The beginning of the journey

Greetings from Beijing,

It's been a busy and hectic start for the trip in Asia! Beijing is such a vast and busy city that couldn't expect it to be like this. Although there are 15 million people living here, so I guess that shoud've expected that :). We came here one week ago and have been strolling through the major sights like Forbidden city, Summer palace, Ming tombs, Great wall, Temple of heaven park, Lama + Confucius temples, Tiananmen Square, and just been amazed abouth the hectic life on streets of this city. Huge buildings and between them scruffy (but some of them quite charming) hutong-areas, beautiful parks & architecture in some areas, very wide roads with frightening amount of cars, and every where lots of construction going on. A big cloud of pollution over the city and crowds every where. Beijing is preparing for the coming olympic games in 2008, and it'll be interesting to see how the city can handle the guests and athletes and vice versa. I've taken quite a lot of photos but it seems difficult to download them in the internetcafes and I've also managed to forget the downloading cd back home.. I'll see what can do later, it'd be nice to have some of the pics on this site.

It's been quite a new experience to see what a huge city in China is like, as it's quite different from Europe even though it's commercialized probably a lot over the years and lots of street names and names are in English, also the announcements in the tube etc. Tomorrow we are continueing to Shanghai by night train for the New Year celebrations. It's going to be the year of the dog from 29.1. :). 

I'll continue the story from Shanghai!