured to Banpo Neolithic village, and found it more interesting. I shook my head at their version of cave man's dancing. I rather doubt these ancient people wore sequined costumes and danced to disco music while laser lights bounced all around them.

7. Shanghai: I've been to Shanghai several times. The Shanghai Museum is stupendous. We spent 10 days there two years ago, and pretty much only went to see friends. We spent as much time touring sites around Shanghai as we did in Shanghai.

8. Hong Kong Island: I spent almost a week in Hong Kong a few years ago. It is an amazing city, and someday I'll go back. I especially enjoyed a short cruise on a junk through Aberdeen Harbor and a day trip via ferry to Cheung Chau Island.

9. Stone Forest: I've not been there yet. One of these days. . .

10. Lijiang: This is another place I went to visit. Our Shanghai friends went there last year, and got some stupendous photos. I was so envious!

If you're planning a trip to China, especially Beijing, please check out my website. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. And don't forget to check out my books on travel in Beijing; they're available as downloadable ebooks or in print.

The Year of the Tiger

2010-02-11T13:02:00.001-08:00

Sunday, February 14, marks the start of the new Chinese lunar new year, and is celebrated by Chinese communities around the globe. This year is the Year of the Tiger, the third of 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac.

Chinese New Year is a major holiday in China, much like Christmas is to the Western world. People, by the hundreds of millions, go home to visit families. Generally, the government adds thousands of train cars and buses to the system to try to accommodate everyone.

I lived in Beijing during two Spring Festival celebrations, as the holiday is known there. My first celebration was for the Year of the Pig, the last zodiac animal. I really enjoyed seeing the creative art work celebrating this animal. I took dozens of pig photos during the holiday, and continued taking pig pix throughout the year. What a collection I have!

The second year was for the Year of the Ox. I spent two hours on a bus to get to the temple fair at Da Guan Yuan is southwest Beijing. (I lived in northeast Beijing.) I enjoyed the colorful street parade and the activities at the park, and pigged out on a variety of snacks. One activity which was mind-boggling to watch were young Chinese men on very high stilts somersaulting backwards from a platform to hit the ground standing. Some were a little wobbly in their stilt-landings, but it wasn't an activity I cared to duplicate. In the picture ahove, stick ponies rest after the big psarade.

Chinese families celebrate New Year's Eve by making jiaozi (or dumplings) to eat the next day. One tradition that I especially liked was that women weren't supposed to sweep the kitchen floor on New Year's Day lest it upset the kitchen gods.

The 12 animals in the zodiac are rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig, each celebrated in that order. Chinese legend says that if you were born in, say the Year of the Tiger, then you will have good luck during that year. I hope it doesn't mean you have to put up with 11 years of bad luck just to have one good one!

If China, is in your travel plans, please visit my website or email me with any questions.

If you're going to the Beijing area, check out my books on places to see that are off the beaten tourist path.

Saturday in the park

2010-01-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

Whenever I hear the old Chicago hit, Saturday in the Park, I always think of Beihai Park in Beijing. It's my very favorite park in the Chinese capital. In fact, the last time I was there it was a Saturday and people were indeed dancing and laughing, plus a host of other things.

We saw people playing badminton, doing tai chi exercises, singing, dancing (both ballroom and traditional flag dances), using a huge brush to write Chinese characters on the sidewalk with water, playing in a chamber orchestra, juggling . . .

No wonder Beihai is the most popular park in Beijing! It's also one of the prettiest. In the spring, the trees blossom out and the park is awash in pink and white blooms. One summer I went to a fireworks display at night. In the winter, the lake freezes over, with people ice skating. In the summer, they rent boats and paddle/pedal around the lake.

Because it's just a short distance west of the Forbidden City, the park was a playground for China's imperial family. It remains a playground today -- for everyone, not just royalty.

The centerpiece of Beihai Park is the Tibetan-style White Dagoba Temple which sits on an island in the middle of the lake. It's a bit of a hike up steep stairs if you enter from the main entrance, but on a clear day the view at the top is worth it. I tell friends just go up the steps slowly, with frequent stops to catch your breath.

I write about Beihai Park in more detail in my books, Parents Guide to Beijing and DIY Beijing.

If you don't visit Beihai when you're in Beijing, you're missing out on a special attraction. Unfortunately, most organized tours don't stop there.

If you have questions about travel in China, please see my website or email me for help.

My top 10 travel destinations

2009-12-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

Frommer's just released their top travel destinations for 2010. I've not been to any of them, although I came close on two of the states and one country. And I have absolutely no desire to visit some of these places in 2010 -- or any time!

If money were no object, here's my top 10 list of destinations, but I'd spread them out over several years to allow time to savor the flavor of each spot.

1. Going on safari in Africa is something I've always wanted to do. My perfect destination would be Kenya. But there's so much unrest in Africa these days, I'm almost afraid to go. I took this picture at the Beijing zoo, but I'd prefer to see the big cats in the wild. I still get excited when we see deer or elk when we're camping.

2-3. Singapore is another place that has always captured my fancy. Exotic, but strict. From there, I'd go to Bali for awhile.

4. Yellow Knife in Canada's Northwest Territories. Many years ago, I considered driving up there, but the 700-mile stretch of gravel road made me change my mind. Maybe they've done some paving by now. And, no, I wouldn't want to fly up there.

5. Provence and the French Riviera. We spent a week in Nice at Christmas 2004, but it wasn't enough time. I want to go back and wander through A Year in Provence country, soaking up the local culture and drinking espressos at an outdoor cafe. I'd love to travel the country on a motor scooter.

6. Quebec. My French ancestors helped settle Quebec back in the early 17th century. Attending a mass in a church they helped build would be a totally cool experience!

7. Vera Cruz, Mexico. Another place that I picked because pictures of the colonial city looked neat.

8. Australia -- just about anywhere . . . Paramatta, Snowy River country, Ayers Rock . . . Melbourne was on Frommer's list, but I don't care if I get there or not.

9. Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. I'd love to do an Amazon River cruise, then head over to the Galapagos Islands to see nature's best.

10. Israel. I'm not especially religious, but it would be a super experience to visit this Biblical land.

Frommer's list had 12 desinations on it, so match theirs, I'd add:

Russia, where my maternal grandmother was born about 100 miles from Kiev.

The Kashgar Sunday market in west China, as well as a few other places in China such as Lijiang and Tibet.

Try before you buy!

2009-12-14T16:48:00.000-08:00

Another two of the podcasts I did for VisualTravelTours are now available on video. You can hear the introduction and view some of the photos on youtube.com. They are:

China's Great Wall: Walking on History. In this podcast, I review the Great Wall sites in the Beijing area, mainly the ones that I've been to. Despite heavy crowds, Badaling remains my favorite site to access the Wall. It's easiest to get to from Beijing on public transportation, and I love the "flea market" shops. It also is home to the Great Wall Museum, which is not to be missed. The picture here is of Badaling; if you walk a few minutes to the left at the main entrance, you'll soon be out of the crowds.

Imperial Beijing: Tian'anmen, Forbidden City, Jingshan. This is a walking tour that begins at the south end of Tian'anmen Square, the world's largest public square that is about 100 soccer fields big. It then continues to the Forbidden City, known as GuGong or Palace Museum in China. It was home to China's imperial families for many centuries. The tour ends across the street from the north entrance to the Forbidden City. Climb to the top of Coal Hill in Jingshan Park for some pretty neat views of what you've just seen at the Forbidden City.

The tours are downloadable to mobile devices. They are available on DVD as well. Click here to go to the podcasts on VisualTravelTours: Great Wall and Imperial Beijing.

I've also written other podcasts on Beijing; some are not available in video format yet, however.

Please see my website for more information about travel in China. If you have questions about travel in China, particularly the Beijing area, please feel free to email me.

Writing about travel in China

2009-11-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

I write articles about travel in China for Suite101.com. Here's a few of my latest articles which will be helpful if you're headed to the Middle Kingdom:

Learn Chinese online is a review of some of the sites where you can learn how to speak Mandarin online and, best of all, for free.
If you get sick in Beijing, where do you go? Here's a list of some of the clinics which treat foreigners with Western medical techniques.
A quick primer on Chinese vegetables.
Chinese papercuts make great inexpensive souvenirs, and they're practically weightless in your luggage!
Trains in China provide an efficient way to move around this huge country.
The Wangfujing night food market, pictured here, is one of my favorite places to eat in Beijing. It was one of the first China travel articles I wrote for Suite101.

I'm not the only one who writes about China travel for Suite101. Here are some others:

Solange Hando is the feature writer for Southeast Asia and China. She gave a very positive review to my Parents Guide to Beijing, on sale at GuideGecko. Order your copy soon if you'll be giving it as a Christmas present. And don't forget to order a copy of DIY Beijing while you're at it.
Mistie Shaw is an American who now lives in Luoyang in central China where she teaches English as a second language.
Bridget Coila is another American who now lives in Beijing. Some of her articles offer tips on nightlife and the arts.

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website for more articles, tips and recommended reading. If you have questions about China, please feel free to email me.

My Beijing guides in Frankfurt!

2009-11-12T09:12:00.000-08:00

There were almost 2,500 books on China on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair last month, and mine were among them. China was the honored country at this year's fair, which is the world's largest, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

Parents Guide to Beijing and DIY Beijing are listed on page 146 under travel guides in a 202-page book of all the books about China at the fair. I was very excited that my books were displayed with all the China books as well as at the GuideGecko booth. GuideGecko is a Singapore-company which specializes in travel guides. GG's Daniel Quandt encouraged me to get my books ready in time for the fair, and has just sent me pictures of them on display at the fair.

Daniel sent me these photos of my books at the fair.

If anyone on your Christmas list is planning a trip to Beijing, Parents Guide or DIY Beijing will make excellent gifts. Check them out on GuideGecko.

For more information about travel in China, check out my website. And please feel free to email me with any questions you have about traveling in the Middle Kingdom.

Saving on travel, part 5

2009-11-05T09:17:00.000-08:00

You've arranged for your plane tickets and hotels, now it's time to figure out what you're going to see at your destination. And, yes, it's possible to cut costs here.

If you've booked through an agency, they'll give you lots of options for day tours. However, it's generally cheaper if you book them once you arrive at your destination. Or, it likely is possible to get to an attraction by public transportation, which means you can sightsee on your schedule, not a tour company's.

First, do an online search for free things to do at your destination. You'll be surprised at what comes up. For our trip to London in 2003, we snagged free tickets to a performance at a top West End theatre. That show turned out to be the highlight of our trip. If you're going to New York City or Los Angeles, you can get free tickets to tapings of game and talk shows, and sitcoms. This involves planning ahead with ticket requests, however.

Many museums have free days or stay open late one night a week when admission is free. We saw a wonderful exhibition of photos by Charles Dodgson who, using the pen name Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, at a San Francisco art museum; the exhibit even included a picture of the little girl who was his Alice.

If you can't get in free, get in with a discount. After you've checked out the free things to do, do a search for discount tickets for attractions. We saved big this way when we visited Cadbury World in Birmingham, England, last spring. I'd printed out a page of discounts to attractions around England, including one for a 20 percent discount at Cadbury World (I later found out no one pays full price at Cadbury because hotels have discount tickets to distribute to guests.). On top of that, Cadbury gave us their senior discount, so we ended up paying 8 pounds for a 13-pound ticket. Plus, we were given so much chocolate, we suffered from chocolate overload!

If it's available, always use a senior discount. In some countries, the discount is only offered to residents, but in others, the discount applies to anyone. Always ask, especially if the admission board does not list senior discounts. (In England, senior discounts come under "concession" or "OAP" ticket prices.) In China, where only the Chinese can read ticket prices, just show your passport for discounts of up to 50 percent. The senior discount there is only good for basic admission; a lot of attractions inside charge a separate fee, so you'll need to figure out if you want a regular full-meal deal ticket or just pay separate admissions to one or two things inside.

In the United States, American citizens can buy lifetime passes for free admission to federal facilities, such as national parks and interpretive sites. The passes, which are not very expensive, also are good for discounted campground frees.

Looking for Christmas gift ideas?

My travel guides, Parents Guide to Beijing and DIY Beijing, make perfect gifts for anyone contemplating a trip to the Chinese capital. Or how about a CD of a walking tour in Beijing -- I've written seven. Check them out on my website.

From guidebooks to papercuts

2009-10-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

My guidebooks

I was a guest blogger on Travel Writers Exchange on 10/19/2009/. I wrote about how travel writers could self-publish their own guidebooks, something I've been doing since 1996. All my mini-guides have been on China so far, but I have plans to branch out to other places on the globe.

Speaking of guidebooks, I am getting really great reviews on the three I published this summer on GuideGecko: DIY Beijing: A guide for the independent traveler, Parents Guide to Beijing: A kid-friendly city, and Cuandixia: An ancient mountian village in China. Cuandixia is an ebook only, but DIY and Parents Guide are available as print books, too. Readers say they like the compact size, which makes it easy to pack around. They also like the directions on how to find things on public transportation.

Suite101

I'm continuing to add to my cache of articles on travel in China on Suite101. Here's some of my recent articles:

Chinese vegetables are more than just bean sprouts and snow peas. How about broccoli, potatoes and cabbage? They're on the list, too.

I love Chinese papercuts. They're delicate and colorful as pictured above, and don't take up much room in your luggage. Inexpensive, too, which means they make ideal gifts.

Chinese trains provide efficient transportation around this huge country. I especially like traveling hard-sleeper as it provides a chance to meet average Chinese.

A visit to Wanping takes you away from the hustle and bustle of central Beijing to a quiet suburb. Wanping is home to the Marco Polo Bridge (Luguoqiao) where Japan fired the first shots in a war against China in 1937. A museum about this war also is located in Wanping. These aren't considered major tourist sites but are well worth the visit.

Tanzhesi is Beijing's oldest temple located about 45k from central Beijing. It also makes a nice day trip.

If you have questions about travel in Beijing, email me. For additional information about travel in China, please check out my website, which I recently updated.

DIY Beijing

2009-09-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

An update of my very first Beijing guide was published today: DIY Beijing: A guide for the independent traveler.

My pride-and-joy guide was initially published as 17 really neat things to see and do in Beijing and other good stuff I learned the hard way in 1996. It grew out of an article I was writing for a newspaper travel section. The newspaper wanted 750 words on things to see and do in Beijing. 750 words! Impossible! I kept on writing when I hit 750 words. When I got done, I counted up my favorite things to do in Beijing, and there were 17. So that's what I named my guide.

Two years later, I expanded it by 20 pages and renamed it Do-it-yourself Beijing. It was only available for sale on my website, and I didn't accept credit cards, payment in advance only. It was self-published in the truest sense of the term: I did it all myself at Office Depot., and mailed it to my customers. I sold about 500 books over a two-year period.

DIY Beijing is positively upscale compared to those early efforts. It's available as both an ebook and print from http://www.guidegecko.com/. (They accept credit cards, too!) GuideGecko is a relatively new travel book company; DIY Beijing is the third guide I've published with them. The others are Parents Guide to Beijing and Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China. Cuandixia is only available as an ebook, but Parents Guide is both an e- and print book.

All three guides are geared for the independent traveler, but it's also good for travelers on organized tours who want to break away for a few hours. Parents and DIY Beijing takes them to the off-the-beaten path places that I love so much. The major attractions aren't neglected, however, especially if they're sites I like to visit again and again. And like 17 really neat things, DIY Beijing is still filled with tips I learned the hard way during the years I lived in Beijing.

Just click on the links above to find the books on GuideGecko. GuideGecko will feature both Parents and DIY at the Frankfurt Book Fair next month. This is exciting news for me!

If you're planning a trip to China, check out my website. If you have questions about travel in China, please email me.

Shameless self-promotion!

2009-08-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

I need more votes!

GuideGecko.com is having a travel writing contest for books self-published through their site. The winner gets a trip to the Frankfurt, Germany, Book Fair in October. The book fair is the world's largest, annually attracting some 300,000 visitors and more than 7,000 publishers.

Books about a different country are featured each year. This year China is the honored country. GuideGecko will be promoting by Parents Guide to Beijing there. Hopefully, with that many people they'll be able to sell a few of my books.

I've entered my book in their travel writing contest, and need votes so I can be at the fair with my book. The winner is determined by popular vote. You can vote for Parents Guide here. Buying the book is not required to vote for it, but you're very welcome to buy it if you want.

I got an email on 9/7 from GuideGecko saying I was third out of 44 guides entered, and only 10 votes out of first place. This is another election where every vote is going to count! You must be registered with them for your vote to count.

Even if I don't win the contest, I'm excited my books will be there. Books? What's this? Well, for the last month or so, I've been working on a major overhaul of my Do-it-yourself Beijing guide which I first published in 1999. I just finished the first draft last week. GuideGecko also wants to promote the updated book at the book fair, so I've got to hustle and finish it quickly. Looks like I'll spend the next couple of weeks chained to my computer.

My eguide, Cuandixia: an ancient mountain village in China, is also on GuideGecko, but, unfortunately it long enough and will be staying home.

Examiner.com interviewed me

Glen Loveland, the Asia headlines specialist for Examiner.com, interviewed me about my travel writing on China. It's a nice article, in Q & A format, and, of course, the answers are stunningly brilliant! You can read it here.

In the "it's a small world" department, Glen is originally from Yakima, Washington, about 75 miles north of Kennewick, where I live. He's lived in Beijing since 2007.

For more information about travel in China, please see my website. If you have any questions about traveling in China, please email me.

P.S. The photo above is of Beihai Park's White Dagoba Temple, a landmark sight in central Beijing.

Tips for saving on lodging costs

2009-08-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

Accommodations rank right up there with airline tickets for major vacation costs.

If you don't want to sleep on a park bench, a friend's sofa or a tent in a campground, what can you do to control the cost of getting a good night's sleep?

When I was younger and single, I used to stay in bed-and-breakfasts when I traveled in Europe. The opportunity to meet travelers from around the world over breakfast made up for the inconvenience of walking down the hall to the bathroom. Now that I'm older and married, I want a bathroom in the room, though I still like breakfast to be included in the room rate.

Other than that, I'm not too picky about where I stay, other than it has to be clean, in a good location and preferably cheap. If it's a place we're going to stay more than three nights, I'll probably upgrade to something a little nicer than if we're only going to be at a place one night.

So how do you find accommodations that won't break your travel budget?

Booking airfare and accommodations as a package using an online travel agency, such as Expedia or Travelocity, is one way to cut costs. In many instances I've been able to get a package deal that that is around the same cost as an airline ticket alone, booked from the airline's website. For example, when we went to Shanghai for 10 days in March 2008, I used Travelocity to book 10 nights in a Shanghai three-star, airfare and taxes for under $1,100 per person. The cheapest airfare I could find was $1,100. Three years ago, I found airfare, lodgings and taxes for five nights (three-star) in Beijing for $750 pp at go-today.com; airfare alone was running almost $900. This system works best if you're going to be visiting only one city.

If you're going to be visiting multi-cities, want confirmed reservations and don't want to use a store-front travel agency, you're going to have to do some work to find reasonable accommodations.

If I know what hotel I want to stay in, then I'll check first with their website. Chains like Choice Hotels have properties in a wide range of styles and prices. So I'll check with them, if only to give me an idea of the price I have to beat. When we went to Birmingham, UK, this spring, I saved $15 a night by booking with Expedia rather than the Choice website. For our honeymoon on the Oregon Coast, I booked through the Inn at Spanish Head's website, and saved $85 a night. Sometimes I'll just do a search for accommodations in a certain city and see what comes up. Sometimes some little-known local booking agency comes up with terrific deals. I've used these a couple of times though I admit to being a little hesitant because I didn't know anything about the booking agency.

I'm also a big fan of the Motel 6 chain, having first stayed in one 40 years ago when the cost was $6 for a double. Motel 6 motels are good, basic accommodations, though sometimes the location isn't always convenient. When I had a dog, I always stayed there because they didn't hassle me about him -- he was as welcome as I was. I also like security features at check-in. Even if you're the only guest checking in, clerks never say your room number out loud, but point to it on the map, indicating how to find it. I once checked into a major chain hotel with a lobby full of other guests waiting to check in. In a loud tone of voice, the clerk announced my room number and told me where to find it. Not good, especially if you're a woman traveling by herself.

I've also used hotwire.com and priceline.com to find accommodations. The drawback with these is that you don't find out where you'll be staying until after your credit card has been charged. You can, however, select your price range and general location. I've used hotwire a couple of times for trips to Seattle. We've gotten a Marriott for $55 a night plus taxes; the Marriott website lists room rates starting at $169 for this particular property. I used priceline to find out hotel in London last spring. I was reading online reviews of properties in our price range, and, let me tell you, they weren't good: linens that hadn't been changed in six months, smelly rooms, bed bugs, filthy rooms, etc. Nothing I would stay in. In desperation, I turned to priceline.com, asking for a four-star in Kensington, figuring it had to be decent. I also bid $65 a night plus taxes. OK, so I was maybe dreaming a little bit, but guess what? The London Copthorne Tara accepted it! It was a wonderful hotel (pictured above) a three-minute walk from the High Street Kensington tube stop. The staff tried to sell us an upgrade when we checked in, but we held firm. The rate didn't include breakfast, but we were given discount coupons for breakfast. The breakfast wasn't that great for the price, so usually we went to a nearby McDonald's or tearoom. The Copthorne chain's website said rooms at the Tara started at $200, so we really lucked out.

You can also try negotiating directly with the hotel. Our trip to Beijing last fall was one of the few times I booked accommodations and airfare separately. Friends were going with us, so it would be two rooms for 12 nights. Because of this, I felt a discount was called for. The hotel gave us one night free for each room -- I probably should have held out for a larger discount, but it worked for us.

Also take advantages of business rates if you qualify, and AARP or AAA discounts if you belong to either of these groups. Properties will give discounts of 5 percent to 20 percent for these memberships. You will only get these discounts if you book directly with the property, however..

Saving on travel, part 3

2009-08-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Airline tickets "purchased" using frequent flyer miles are a good way to keep travel expenses down. Unfortunately, if you don't fly very often, it's going to take a long time to build up the miles.

We go to China a lot, and that's about 13,000 miles roundtrip, so two trips is enough for a free ticket in the continental United States. But we just let our miles accumulate. A couple of reasons for this. One is that you need a lot of miles for a frequent flyer ticket to Europe or Asia. A second reason is that if the cheap seats are filled (where we usually sit -- hey! those first-class passengers aren't going to get there any sooner than we will), airlines upgrade those passengers with the most frequent flyer miles. This happened to us two years ago, when we were upgraded from the cheapest economy to business class between Munich and Chicago. Wow! Business class is the way to go, if you've got the bucks. Unfortunately, we don't.

We cashed in some frequent flyer miles when we went to London in May. United normally wants 55,000 miles for a ticket to Europe, but was having a "sale" for 40,000 miles to certain European cities. You do have to pay taxes and fees on frequent flyer tickets; this worked out to $112 for each of us. Taxes and fees depend on where you're going. We had considered going to Beijing, and that would have cost each of us $40.

I've been told by many friends that it's extremely difficult to use frequent flyer miles for tickets. For some reason I've never had this problem, and we got our first choice of dates for these tickets.

What's good about frequent flyer miles is there are many ways you get rack up the miles without setting foot on an airplane. Some of my friends have credit cards affiliated with the airlines, and charge even very small amounts just to get the miles. They pay the credit card bills every month, so it doesn't cost them anything to do it this way. Spend some time on your airline's frequent flyer program looking at ways you can earn miles.

I like online shopping as one way to earn miles. For example, if there's something I'm going to buy locally, I'll check the price at the store, and then order it through the airline's shopping mall. If I pick up the item at the store, then there are usually no shipping charges. One added benefit is that online store prices are sometimes cheaper. We also subscribe to magazines through the online malls; generally, you get 12 miles for every $1 spent, which compares favorably to the 1-2 miles for every $1 with other merchants.

I also earn miles on Northwest by taking surveys. Yeah, I know you're thinking of all those come-ons that say you can earn big bucks by taking surveys; you take the survey and nothing happens. I do surveys through e-Rewards.com. They pay in e-currency which is redeemable for items such as magazines and airline miles.

I also earn miles by doing grocery shopping at Safeway, which credits my United account with 125 miles for every $250 I spend.

Granted the number of miles earned is small, but they're just enough to keep my frequent flyer account active. Each time I earn a few miles, it extends the expiration date of my miles. Over the years, I've probably lost 50,000 miles in various frequent flyer plans because I didn't use or add miles to them.

(Note: the above photo was taken in Birmingham in the West Midlands where we spent a week of our trip.)

Check out Parents Guide to Beijing: a kid-friendly city

If you're going to Beijing, with or without your children, you'll enjoy my eguide, Parents Guide to Beijing. It's filled with tips and things to do that will appeal to all ages.

For more information about travel in China, please check out my website or email me with your questions.

Saving on travel costs, part 2

2009-07-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

Air fares are probably going to account for the biggest chunk of your trip expenses. But there are ways to cut down the cost of a plane ticket.

We try to fly United as much as possible. I'm not that keen on the airline service and I think the meals are pitiful. But back in the days when United was a better airline, we racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles, and decided to keep flying United, rather than splinter the miles off to different airlines. Actually, in Pasco, Washington, we don't have a whole lot of airline choices, anyway. United, which is convenient for Europe, especially now that the airline flys nonstop to London from Denver; Delta, which also is convenient for Europe; and Alaska/Northwest which goes to Seattle and points beyond. Delta and Northwest are in the process of merging, so that will cut down on our options. We frquently find it is cheaper to drive to Portland or Seattle and pay parking than to fly Pasco to Portland or Seattle. If you have that luxury, check out ticket prices from nearby airports.

So I always check the airlines' websites first to get my price bearings. If nothing else, this lets me know the price I have to beat. Sometimes the cost of the ticket is surprisingly reasonable, and I'll book from the website. You can usually earn a few extra frequent flyer miles booking this way.

Most airlines now will provide fares for two or three days on each side of your estimated departure date. If your dates are really flexible, try plugging in the same day of the week for the weeks before and after you want to leave, to see what those prices are. Generally, prices for weekend departures/returns are higher.

I may do this check many times, as fares change frequently. You should also do these checks at different times. I once snagged a pretty good Beijing/Portland fare at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. This fare was only up about three hours, so if I hadn't decided to do a spur-of-the-moment price check on my lunch hour at work, I wouldn't have found it.

There also are a lot of ticket agencies out there which appear to offer pretty good fares. Some sites, like sidestep.com, just search for the fares and then tell you where to find them. Checking one of these sites is good for comparison purposes. However, be aware that some of the fares quoted on comparison sites don't always include departure taxes and fees, which can add up quickly.

And sometimes booking airfare and accommodations through an online travel agency such as Expedia or Travelocity is the best way to go. I'll write more on that in a future blog.

Update on Parents Guide to Beijing

Solange Hando, feature writer for China travel on Suite101, has favorably reviewed by new eguide, Parents Guide to Beijing. : “This new Parents Guide to Beijing offers sound practical advice and reveals a city full of exciting attractions for all the family.” Read the full review here. The ebook is available for sale on GuideGecko.com.

If you're planning a trip to China, please see my website for information on travel in China.

Parents Guide to Beijing

2009-07-06T09:00:00.001-07:00

After much anguish and pain, (almost as if I were giving birth to a real baby), my Parents Guide to Beijing is for sale as an ebook on GuideGecko.com.

Getting to this point wasn't easy. The book practically wrote itself, but then there was the design to do. Everything went well, up until it came time to PDF the book. That's where the real pain began. It is best left unsaid what I went through in this process. But it's done. Finally.

The ebook got its start as a podcast, Beijing for kids, that I did for VisualTravelTours.com. (They specialize in tours which are downloadable to mobile devices while you're on the scene.) It was a really fun tour to write, but I had so much information left over when I finished it, it begged for a book. So I kept on writing, and Parents Guide to Beijing is the result.

The name may be a misnomer, because it's about things that kids of all ages (even those in their 80s!) can do in Beijing, Beijing is such a kid-friendly city that even if you don't know the language, you can still have a good time. The book includes some very common phrases and numbers in Mandarin. I've given phonetic pronunciations and if you or your kids are anywhere in the ballpark with them, the Chinese will compliment you on your speaking skills.

The ebook takes in major sites to see, such as the Great Wall, as well as mentions kid-friendly things to do at them. There are sections on restroom tips and how to eat kao ya, as Peking Duck is called in Beijing.

The picture here is on the book's cover. It's one of many playful statues outside the Gulou ditie (subway station) on Second Ring Road. I really love those whimsical statues!

Parents Guide to Beijing is only available in ebook form now. As soon as I work out some more bugs, it will be available as a print book also.

Please see my website for more information about travel in China, especially Beijing.

China podcasts are available now!

2009-06-22T09:09:00.001-07:00

We interrupt this series of blogs on how to travel cheaply to bring you this important announcement: the walking tours of Beijing I wrote for VisualTravelTours.com are now for sale!

I wrote and photographed a total of nine tours, with seven of them about Beijing and its environs. Right now they're available only as downloads to mobile devices, but they will be available on CD soon.

The tours are:

China's Great Wall: Walking on History. The Great Wall is undeniably one of China's top attractions. This tour visits several sites in the Beijing area.
Cuandixia: China's Village that Time Forgot. Cuandixia is a village about three hours by car from Beijing. In an effort at economic revitalization, it has turned itself into a living history museum. I've been there twice, and will go again.
Imperial Beijing: Tian'anmen, Forbidden City, Jingshan. This tour starts at Tian'anmen Square, the largest square in the world, and the heart and soul of China. It then crosses the street for a tour of the Forbidden City, once off limits to commoners but which is now toured by thousands of them every day. It ends at the north entrance to the Forbidden City where visitors climb to the top of Coal Hill in Jingshan Park for stunning views overlooking the Forbidden City. The park was a playground for China's royal families.
Beijing for Kids. This is a fun tour for kids of all ages, which provides ideas for different things to do such as visiting the world's largest inland aquarium, shopping for toys and taking pictures of silly signs.
A Walk Through Beijing's Past. This tour starts at Beihai Park with its landmark White Dagoba Temple. The park was a playground for China's imperial family. The photo above, of Chinese characters cut into bamboo, was taken there. The tour then goes on to explore the city's disappearing hutongs, a centuries' old style of housing that is unique to China and now giving way to 21st century modernization. The tour ends at the Soong Ching Ling House on the northeast shore of Houhai Lake. Soong Ching Line was the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, first president of China, and so important in her own right she was referred to as "the mother of China."
Western Beijing: Boats, Blooms 'n Boots. This tour explores the Summer Palace, which is one of my favorite places to visit in Beijing. See the controversial Marble Boat, built by funds diverted from the Royal Navy. Grab a taxi to the Beijing Botanical Garden with its beautiful flower gardens and tropical conservatory; the Sleeping Buddha Temple is located inside the garden. Finally, end the day at Fragrant Hills Park which offers hiking and stunning views of the Beijing landscape from atop a hill.
Beijing: Finding Peace and Quiet. Beijing has millions of people and there will be times you feel like they're all visiting the Summer Palace at the same time you are. This tour provides ideas on places you can visit to escape the crowds.

The other two tours I've written are:

Maryhill Museum: Guarding the Columbia River Gorge. Maryhill is a fabulous little museum in southcentral Washington which overlooks the scenic Columbia River Gorge. It has the largest collection of Rodin works on the West Coast, a replica of Stonehenge which serves as a war memorial, and the first paved road in Washington State. The tour ends with a visit to Maryhill Winery with its outdoor amphitheatre for summer concerts.
Motorcycle Museums in Britain. Jon and I went to England in May where we visited England's top three motorcycle museums: National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, Sammy Miller Museum in New Milton near Southampton and the London Motorcycle Museum. We also visited a couple of lesser known museums which also had motorcycles. We saw everything from the earliest motorcycles which were simply bicycles with gas engines to the Triumph Bonneville Tom Cruise rode in Mission Impossible III.

Please see my website for more information about traveling in China.

Tips for traveling cheaply, part I

2009-06-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

Jon and I do a lot of international travel. Why not? I come up with such good deals, it's stupid to stay home! Because of this, many of my friends ask me to find similar deals for them on the spot. Can't be done. You need to do your homework and that can take weeks or months.

Since 2003, here's some of the prices I've come up with for airfare and hotel:

Pasco, Washington, to London, 7 nights in a three-star hotel in great location, breakfast included, $800 pp.
Pasco to Nice, France, 7 nights in a tourist hotel, $800 pp.
Pasco to Munich, 7 nights in a three-star, $735 pp.
Portland to Beijing, 5 nights in a three-star, breakfast included, $750 pp
Pasco to Shanghai, 10 nights in a three-star, $1,050 pp.
Portland to Beijing, 12 nights in a three-star. $1,230 pp.
Pasco to London, 6 nights in a three-star in Birmingham and 7 nights in a four-star in London Kensington, $1,100 pp.

When we start thinking about an international trip, I start checking prices about three months ahead. If you're flexible on dates, you can pick up some really great bargains. When I was working a full-time job, I could only get a week off at a time, so we tried to leave on Saturday returning the second Sunday, which would give us nine days. But sometimes this was too expensive, so I looked at leaving other days of the week.

All but two of the trips were booked with online travel agencies, such as Go-today.com, Expedia or Travelocity. They'll give discounts if you buy a hotel/air fare package; sometimes, the combined price is cheaper than what the airlines want for just a ticket. On the long Beijing trip, we bought air tickets separately, and I negotiated a discount directly with the hotel because there were four of us going and we wanted to spend the whole time in one hotel. On the longer English trip, we used frequent flyer miles for the tickets (we still had to pay taxes and fees); I booked the Birmingham hotel through Expedia and the London one through priceline.com.

The cheap trips are after exploring all possible pricing options. I've booked a couple of trips through Go-today.com. When we travel, we like to base ourselves in one city, and then take day trips. Go-today.com sometimes has great prices for short trips, if all you want is airfare and hotel. They include breakfast in any package, and you can make up your own tour program with tours they have available. We don't go for any of the extras, because they're quite a bit more expensive than what you pay if you book at your destination. But I usually start my travel pricing with them so I'll have ball park figures to work with.

I always check the airlines' websites to see what they're charging for tickets. I like it that you can stipulate flexible dates for travel. I'll then run the cheapest dates by online travel agents to see what they can come up with in an air/hotel combination. I'll do this maybe once or twice a month in the early planning stages of our trip, then weekly and finally daily the closer it gets to our desired departure date. I'll also run price checks on leaving on different days of the week as well as the same day in weeks before and after. For example, the Munich package was only good on one specific date. Prices for the day before or after were almost $1,000 per person more. So guess when we went!

Finding cheap deals takes a lot of work. It depends on how much your time is worth to you. For us, the extra time is worth it because we save so much money. It means we can spend more at our destination or on our next trip.

Terracotta Warriors in England

2009-05-20T19:06:00.001-07:00

When Jon and I were in England recently, we visited the Dorchester Terracotta Warriors museum.

Dorchester is a small town in southwestern England not too far from the English Channel. Originally, we'd planned to see the English Channel on a day trip to Dover for the last day of our train pass. But that morning, I'd been looking something else up in our guidebook's index, and saw the listing for the Terracotta Warriors museum. Being Sinophiles, we decided to go there instead. We got to Waterloo train station at 9:33 a.m. A train, headed in the right direction, was scheduled to leave at 9:35 a.m. Somehow we made it through the ticket gate and to the platform. We hopped on the first available car, with the doors closing behind Jon who got on after me. We were on our way!

At the time we got on the train, we figured we'd have to take the train to Weynouth, then backtrack, but fortunately the train stopped at South Dorchester. The museum is about a 20-minute walk from the train station, but it took us longer because we didn't know where we were going and we ended up going the long way. Plus, many people we asked directions of had never heard of the museum. The warriors museum shares space with a teddy bear museum, so if we were to go again, I think I'd ask for directions to that instead.

The museum is small, but quite educational. I've been to see the real thing twice in Xi'an, but managed to learn some new things about the warriors in Dorchester. The information is very well presented, with tableaus, warrior replicas, a short film and photos. Museum officials don't permit photography inside, so you'll have to settle for seeing a photo of the terracotta warriors on my first trip to Xi'an in 1997.

It takes less than an hour to see the holdings, so this makes the admission fee expensive in terms of what's there. If you're in Xi'an, you can see the real thing for about the same price. Jon has never been to Xi'an before, but wants to go the next time we go to China.

I've written an article about the musseum for Suite101.com. You can read it here.

For more information about travel in China, check out my website. Or, email your questions to me, and I'll try my best to answer them.

Birmingham buffet

2009-05-13T23:38:00.001-07:00

We had ate Chinese food once in Birmingham, England, at a small restaurant a couple of blocks from our hotel.

It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, thought not in the way we think of buffets in the United States, where you walk through a line, piling food on your plate.

At the Lychee retaurant, we were presented with a menu that listed about 80-90 dishes. You ordered the dishes that you wanted, and they were rushed hot to your table, each individually prepared. You could order as many dishes as you wanted, but if you didn't eat everything on the plate, they'll charge you the a la carte prices. Oh, and you were only allowed to eat for two hours. Two hours! My gosh, I had problems eating just three dishes: shrimp tempura, chicken in a spicy sauce (where's the spice?), and crispy duck that was seasoned with cinnamon. The food was very good, and I can see why the retaurant has been in business for almost 30 years.

I didn't take any pictures of the food we were served at this restaurant -- in fact, the only food pictures I took were of Jon eating nachos at a pub and "high heeled shoes" made from chocolate at Cadbury's. The picture here is one I took of deep-fried shredded potatoes when we were in Beijing last fall. They taste like potato chips.

See my website for more information about travel in China, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Off again!

2009-04-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

We are leaving soon for two weeks in England, where we'll be mainly visiting motorcycle museums. My husband is a motorcycle fanatic! The photo is one I took of him when we visited the London Motorcycle Museum in 2003 on a trip we took to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I call it "praying to the god of motorcycles." Actually, he was kneeling to get a close-up photograph of one bike.

It seems weird to be going somewhere other than China. Three of my last four international trips have been to China. The only non-China trip was to Munich in the spring of 2007. What can I say? I like China! Especially Beijing!

When we were in London in 2003, the bird flu was making the rounds. This time it's the swine flu which is killing the people.

We visited London's Chinatown in 2003, and I picked up a few ingredients that are hard to find here. We'll probably visit again on this trip, if I can pry Jon away from motorcycles. We walked by Westminster Abbey on that trip, but didn't go in. I joke that's because there were no motorcycles on the altar!

Park yourself in a park!

2009-04-22T20:31:00.000-07:00

It was a nice sunny spring day yesterday, so I climbed on my motor scooter and headed for Columbia Park for a photo shoot. As far as I'm concerned Columbia Park is THE park in the Tri-Cities, where we live.

It's right on the banks of the Columbia River, which was as smooth as glass yesterday, even with the little ripples made by mother geese teaching their new goslings to swim. What was interesting about this is Mom led the flock, with another adult goose or two bringing up the rear, making sure none of the little ones got lost.

All this reminded me how much I love Beijing's parks. Beijing has a lot of them, ranging in size from vest pocket, like across from the Gulou subway station on Second Ring Road, to huge, like Beihai Park and the Summer Palace. They are my favorite parks in Beijing, and still are. I try to visit them each time I return to Beijing. I especially like the parks in the spring, when the trees are greening up and blossoming out. I also just like to sit on a bench and watch life go by. One night a small mouse scampered across my feet at Beihai Park -- that I did not enjoy; maybe he was frightened by the fireworks we'd come to watch. Beihai's White Dagoba Temple is pictured above.

Another park that I liked a lot was Tuanjiehu, a small park filled with ponds and bridges, and, at 6 a.m., people dancing, on Third Ring Road between Lufthansa and World Trade centers. I only went there once, but YuYuanTan Park was stunning -- and huge. It is so big, they allowed people to ride their bikes through it. Once, at Purple Bamboo Park, a friend and I came across a fashion show which was unique in that the clothes being modeled were all made of bamboo. I don't imagine sitting down would have been very comfortable.

The smaller ponds at the parks were filled with gold fish, as most park ponds in China. I found it interesting that children would be sitting on the bank or bench, fishing poles in hand, trying to catch a gold fish. I often wondered if this was a catch-and-release exercise or if they took the fish home.

For more information about travel in China, please visit my website.

Until next time, zai jian!

Art in public places

2009-04-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

Jon and I took an outing to northeastern Oregon yesterday. We had to cope with a late-spring snowstorn and horrendous white-out conditions, but the drive to Joseph was worth it. I remember going to Joseph as a kid; our parents took us camping to Wallowa Lake for a week almost every summer. Joseph was just a sleepy little town to drive through. No more! I was stunned yesterday to see magnificent bronze statues lining a three-block section of Main Street. Horses, deer, wolves, cougars, fish, cowboys (a cowboy on a bucking bronc was especially mind-boggling!) and Indians. Joseph, Oregon, is named after Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe.

You can read more about Joseph's Art Walk in the article I wrote for Suite101. This wasn't a planned article, but I couldn't help myself. I just had to share this with others.

Art in public places adds so much to a city. I really enjoyed the sculptures the government placed around Beijing. Usual places like parks, but also alongside major highways or just somewhere on a sidewalk. Whoever decided to place the gigantic beer mug in Sanlitun had to have a keen sense of humor. Not only is Sanlitun a key embassy area, it has many watering holes popular with partying foreigners. The Xinhua bookstore in Xidan had an uneven stack of books for its statues. And the rickshaw driver on the Wangfujing pedestrial mall was very popular with Chinese and foreigners alike who would hop in the rickshaw for a photo op.

The Olympic Green in Beijing is filled with sculptures the length of the green. They also are popular places for people to have their pictures taken. When we were in Beijing, I didn't have time to walk the length of the green to see all the statues, but the ones I did see were great. I particularly enjoyed the two people, dressed in ancient garb, playing soccer.

For more information about traveling in China, please see my website.

Hoppy Easter!

2009-04-07T22:22:00.000-07:00

Last year we spent Easter in Shanghai. This year we're staying home.

Easter is not a major holiday in China, usually only celebrated by the big hotels that cater to foreigners. The first Easter I lived in China, we went to church and then to the Panjiayuan flea market, then held in a big dirt field. The second Easter, we went to Sunday brunch at a major hotel, but that was it. So when Jon and I knew we were going to spend Easter in Shanghai, we wanted to make it special for our Chinese friends.

All that was on the agenda for the day was hanging out at our young friends' new condo, which they'd just moved into the week before. Shuo's mom and step-dad came down from Beijing for our visit.

Jon and I decided to have an Easter egg decorating contest. We took over a couple of different Easter egg coloring kits and some stickers. After lunch, we set up the dining table with everything: boiled eggs, paper cups full of dye, marking crayons, transfers and marking pens plus ribbons and fabric for anyone who wanted to get really creative.

We spent the next couple of hours decorating the eggs -- a first for our Chinese friends. They took this very seriously. There was much discussion on what to do, and what would be the best way to go about it. Should the egg have Chinese characteristics? Should it be simple? Should it be fancy? Of course, this was a big deal. After all, a chocolate bunny was at stake. We brought the bunny to give as a prize to the person who made the best decorated egg. The winner was decided by popular vote. You can see our results above.

Celebrating holidays in a foreign land, and sharing it with good friends makes holidays just that much more special. Last Easter was one we'll remember for a long time. This year we'll be spending Easter at home, but thinking of our faraway friends and all the fun we had on that trip.

If you're planning a trip to China, please check out my website for more information. If you have questions about travel in China, please feel free to email me.

50 articles!!!

2009-04-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I submitted my 50th article to Suite101.com. Fifty articles is considered a milestone at S101 because then writers are eligible for a bonus on their earnings. A majority of the articles have been related to travel in China in some way, but I've done a few for the motorcycles section and some on Maryhill Museum.

Maryhill Museum is a wonderful little museum located out in the middle of nowhere, but well worth a stop if you're traveling between Portland and Boise. It sits on a high bluff overlooking the Columbia River Gorge so the views are stunning. Maryhill has the largest collection of Rodin statues on the West Coast; numerous memorabilia,including thrones, from the Romanian royal family; a replica of Stonehenge, and Theatre de la Mode, a collection of wire mannequins wearing the latest World War II Parisian fashions. The "dolls," what I called them back then, is one of my two memories from the first time I visited Maryhill when I was six years old. I also remember the signs warning visitors to look out for rattlesnakes, though I've never seen on my many visits since that time.

Here are some of the latest stories I've written on China for S101:

Chinese money comes in a variety of sizes and colors, making it a little easier to cope with unfamiliar money in an unfamiliar land. You'll spend it just as fast, though!

A list of Beijing tourism offices where you can go to get on-the-spot help.

The Yellow Crane Temple is a major site to see in Wuhan, which doesn't have a lot to offer in the way of tourist attractions. The inside of the temple has a huge magnificent mosaic of a flying crane. I remember the temple visit because I was fined 10 yuan for taking pictures at a wonderful bell concert. Luckily, the officials didn't confiscate my film, so I got off lightly, though if I'd known I was going to be fined for taking two pictures, I would have taken a lot more!

Going to church in Beijing, or any foreign city, is something I always try to do as I look upon church attendance as part of the cultural experience. I remember breaking out in tears when I attended an Evensong service at Canterbury Cathedral because it was so moving.

I also found time to post an update to my website on traveling in China yesterday. I added four new pages and revised a few others. If you have questions about traveling in China, please feel free to contact me via email.

Beijing street food

2009-03-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

OK, I'll admit it. I'm a Chinese food junkie. And I love the snacks you can buy on the streets. I love youtiao, which is a fried break stick (I remember eating this on my first trip to China in 1984.) and jianbing, which resembles a huge egg burrito, only crunchy. (One jianbing and you won't want anything moe to eat for hours!) I'm also addicted to deep-fried lamb and pork kebobs sprinkled with cumin and ground chili peppers. Yum!

When I lived in Beijing, I ussd to eat frequently at the Wangfujing night food market, and usually make it there at least once when I go back to Beijing. It is a snacker's heaven! There is every snack available, including regional specialties from throughout China, all in individual servings. I've never been brave enough to try the bug kebobs (grasshoppers, beetles, etc), but a friend who tried the scorpions says they tasted like popcorn. I'll take her word for it.

Even if you don't go there to eat, it's fun just to walk by the stands and see what's available.

I have been fortunate enough to have never gotten sick on street food. However, I've gotten sick after eating in restaurants. I asked someone about this once, and he explained street vendors only buy enough food to sell that day. Restaurants, on the other hand, buy large quanities of food which may not be properly refrigerated and sit out, gathering bacteria. Makes sense to me.

I do follow certain rules when deciding what street vendor I'll buy snacks from. First and foremost is how clean is his cart. If I see any dirt or the vendor not following good sanitary practices, I'll pass on by. Secondly, as much as I love kebobs, I'll never buy any on metal skewers -- you just don't know how well they've been cleaned between customers. It's got to be disposable skewers or I'm out of there.

And for extra insurance I have been vaccinated for hepatitis A.

Eating street food is a personal call. If you don't try street food, you're missing out on an important part of a country's culture. But if you do try it and it makes you sick, you're missing out on part of your vacation while you're recuperating in your hotel room.

Please see my website for more information about traveling in China.

China potpourri

2009-03-19T08:58:00.001-07:00

Just a few bits and pieces today:

Top Suite 101 stories
My article about the Shanghai motorcycle market was my top read story on Suite101 for the last 90 days. I write mainly travel-oriented stories about China and the Pacific Northwest, but put this one in their motorcycles section. It was written about a month after I started writing for Suite 101 and 10 days after the article in second place.

If you're a biker visiting Shanghai, be sure to check out this market. It's a little bit hard to find, but if you do, you can save big bucks on motorcycle parts and gear.

In second place is an article I wrote 10 days earlier about Washington's Stonehenge, a replica of the British monolith. Washington's Stonehenge is a memorial to Klickitat County war dead, and is part of the Maryhill Museum of Art complex.

Easy chicken recipe
Last week's blog was about an easy way to turn common chicken drumsticks into elegant dinner fare. Since I'd gotten the recipe from my friend Diana in Beijing, I let her know about it. She promptly posted it on her blog.

Friends who read the blog suggested the marinade would be good over pork tenderloin -- I'll have to try that. Another suggested barbecuing the drumsticks rather than baking them. Hmm. . .

Chinese in St. Louis
St. Louis Chinese Corner is a blog I learned about after signing up for the Friends of China group on LinkedIn. It's written by St. Louis resident Donna Gamache, who has been to China a couple of times in the course of her job with a company that does business with China.

For more information about travel in China, please visit my website.

Easy Chinese chicken!

2009-03-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

The night before we left Beijing to return home on our last trip, we went to my friend Diana's condo for dinner. Diana is a very successful young Chinese career woman who I've know since 1995. Diana had just returned from Singapore the day before, and said she was too tired to fix a Chinese meal for us. So she cooked Italian, a cuisine she likes a lot. She cooked a wonderful baked pasta dish (I still need to get the recipe for it!), garlic bread, vegetable salad and one Chinese dish, baked chicken drumsticks.

The drumsticks are superb. They're quick and easy to make, and look elegant. I've served this dish frequently, a couple of times to guests who think I've slaved away in a kitchen all day. Not so!

Here's what you need to do it:

chicken drumsticks -- I use two drumsticks per person
cooking oil
honey
soy sauce
chopped fresh garlic

1. Wash and dry the drumsticks -- defrost first if you're starting with frozen, which I always do.
2. Put the drumsticks in one layer in a plastic or glass container with a tight-fitting lid, and pour soy sauce over them. I use enough soy sauce to cover the bottom of the container.
3. Chop fresh garlic. Diana didn't say how much garlic to use, but I use 2-3 big cloves because we like garlic.
4. Mix together two tablespoons each of the oil and honey, add the chopped garlic and stir again. If you're doing more than four drumsticks, you will need to increase the amounts of oil, honey and garlic.
5. Pour this mixture over the chicken and soy sauce, put the lid on the container and refrigerate anywhere from one hour to overnight. I usually start the marinating process in the morning. Shake the container every couple of hours if you want to mix everything up.
6. Transfer to an oven-proof dish and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour or until the chicken is done. Serve and enjoy the compliments!

I haven't tried this yet, but I think it would work just as well with chicken wings and thighs, or turkey drumsticks.

Please see my website for information about traveling in China.

15,000 photographs!

2009-03-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

I estimate I've taken 15,000 photographs of China since I made my first trip way back in 1984. That's a lot of photos!

I took 2,400 photos on our last trip to China alone. Of course, I was shooting mainly to illustrate the podcasts I was working on for VisualTravelTours.com. I eventually did seven podcasts on Beijing for them, and they should be available for sale soon. VTT likes 65-75 photos per podcast, but I tried to shoot at least 300 pictures for each podcast topic, so I could pick and choose the best ones. As it turned out, my favorite photo of the trip was not one I used in a podcast. It's the one here, of a couple of butterflys getting up close and personal with a flower at the ancient village of Cuandixia.

Keeping track of that many photos is no mean feat. When I lived in China, and shooting two to four rolls of film a week (more if I went out of town -- I once shot four rolls in two hours at a minority village in South China), it was time-consuming to do this. When I got a roll of film back from the developers, I immediately wrote the subject matter on the back of each picture. Negatives came in flimsy paper sleeves, so I wrote the roll number on that. Then I matched the photo to the negative, and wrote the roll and negative numbers on the back of the photo. When I returned to the United States, I made photo albums out of large three-ring binders and plastic photo sleeves.

That was in the days when I was using a film camera. Now I shoot digital. No more albums, which I miss as I enjoy looking through my China photos from years past. Of course, I coiuld make prints from my digital photos, but I'm too lazy I guess. My photos are now organized by trip or by the day I took them, then copied to a CD for safekeeping in case my computer crashes. I use my China photos for writing projects, so I keep them on the computer. Also, I've set up my screen saver as a photo slide show, so I can see my pictures in random order that way.

I'll never go back to film cameras. The quality of digital photography is improving so rapidly. Plus, I like the size of the digital camera. I have two, and both fit in my jean pocket to whisk out when a photo op pops up. I used to keep a film camera, along with a couple of lenses, in my backpack, which got to be extremely heavy after awhile. Sometimes I wouldn't take it with me, and, of course, that's when I missed out on the best photos. I probably would have taken five times as many photos if I'd had a digital camera when I lived in Beijing.

Please see my web site for more information about travel in China.

China then and now

2009-02-19T11:06:00.001-08:00

I've spent the last couple of days updating the China section of a multi-country guidebook for a publisher.

I don't know when the China section was originally written, but I'm guessing 15 to 20 years ago. The writer obviously has not been in China in the last 10 to 15 years.

For example, the writer talks about the Friendship Stores, once the only store that foreigners were allowed to shop in, and even then they had to use a special money, called FEC for Foreign Exchange Certificates. Chinese were not allowed in unless they were employees or had FEC, which was very hard for them to obtain since they weren't foreigners. Now anybody can shop at Friendship Stores, though few do because the stores haven't adopted modern marketing practices.

The writer also mentions how people could not stay at the Beijing Hotel, then Beijing's premier hotel, unless a high Chinese official got them in. Now you can book rooms there over the Internet. And the Beijing Hotel is no longer the premier hotel in Beijing, though it's still a nice hotel.

And I bet Sanya residents would be surprised to see how their city is described: You get there on an old Russian biplane; there are only 500 rooms and none have private bathrooms. Today, Sanya on Hainan Island has a modern airport with more than 100 flights a day. It has thousands of hotel rooms in all price ranges, including a bunch of five-stars. Sanya is now known as China's Hawaii!

Please see my website for more information on travel in China.

Motorcycle junkie

2009-02-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

When you're married to a motorcycle fanatic as I am, you spend a lot of time looking at motorcycles wherever you go.

Wherever we go, Jon must stop and look at every motorcycle he finds. This is especially true in foreign countries where different brands are manufactured. Then he takes pictures of them. Looking at motorcycles in foreign countries takes up a lot of time that could be spent in museums, parks and shops.

On a trip to London a few years ago, we visited the London Motorcycle Museum in a quiet suburb, and then made a day trip to the Sammy Miller Museum which is located in a small town 15 miles west of Southhampton. Sammy Miller is a motorcycle racing legend, so of course as long as we were in the country, Jon had to go there.

In Shanghai last spring, we went to the motorcycle market, a hodge-podge of dozens of repair and accessories shops. I really couldn't complain about that because we went there to buy parts for a Chinese motor scooter I owned. Still, I did enjoy the experience, and almost bought a couple of new helmets, but they didn't have the ones I wanted in my size. Just as well, I'm not sure where I would have put them in my luggage. Jon did buy a muffler for the scooter. It was a long, round cylinder. We were afraid it might look like a bomb to airport x-ray machines, so we had the hotel write "motorcycle muffler" in characters and put it with the muffler. Sure enough, when we got home, Jon found a note that said his luggage had been opened and inspected.

When we were in Beijing last fall, so I could research walking tours for the Visual Travel Tours podcasts I was doing, I snapped the above picture of a motor scooter. We were walking through the hutongs to a cooking class, when we came across a couple of motor scooters outfitted for firefighting purposes. Hutongs are narrow alleys that are much too small for regular fire trucks, so the ingenious Chinese adapted motor scooters for this purpose.

Please visit my website for more information about traveling in China.

Chinese chops

2009-02-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

I've always been fascinated by Chinese chops or seals. I even owned a chop with my name on it long before I went to China for the first time. I had a friend who was going to Hong Kong pick one up for me.

Now I own another one. The second one I got on a trip to Xi'an. I'd been to the Terra Cotta Warriors the day before, and wanted something as a souvenir. As I was walking through the Muslim Quarter, I spotted a chop maker. He had a chop with a warrior on top, so I whisked out my business card in Chinese and had him engrave my first name on it.

Surprisingly, the characters for Cheryl are different on each chop.

The friend picked my name out of a book of English names translated into Chinese characters. When I worked at China Daily, they translated my name phonetically into characters. That's the one that I use today, usually when "signing" the books on China I've written. In those characters, my name is pronounced as "shay ree la." It's just a group of characters that don't mean anything. Depending on the characters used, I'm told "Cheryl" can mean "morning dew" or "snow drop." And there are problably other translations out there.

There's a couple of sites on the Internet which will translate your name into characters. And I found out today, when I was researching chops for a Suite101.com article that you can use Adobe Illustrator to come up with a chop based on your own signature. How exciting this would be, but probably only if your signature is legible to begin with.

Visit my website for more information about traveling in China.

Why China?

2009-02-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

In the 1980s, I owned a small weekly newspaper in rural Eastern Washington. I was sitting at my desk one morning in February 1984 going through the mail, when I came across a flyer from a New York travel agent who was putting together tours of China for American journalists. The price was certainly right, about $1,500 for two weeks (airfare, hotel, meals) out of San Francisco. So I said to myself, what the heck, why not? Six weeks later, I was in Shanghai, clearing customs and immigration.

I remember thinking what did I get myself into, as we walked from the plane between two long rows of armed soldiers into what appeared to be a very large Quonset-type metal building which served as the terminal. The huge room was filled with hard benches, each one with armed soldiers sitting at each end. Our group was directed to go behind a curtain after which we walked the length of building. When we exited from behind another curtain, we were officially in China. We sat on the hard benches for awhile, and then reboarded our plane for Beijing and the official start of the tour.

I've been through the Shanghai airport many times since then, and I'm happy to see that it's a thoroughly modern airport now. In that first trip, we stayed in Beijing, with stops in Jinan, Qufu, Taishan, Nanjing, Wuxi and finally back to Shanghai. When I returned home, I wrote a series of articles about the trip for my newspaper. Looking back over that first one recently, I found I wrote, "I've never had all that much interest in the Orient, so why I went to China, I'll never know."

I still don't know today why I went to China, but I do know that trip changed my life forever. Ten years later, I returned to work as a copy editor at China Daily on a one-year contract. I came back to the United States when that contract ended, but a year later, I was back at China Daily for another year. Since that contract ended, I've gone back to China about every other year, including two trips in 2008.

Me and Suite101

2009-02-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

I became a contributing writer to Suite101.com in December 2008, and post articles on travel in China on a regular basis.

Here's a list of the articles I've posted on Beijing so far:

Great Wall of China
How to avoid the crowds of tourists at Badaling Great Wall
The ever-popular Beihai Park, which is a favorite of mine
Four must-see sites in Beijing: Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City
The Summer Palace, a gorgeous park which is another favorite of mne and a must-see for visitors to Beijing
Tian'anmen Square, one of the must-see places to visit in Beijing
The Forbidden City, located across the street from Tian'anmen
Fun and free things to do in Beijing
Expanded subway system makes it easier to move around Beijing
The Soong Ching Ling House offers peace and quiet on the banks of upper Houhai Lake. Soong was the widow of Sun Yat-Sen, and a noted personality in her own right.
Beijing Aquarium
Tips for coping with the language barrier
Panjiayuan flea market is Beijing's biggest and best flea market. It's also known as the Dirt Market because at one time it was located in a big dirt field.

Here's a couple of stories I've posted so far for travel elsewhere in China:

Shanghai Motorcycle Market is a good place to get parts for Chinese motorcycles and scooters which are becoming increasingly popular in the United States because of their low prices.
Yixing teapots are made from a special clay which absorbs the flavor of the tea. We visited here last year on an overnight trip from Shanghai.

The above stories are short, because that's the way Suite101 wants them. I look at them as teasers, to be expanded on my growing website, Cheryl's China.

Stay tuned because there are more stories to come!

Update on my China activities

2009-01-31T16:24:00.000-08:00

After almost a year off, it's time to reactivate this blog.

During that time, I've made two trips to China, finally got a new website on traveling in China up and running, and have written seven podcasts about Beijing for VisualTravelTours. The podcasts should be up and running soon, and available for purchase. You can then download them to your IPod wherever you are, and off you go.

I really enjoyed doing the podcasts, and learned a whole lot about Beijing in the process. I will look at the city through different eyes the next time we go back.

My husband and I went to Shanghai in March, as planned. We really don't like Shanghai that much -- it's much too frenzied and fast-paced. We spent about half the time away from Shanghai, on an overnight trip to Wuxi and Yixing, and day trips to Tongli and Jiading. We also spent Easter Sunday holed up in our friends' apartment where we ate a lot of food and had an Easter egg decorating contest. The person who had the best decorated egg won a chocolate bunny. What else!

We returned to China in October, this time to Beijing, spending 12 days there so I could do research for the podcasts. Even though it'd been only two years since I was last year, there were a lot of changes. The expanded subway system is great!

Since we've been back, I've started a new website, Cheryl's China. It's not as comprehensive as my old one, but I'm updating it a couple of times a week, so it's getting there. I'd eventually like to get it up to about 100 pages. The old one was only 10 pages, so this one will be a whole lot bigger and better. Check back regularly!

I'm also a contributing writer for Suite101.com, writing mainly about travel in China. I write a couple of stories a week for them. Click here for a list of articles I've written for them.

Getting ready to go

2008-02-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Our visas, allowing us to enter China, came last week, and with it a surprise.

We had applied for the standard tourist visa, which gives you 60 or 90 days to enter China with a maximum stay of 30 days.

What we got were visas which give us one year to enter China with a maximum stay of 60 days. I wish I'd known this sooner because visa prices went up $30 each the week before we applied for ours.

This is apparently in retaliation for the United States raising its visa prices for everyone, not just the Chinese, to $131. The USA also requires foreigners to fax their itinerary two days before they arrive here. This reportedly is for homeland security purposes. At the same time, the government is requiring this, they're planning to mount a multi-million dollar compaign to attract foreign tourists. Go figure!

We're working on gifts now to take to our friends. We each take a small wheeled suitcase with a day pack to carry on the plane. That limits the size of the gifts we can take. Plus, all the neat souvenir items, such as mugs and T-shirts with Washington on them, are usually made in China. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle! In the past I have scrapped off "made in China" stickers as well as cut tags off clothing. I am trying something new this time: having items made with pictures I've taken on them. In China, you have to be careful about giving gifts that you've made yourself. For so many years, the people did not have enough money to live on, let alone buy gifts, so any gifts were homemade. Today, with their standard of living rising, they have money to buy gifts, and a store-bought item has become a status symbol. I'm hoping the gifts we're taking this year are just the right compromise. They can be seen at http://www.photoworks.com/storefront/Cheryl_Probst.

One friend is a diabetic who loves sweets, so we're taking along a lot of sugar-free candy for her. She also likes Sweet 'n Low, so we're taking a long a couple of boxes of packets for her. Apparently you can get artificial sweeteners in China, but she says it's not as good as Sweet 'n Low.

On becoming a Sinophile

2008-02-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

On becoming a Sinophile

My husband has become an unbashed Sinophile, which, as a macho motorcycle rider, is about the last thing I ever thought he'd turn into.

When we got married in 2002, I'd already spent two years working in Beijing and traveling around the Middle Kingdom, plus I'd been back to China twice since my last contract with China Daily ended in 1998. I was having withdrawal symptoms as it had been a couple of years since I'd been there, and proposed a trip for our first anniversary. He wasn't having any of it. No way he'd ever go to China, he declared, especially since the SARS epidemic was still going on (though in the waning days). Let's go somewhere else. So we went to London -- a city I'd visited several times before -- instead. He got sick the morning we were to return home and puked his guts out across the Atlantic. I told you we should have gone to China, I smirked.

Six months later, in the spring of 2004, I broached the subject again. I NEED to go to China, I told him. No way, he responded. OK, then, I'll go by myself. No way, he said. Never mind that before we were married, I'd spent 30 years traveling around the world by myself, and was perfectly capable of going to China again on my own. He reluctantly agreed to accompany me for a quick trip to Beijing, complaining all the way. Some good Chinese friends of mine met our late flight at the airport and got us settled into our hotel near the Chongwenmen subway stop. The next morning we took the subway to Tian'anmen Square, walking the length of it before touring the Forbidden City. His vocabulary that morning consisted of one word: awesome, and just a few hours later he was making plans for our next trip to China. And I thought you didn't want to come to China, I muttered to myself.

Two years later I returned to Beijing with three friends on a "ladies only" tour, and he complained because he wasn't invited. (Hey, sweetie pie, at least I didn't go by myself!)

He is the driving force behind our trip to China next month, and is even more excited than I to be returning to the country I consider my second home. Maybe if we weren't going just to Shanghai . . . I've been there twice, both times on tours (once as a tourist and then as a tour director) and have never been impressed with China's largest city. We'll be spending the whole time there, with maybe some day trips, and friends from Beijing will fly down one weekend to see us.

Still, it's gonna be a good trip.

P.S. He didn't get sick coming back from China, though he barfed his way across the Atlantic again after a trip to Nice, France, the following year.

Chun jie hao!

2008-01-27T09:36:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year, known as Spring Festival, is coming up next week. Spring Festival is the equivalent of our Christmas, just as "chun jie hao" is the equivalent of our saying Merry Christmas, meaning in Mandarin "happy spring festival." Families travel hundreds of miles across the country to be together, gifts are given, and the night before is spent making dumplings. A lot of small shops close so the owners can go home for the holidays. China Daily always gave staff three days off, and put out smaller newspapers with a skeleton staff the rest of the week.

I lived in Beijing during two Spring Festivals, in 1995 and 1997.

Though the temperatures were freezing, it didn't stop people from enjoying the festivities. Parks have temple fairs, with games, food, entertainment and a gazillion people. The first year I went to the temple fair at Ditan Park, a major park in northcentral Beijing which was only a short bus ride away from China Daily, where I lived and worked. I was able to only see a few things before people swarmed the park, making it impossible for a short person like myself to see anything, let alone move about. I know now what sardines feel like!

I learned well from that experience: don't go in the middle of the day. Two years later, I left early for the temple fair at Da Guan Yuan, a smaller park in southwestern Beijing. This time the bus ride took an hour, instead of just a few minutes, but it got me there for the start of a very colorful parade with dragon dancers and musicians. Some even rode toy ponies like children ride.

After the parade, I entered the park. It was still early, so crowds were minimal. I enjoyed watching people play games, the entertainment which included singers, and, most amazing, men wearing high stilts doing somersaults, always managing to land upright on the stilts. Talk about coordination! I marveled at the delicious looking snacks for sale, but the crowds were starting to swell, and I wanted more than snacks to eat, so I left, and had lunch at a noodle stand just outside the park walls.

I also made a few trips to Beijing Zhan (train station) to photograph the crowds coming and going. It's very hard to get train tickets during this time, so when a co-worker and I made a day trip to Tianjin that week, we took a bus. Firecrackers and fire works weren't allowed in Beijing, but they were in Tianjin, on the coast, and the streets were littered with red paper remnants. We walked through the shops on Ancient Culture Street, buying some tiny souvenirs. We met a man from Hong Kong who, like us, was working in Beijing. The three of us had lunch at a dumpling restaurant, and then caught the train back to Beijing. Because everyone had already arrived at their destination, few people were traveling that day, and we had the car to ourselves.

Cheryl's China

Are you a Dragon?

New York Times China picks

Beijing Musuem Pass

Celebrate two New Year's in January

On a slow boat to China

Chinese knots date back to ancient times

Planning a trip to China

Meeting the locals

Chinese in Yellowstone

The math is mind-boggling!

What I like about Xi'an

Chinese history

Think sweet!

Thank the Chinese

Peanut brittle -- Chinese style

Exciting developments for Chinese trains

Papercuts: a traditional Chinese art

Contrasting the old and the new

Peking Duck: Yum!

Chinese "accessories"

Wangfujing night food market

Doing business with China

A visit to Qingdao

My books on Amazon Kindle

Top 41 list

U.S. appoints new ambassador to China

Do you have questions about travel in China?

Cheryl's China: the newspaper

President Oba-mao

Life in the hutongs

Sharing my travels

Great Wall Ends at Shanhaiguan

Tea Drinkers' Heaven

Give Gaobedian a miss

The terrible TOEFL!

The things that parents say!

Is this imaginative or what!

Church services abroad can be cultural experience

Farmers Markets

China's picturesque money

China for cheap!

Two Beijing podcasts are now available on Amazon

Joan Hinton: an American in China

Where's the wildlife?

Cheryl's Guides

My favorite travel gadget

UK Motorcycle Museums

Cheap calls to China

Kaifeng, China

China Travel Tips

My take on a top 10 list of places to see in China

The Year of the Tiger

Saturday in the park

My top 10 travel destinations

Try before you buy!

Writing about travel in China

My Beijing guides in Frankfurt!

Saving on travel, part 5

From guidebooks to papercuts

DIY Beijing

Shameless self-promotion!

Tips for saving on lodging costs

Saving on travel, part 3

Saving on travel costs, part 2

Parents Guide to Beijing

China podcasts are available now!

Tips for traveling cheaply, part I

Terracotta Warriors in England

Birmingham buffet

Off again!

Park yourself in a park!

Art in public places

Hoppy Easter!

50 articles!!!

Beijing street food

China potpourri

Easy Chinese chicken!

15,000 photographs!

More Suite101 stories on China