Website changes

When I was a writer for Suite101, I wrote dozens of articles about China, frequently mentioning them on this blog with a link to the Suite site.

I no longer write for Suite and, at my request, the company deleted all my articles. The information contained in those articles is too good to just toss out, so I am gradually adding the ones on China to my website, Cheryl's China.

If you haven't checked my website out lately, please check back again...again...and again. Adding this content, plus other pages I'm working on at the same time, is a never-ending process. Right now, I'm updating once a week.

I've also added a Twitter feed to the home page. I tweet mainly about China, particularly interesting places to visit and news articles that I find interesting. Readers are always welcome to follow me @cherylprobst, but if you're following a lot of people, my China tweets could get lost in the shuffle. But they're all in one spot on my website.

Beijing Auto Show

The Beijing Auto Show is the capital's premier auto exhibition, at which auto makers make important announcements. This year's was no exception. Lamborghini, the Italian manufacturer of fast, expensive cars, announced it was going  to make a sports utility vehicle (SUV). The vehicle, as pictured in the article, sure didn't look like an SUV to me, but more like a jazzed up sedan.

I went to the Beijing Auto Show one year when I lived there. It was interesting to see all the cars made in China, including Jeep, Buick and Mercedes. Beautiful young Chinese women, in gorgeous clothing, adorned the cars, all except for one vehicle that I never thought to see at a car show. It was a tank, complete with guns.

I need see a couple of vehicles that I could have afforded. One was a Jeep, a vehicle that I have always wanted but could never afford at home. The Chinese-made Jeep cost about $4,000 new then. When I asked Chinese friends why it was so cheap, they told me it was very difficult to get parts and service work done in China. Regardless, if I had been brave enough to drive in Beijing traffic, I would have gotten one.

The other vehicle I liked was a tiny van that looked like a breadbox, but still had room for six or so people, making it popular for use as a taxi. I remember one night we got nine people in it. It was very crowded, of course, but it was late at night, and we'd already been waiting 20 minutes for a taxi and had no idea when the next one would come along.

The van was about half the size of one of our mini-vans, I wanted to stuff one in a suitcase and bring it home with me.

What's your favorite car?

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.

Slide shows on China

Opening slide on Buddhist cave art

One of the things I like about my new Cheryl's China website is the ability to easily add slide shows. So far, I've done one on sites I've visited on the Great Wall of China and another on snack foods that can be found at the Wangfujing night food market in Beijing.

I'm working on another right now called Buddhist cave art. It's primarily about the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, but does have a few photos of Thousand Buddha Hill outside of Jinan which I visited on my first trip to China in 1984.

Buddhist cave art is fascinating, with carvings of statues ranging from a couple of inches tall to tens of feet high. Cave art may be a slight misnomer as the unique statues are carved into a hillside in such a manner they look like they are in caves. Cave art flourished in the 5th and 6th centuries. Much of the cave art is deteriorating from being exposed to the elements for so long, but what remains is quite impressive and worth a visit.

While Thousand Buddha Hill has only a thousand Buddhas carved into a hillside, Longmen has more than 100,000 statues of Buddha and his disciples. It is a particularly scenic setting alongside the Yi River about nine kilometers from central Luoyang.

More slide shows are on the drawing board, so check my website frequently. I have around 25,000 photos of China, so I've got a lot to choose from.

Are you going to China?

If you're planning a trip to China, be sure to check out my website, Cheryl's China. If you have questions about traveling in China, especially Beijing, feel free to email me. 

Introducing the new Cheryl's China

Introducing the new Cheryl's China website.

My new website is finally up! It's been about a year in the making, due to several disastrous starts and other problems encountered along the way. You don't want to know about them. Honest. Trust me on this.

The new Cheryl's China represents a major overhaul of the website I originally put up on 1999, which was only 10 pages. The last Cheryl's China was 14 pages, but was two separate websites cobbled together, because the software I designed my site in only allowed 10 pages per site. It also was very time-consuming to update, so it didn't get updated very often.

All this changed with the new Cheryl's China. It's about 40 pages now. Since it is easier to update this site, I plan to add new pages periodically, so you'll want to check back often.

This website is heavy on Beijing travel. I lived in the Chinese capital for two years and that is where we most often go when we return to China. However, I've been to a lot of other places in China, and I'll be adding information on them as time passes.

The section on Chinese food is getting rave reviews from viewers so far. I love to take pictures of the food we eat, and it was difficult to pick out my favorite food photos -- I have hundreds of them.

Please take a look at Cheryl's China.

And, remember, if you have questions about traveling in China, especially Beijing, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

Cheryl's China: the newspaper

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.