Lunch with Hilton

On Thursday, Laura and I followed separate paths. I worked from my hotel room and went to lunch with my colleague Hilton Zhao while Laura and Annabel visited the Temple of Heaven, Tian'anmen Square, and the Forbidden City.


While I don't have Laura's pictures loaded onto my laptop yet, she said it was an amazing day. The Temple of Heaven was beautiful - here's the Wikipedia link:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_of_Heaven


Thursday was May Day - a National holiday to celebrate Workers and their contribution to the prosperity of the country. As such, apparently Tian'anmen Square - the largest urban square in the world - was absolutely jam-packed with people, many of them in line to visit Mao's tomb. It is said that Tian'anmen Squ. can hold up to a million people, and Laura said it felt like there was easily 500,000 people there with them yesterday. The Forbidden City was also crowded, but not quite as crazy.


Meanwhile, I had the fortune to meet Hilton Zhou, a colleague of mine based in our Beijing office. Despite the holiday, he was kind enough to come to our hotel and take me out to lunch at a beautiful restaurant built around several inner courtyards, with beautiful woodwork, painting, trellises and plants. In one room was a waterfall, coy pond, and river that flowed underneath the transparent tiling under your feet. A very cool effect, though it unfortunately did not lend itself to an interesting photograph.












I just saw Laura and Annabel off with their driver for the day to go visit the Great Wall, and I will head into our office in a little while. I will have my chance to sight-see over the weekend while they head down to Hong Kong Disneyland. On Monday I'll fly down to Hong Kong and meet up with them for a day before we take the train up to Guangzhou and picking up the new baby!