Wednesday, 8th of July. Wake up call is at 6am. We are leaving in 30 minutes because Rich wants to beat crowds at Great Wall. I like this approach. It suits me well. If I can come somewhere soon I usually do it.
We have been warned about breakfasts in Chinese hotels, but that is nothing compared to warning we have received regarding today. The breakfast boxes hotels give to people who cannot come to proper breakfast are terrible. They were probably invented to torture people by hunger. So I cheated a bit and ate a few things I brought with myself. It did not help at all :-( Unfortunately this was not the only time we ended up with dreaded breakfast box. Well, even getting to places before crowd forms has some disadvantages.
Morning 7th of July starts with a wake up call. Twice. Either human factor or failure of technique. Or too eager receptionist. Or maybe I did not say Xie Xie (谢谢) the first time, because I thought it is an automatic call.
Rich has warned us during briefing yesterday breakfast in China is different from what we are used to. It is the same stuff you will get for dinner. So he usually does not bother with it. But not us! We came here to taste as much of Chinese meals as possible... at least I did (well I looked forward for Tibetan meals more, but that does not eliminate Chinese ones).
After 10 long hours of flying we landed at modern Terminal 3 in Beijing. But it was not over yet. We had to wait till Swine Flu Prevention Squad measures temperature of all passengers. Now, we will see if all of them were coughing and choking for nothing. And whether my claim in Flu Assessment paper "I have not been in close contact with anybody with flu symptoms" is correct.
Great, we (and everybody else) passed! So now to get rid of assessment and to pass infra thermometers in terminal. Success again. It looks like doors to China are open for us! Yippee! And I can say they take swine flu more seriously than in UK.
Last week we have returned from our 3 weeks long vacation in China. It was amazing holidays. It was our first vacation with a tour operator. We decided to use tour operator because it is not easy for individuals to get to Tibet. Visa are hard to get and going out of Lhasa needs "paperwork" too. Not to mention it is very hard to read Chinese for us ;-) , "nobody" speaks English and it is not possible to book train tickets online (tickets can be bought 2 days ahead and that does not suit my life style well).
We were bit unsure how it will be with operator, because we prefer to travel alone, but I have to say Explore outdid all our expectations. It seems Explore is oriented to customers similar to us (just older). And our tour leader Rich made our experience even better. He was fantastic. He worked hard to satisfy everybody (that is very hard in my point of view) and he succeeded. He helped Zuzka in restaurants to get meals suiting her allergy and he stopped bus any time he heard me taking pictures frantically (yes, I started to take photos through windows of bus, which is... not very satisfying). I have taken unbelievable number of photos, all our colleagues were shocked or amused after learning how many I have made. But many of them were just repeating existing photo just in case previous one was not good (remember - many of them were taken in bus or train (Rich could not stop train for me unfortunately)). So total number of independent compositions is much smaller... I am in the middle of processing them now and it will take some time before I am done, but I am able to publish about a few days from beginning. So stay close to Internet :-)
We were looking forward to our trip to Carcassonne, France since January or beginning of February when we booked our flight tickets. Our decision to go there was slightly different from our typical process we usually use: "Let's find some place where we can fly for a weekend cheaply".
This time we knew that we need to see Carcassonne. We knew it is beautiful castle and medieval city surrounded by walls. But that would not be enough. Our decision to go there was related to our passion to play board games (of German type). And Carcassonne was the first game I have played (I do not like it as much any more, there are so many better games out there now). Of course it helped that Ryan Air is flying there from London.
A few weeks ago we had visitors. Zuzka's parents came so we wanted to show them some places we knew they will like. So we decided to go to St Fagans and Bath.
I have been to both places before, but I did not see exactly the same part of it. And of course I am not going to show pictures of the same places.
Nearly half of Sunday we have spent in Copenhagen ZOO. It is very nice, big and most of animals are lucky enough to live in spacious places.
We could spend much more time there and I probably understand why they sell yearly ticket too. From photographer's perspective it not bad way to take photos of interesting animals (at leasts from a sluggish photographer's point of view) :-)
Because I decided to split "report" about our trip to Copenhagen according to themes, I could not show a few photos I wanted in the last post. Instead I am creating a post dedicated to theme I do not usually pay much attention.
We have been in Copenhagen during weekend and it could affect my observations, but Copenhagen seems to be very quiet city. Suburbs we have seen were peaceful and nice.
Our trip to Copenhagen during Early Bank Holiday was planned for about half a year. Price of flight tickets was good and Copenhagen is full of modern architecture, so I could not say 'no' to Zuzka. She even bought little book about modern architecture in Copenhagen and that helped to sell the idea of visiting Copenhagen to me easily :-)
So this post will be about architecture. Old and also modern one.
After we returned from Isle of Wight to Southampton we went to Brimar Guest House. It is very good guest house and I can endorse it. Friendly staff, clean, quiet, very good breakfast.
Our program for Sunday was to explore coast line of Dorset. Me and Peter have been there before, but other people in our group have not. And it is worth of seeing it more times. It took me longer than usual to decide which photo to select as main for this post. I like to select photo containing red or earth colours if there is some to complement "greenery" of the blog, but I realized many of recent "cover" photos are like that. And it would be mistake if I did not use Durdle Door to represent Dorset.
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