first translation of the China trip blog in English

This is a translation from a previousely written travelblog in Dutch because of several requests i am now translating it all to English. This is the first translation. the trip to Beijing was from 28th of april until the 8th of june this year.



Travelstories: We arrived!
Date: 29-04-2008
Location: Beijing
written by Koen van Westbroek
Translated from Dutch to English by Ester van Dam
Yesterday we arrived in China. The journey went very smooth except for the last bit with the taxi: the driver apparently thought that dropping us off in front of the Youth Hostel was too much hassle. He was pointing at the one-way traffic sign and left us at the corner of the street. That was a long and heavy 500m with the luggage and after a night of airplanesitting.

From the outside the Hostel had no resemblance what so ever with the pictures we had seen on the internet before booking… that has to do with the fact that most of Beijing has transformed into a building site. Only a few more months of vigorous building activities before the Olympics begin…
The façade of the hostel was invisible or gone well at least now we recognize the Hostel by it’s blue metal plates that is kinda easy.
The room we have is rather small, 80% is taken by the bunk beds and when more than 2 people try to take something out of their suitcase, they have to do it one at the time. Apart from that it is a very quiet place, in the centre of town; it has lots of hallways and staircases which give a very authentic feel to it.


Today (29th April) we met Xu Laoshi. For Koen and Ester it was a happy reunion but for Natasja and Maarten it was the first time to meet him. Ester had phoned him yesterday to tell him that we had arrived. But when she came back, she wasn’t sure if anyone had understood anything of the conversation. Today we found out that they had. Xu Laoshi had come to the Hostel to pick us up at 09:00 am. So when we went to TianTan park with the bus for the very first time at least we had someone with us who knew exactly where to go! The city itself is so big that it would have probably taken us much longer to get there. Ofcourse Xu Laoshi knew which bus to take and where to get off.
Today we trained for about 5 hours in the Temple of Heaven park. It is a beautiful place to train and the weather was perfect, about 25c, sunshine (no smog!). Tomorrow we will try to get there by ourselves. We promised him to be there at 10am.
Xu Laoshi is a very fun and sweet person and an exceptional good teacher; sometimes it is difficult to understand everything because of the language: His English is just as good as our Chinese…But with sign language and hand gestures and being physically molded into the right shape, we are getting there.
To close off the day we had dinner with Xu Laoshi in a restaurant close to our hostel. The food is delicious here!