Dumplings, Doppelkopf & Roof

It is quite late now, so just a short, irish style, blog entry. Today we woke up early to go one last time to class at the school and joined the server/database class. Then we played some table tennis in the  basement of the school and had some tough matches versus some Chinese students practicing there. Afterwards we took a shower and had some dumplings with Li and Zhu. Delicious 😀

IMG_3479 „Dumplings, Doppelkopf & Roof“ weiterlesen

798 Art Gallery and German Dinner

Today after work Lili, Kenny and Johnny took us to the so called 798 Art Gallery not far away from our school. We took a look around and visited some of the galleries. The 798 Art Gallery is a big district where a lot of artists have a showroom, there are also some nice restaurants like the „Schindlers Autoladestelle“, where we went for dinner. But first some impressions of the 798:

Then we had our first real German food in seven weeks. It was just awesome, we had Weißwürstel, potato salad, bread with liver sausage, lard and cheese, a kind of Schweinzhaxe and most important „798 Art Gallery and German Dinner“ weiterlesen

Bird’s Nest

Today we met at 9:30 at the company to drive to the Bird’s Nest, the Olympic stadium of Beijing. As usual, Lili managed to surprise us. Instead of parking somewhere outside the Olympic park and then going to the stadium like a normal visitor, we drove straight into the parking lot of the Bird’s Nest, which is located beneath it. We just showed a small piece of paper we got from a police/security officer at the first gate and everyone let us pass through.

After we parked we took an elevator to get to the 4th floor, where the VIP boxes are located. We entered one of them and saw a wall with monitors showing pictures of security cameras. An employee explained a little bit about the control system, from the room we were standing in it was possible to display information about nearly everything that’s electronically controllable. The cameras, water flow, temperature, elevators and so on. We could also step outside to see the inside of the stadium, 91.000 people fit inside. Here are some pictures of the room and the inside of the Bird’s Nest:

„Bird’s Nest“ weiterlesen

Temple of Heaven

Today we decided to visit the Temple of Heaven. After our breakfast, which was baguette with butter, we took the subway to go there. We were accompanied by Li and one of his friends, unfortunately I forgot his name. The subway was quite full, no possibility to sit down after our exhausting visit of the English Corner yesterday. But nevertheless we arrived at our destination and payed 35 Yuan (5 €) entrance fee.

First we visited the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, according to our travel guide the hall is the „most complete and greatest building of Chinese architecture“. Here are some impressions of it:

The ancient emperors sacrificed here to pray for good weather and a rich harvest. „Temple of Heaven“ weiterlesen