DAY TWO - BEIJING (26 DEC 2008)

Spent the morning finalising the hotels in Xian and Chengdu with my confirmed flight dates. The hotel in Xian - City Hotel, which I had a tentative reservations done apparently did not log my booking in their system and I had a hard time sorting out with the front desk staff over the phone. The hotel was undergoing partial refurbishment and single rooms were fully booked and my prior reservations was not registered in the system. Finally settled with the front desk staff after some haggling - that I will come in as planned on 28th Dec, hopefully at the time of check-in that single room would be available, if not then a double room or whatever is available. The combination of the hotel's location and room rates are hard to find even though there are hotels aplenty in Xian.

For Chengdu, the reservations was easily done online at the 7 Days Inn website. An almost immediate confirmation SMS was sent to my mobile line upon booking.

The big event in Beijing for this trip was the Great Wall trek on 27th Dec (Saturday). Hence for today I was taking it easy with visiting just the Temple of Heaven and then to the Olympic area for the Bird's Nest & the Water Cube - all easily accessible by subway. The weather was getting colder as I could feel the biting cold at my hands if I did not wear my gloves.












This wall works! It transmit sounds from one part to another part of the curved wall. I saw 2 persons trying it out each from a quite a distance from one another and they could speak and hear each other......quite amazing considering the many people shouting at the wall.



The voice of the person standing on the stone at the epi-centre was supposed to be the loudest and sharpest. Many people tried, I think the wrong way, by shouting at their loudest voice. If it works, a normal speaking voice will probably be more resonant. I did not try as there were too many people doing it.



The big disappointment was that I could not touch the actual turf of the Bird's Nest as the whole field was laid with artificial carpet grass, DAMN! DAMN!
In truth the stadium looks smaller than I imagined, watching the Olympics on TV.




I like the changing colours of the Water Cube by night only to find out at the last day (7 Jan) heading to and from the Beijing Airport that it looks even more amazing reflecting sunlight!





I needed my gloves on as it was biting cold, at least minus 4 to 6 degrees!