Beijing Day 1 _8 Nov 2009

I have been delaying my updating of Beijing photos as i took too many pictures and it took time to resize them.

I will start to paste Day 1 (8 Nov 2009) photos from today's blog onwards. I stayed at a budget hotel in Ju er Hutong ( Chrysanthemum Street )located in old town of Beijing ( Tong Cheng / East Town ) , which costs less than 40 SGD (200 RMB) per day inclusive of simple breakfast. The hotel room is clean, service is good, which i do not know if this s because the Beijing ppl is more friendly than Shanghainese, otherwise i am rather impressed by the service, the website is http://hantinghotels.com/ , sorry that they only have Mandarin version website if i am not wrong. Alternatively , you can go to http://www.ctrip.com// for booking on China hotels too if you are travelling to China.

Day 1 Drum / Bell Tower , Smoke Pipe Hutong

Drum tower


These are the long and steep stairs that turn my legs into jelly.


Broken drum to report seasons, 24 drums for 24 different timings in a year.


Water is used to calculate time.




Bell Tower for old Beijing time reporting.


Well, everybody knows Ti An Men from the song.


Smoke Pipe Hutong for souvenirs


Believe it or not , it s a public toilet.

Darby