Tuesday, November 13, 2007

My 1st Taste of China

Beijing, China 2004

My first taste of China was marvelous.... and has no connection to the picture below. But in China, they eat bugs as snacks and I found this yummy meal at a wet market.



The wet market I went to was close to our hotel. I joined my dad on his business trip to Beijing for a few days ... thanks Dad for letting me tag along!



We were also walking distance to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

The Forbidden City was home to the emperors of China.. including their wives and concubines.
The Forbidden City is the world's largest surviving palace complex and covers 72 hectares. It consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms.


The Tiananmen Square is widely known for the 1989 protests also knows as the Tianenmen Square Massacre. The series of demonstrations led by activists, students, and intellectuals against the goverment resulted in a military crackdown which left many dead. (Famous Photo below right entitled "The Unknown Rebel" taken from wikipedia.org)



The Great Wall is the world's longest human-made structure, stretching over approximately 6,700 km (4,160 miles) in total. It is also the largest human-made structure ever built in terms of surface area and mass. At its peak the Ming Wall was guarded by more than one million men.It has been estimated that somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 million Chinese died as part of the centuries-long project of building the wall.



GREAT WALL MYTH BUSTED!!!!

Ripley's Believe It or Not! cartoon from May 1932 explains the fact that the wall is "the mightiest work of man, the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon" and Richard Halliburton's 1938 book Second Book of Marvels makes a similar claim, but it is not true. This belief has persisted, assuming urban legend status, sometimes even entering school textbooks. Arthur Waldron, author of The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, has speculated that the belief might go back to the fascination with the "canals" once believed to exist on Mars. (The logic was simple: If people on Earth can see Mars's canals, the Martians might be able to see the Great Wall.)

* some text taken from wikipedia.org

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Daddy's girl ka talaga :p