Monday through Friday was packed with instructing the 82 participants in our seminar and interacting with our hosts from the China Banking Regulatory Commission. It seemed like every meal brought a new dignitary who wanted to have a conversation with us. It was flattering, but as much as I like Chinese food, 10 straight meals made me wish for a cheeseburger. We finished up with the seminar about 3:00pm on Friday and renewed our sightseeing at the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is another large site in the middle of Beijing where the emperor went to pray for good harvests and other desirable events. It was a beautiful, relatively peaceful place (maybe because we got there about closing time). Here are some pictures.
This is the front gate
This is a view of the inner courtyard
This is one of the main prayer sites. It may look familiar because it is often used as an international symbol for China.
This is some detail from the ceiling of one of the buildings
This is a picture of me with Mr. Pan Guangwei. Mr. Pan is the deputy director of the HR department at the CBRC. It turns out that in the Chinese bureaucracy titles can be misleading. The most important person in the organization is the Director of HR--he has the dossiers on everyone. The second most important person is the International Director because he speaks for the government. I figured this made Mr. Pan the third most important person at the CBRC-- everyone certainly deferred to him. All the people were exceedingly nice to us, but an edgier side sometimes came out when they were dealing with people on the outside.
This is the way the emperor and his court dressed when they came to pray at the Temple of Heaven
After we went to the Temple of Heaven, we intended to have dinner at a famous Beijing seafood restaurant and then go to the Beijing Opera. We had received mixed reviews of the opera, but we figured that a little culture would do us good. Alas, Beijing traffic struck again and it took over an hour to get from the Temple of Heaven to the restaurant (which didn't live up to its billing in my opinion). As a result, we were too late to go to the opera. It turned out that Mr. Pan was relieved--he told us that he had lived in Beijing all his life and had never been to the opera--he also had no plans ever to go.
We ended up walking "Bar Street", which is a chain of bars and restaurants circling a lake. With all the lights and people, it was very pretty and probably more entertaining than the opera. There was every kind of bar, with every kind of music--from traditional Chinese to Simon and Garfunkel (not them actually, but some Chinese musicians playing their music). There were also many different kinds of restaurants. We passed one that said "Genuine American Food". They had to grab me as I made a break for the door. After we circled the lake--probably about a mile all the way around--we headed back to the hotel.
In my next post, I'll load some pictures from our visit to the Summer Palace--my favorite of all the places we visited in Beijing.
Well, this is my first blog. Chris has been pestering me about starting one and given that I want to post some pictures from my recent trip to China, I thought I'd give it a try.Here's picture of one of the buildings at the Ming Tombs where we visited on our first day in Beijing. The tombs are one of the five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in and around Beijing. The Ming Tombs are the burial place for 13 of the 16 Ming Emperors. They are mostly intact and because of the archaeological challenges of digging them up, they are mostly undisturbed.
This is a photo of a map that shows the valley where the Ming Tombs are located. Although Beijing is in a relatively level plain, the mountains start up very quickly just outside the city. The Tombs are located in sort of a bowl, as you can see from the map. It's a couple of miles from the entrance to the main tomb at top center (where my photo is from) and no one was allowed to ride inside the valley.
The same day that we visited the Ming Tombs we also went to the Great Wall. This was the one thing that I thought was a "must see" while I was in China. The wall runs from the sea northeast of Beijing to the desert in the west. It took 300,000 men over 10 years to finish. There are several sites near Beijing that are in good repair. The most famous one is at Badaling, where Nixon visited during his trip to China. It is the one most people know from news coverage of that trip and from movies. That was where our tour was going, but because of a horrific crash on the expressway we couldn't get there. We ended up at another nearby site (there are at least four accessible sites near Beijing) at Juyongguan Pass. This a picture of my friend Mark and me before we walked up the portion of the Wall you can see behind us. We actually made it only to the first tower, because it was so crowded we ran out of time. That was quite enough of a climb for me. If it took them six hours to move accident victims off the major expressway leading out of Beijing, I figured they'd probably just bury one American with a heart attack right where he fell.
On Sunday, we met with our hosts (at the local Starbucks) to get acquainted and work out some logistics. We went to lunch at Mao's favorite restaurant (it serves food in the style of his home province). Afterwards they dropped us off at the Forbidden City, which is right in the middle of Beijing. We got our first taste of Beijing traffic. The Forbidden City wasn't more than a couple of miles from our hotel. but it must have taken nearly a half hour to get there--on a Sunday afternoon! We started our visit from one side of the Forbidden City and walked through to the other side. Most of the large tourist sites around Beijing provide GPS enabled audio guides for which you pay a deposit that you get back when you return them. They worked very well. Here are some pictures from the Forbidden City. A lot of it was being restored and you'll be able to see the difference from sites I visited later which were in much better repair.
On the side of the Forbidden City where we exited is Tiananmen Square. It's supposed to be one of the biggest in the world, but it's so broken up with buildings, monuments and statuary that it's hard to see the expanse. It's most famous for the uprising that happened a few years back and the photo of one man standing in front of a tank. Today it's full of people flying kites and about a million capitalists hawking Mao watches and copies of "Quotations of Chairman Mao." I bought a copy and decided it would have come in handy when I was starting my management career. Here are some pictures:
That brought me to the end of the weekend. Then it was down to work. I'll publish some photos from the rest of my trip in the next installment.
This is the front gate
This is a view of the inner courtyard
This is one of the main prayer sites. It may look familiar because it is often used as an international symbol for China.
This is some detail from the ceiling of one of the buildings
This is a picture of me with Mr. Pan Guangwei. Mr. Pan is the deputy director of the HR department at the CBRC. It turns out that in the Chinese bureaucracy titles can be misleading. The most important person in the organization is the Director of HR--he has the dossiers on everyone. The second most important person is the International Director because he speaks for the government. I figured this made Mr. Pan the third most important person at the CBRC-- everyone certainly deferred to him. All the people were exceedingly nice to us, but an edgier side sometimes came out when they were dealing with people on the outside. 
This is the way the emperor and his court dressed when they came to pray at the Temple of Heaven
