All in all a successful trip to the capital of The People’s Republic. We finished our visit today with a continuous 6 hour walk through the city streets, touring a number of neighborhoods including the CBD ( downtown) and Sanlitun, a hip diverse neighborhood. Amazingly did not encounter a single rundown area, leading us only to believe, overall Beijing is quite well off as far as cities of 18 million go… We had a wonderful dinner with our friend Ray again tonight and tried to really get a feel from his perspective. After all, being a US citizen who comes home often, yet has lived here for 13 years, gives him a fantastic perspective of everyday life and living trends. I’ll wait till after Shanghai to make any tourist generalizations that we tourists like to do, but for now, let me say Beijing is worth the visit for many reasons. Our … Read More

Although a visit to the Great Wall was not the reason we came to China, it has been on the bucket list for a long time. If nothing else, when filling out those “Places I’ve visited” on FB, we get to check off another. No but seriously, since childhood, if there was a place in another country you heard of, The Great Wall has to rank right up there among the biggest. One thing that Tommy and I are both allergic to is endless tours full of filler stops and ” shopping opportunities”. So thanks to our friend Ray, we hired a private driver to take us there and bring us back. Fantastic experience! Our driver Sam spoke english and was able to answer my incessant random questions about everything we went by and just life in general. Biggest random takeaway was the fact that 15-20 years ago, these Audis, BMWs, … Read More

Beirut has far exceeded our expectations. We really had no idea it would be as warm, welcoming, and safe as it was. We went out of our way to start conversations with many people in an effort to get a more local outlook. No matter who they were, they all said the same thing. Beirut is safe to walk, low crime, and people are welcoming. The only true danger we felt was from the crazy drivers; and really, we are already conditioned by having Buenos Aires as our second home. We felt as comfortable here in the neighborhoods as many of the big cities we’ve traveled too ( Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Paris to name a few). Aside from some animated car honking and a waving of the hands in good middle eastern manner, we didn’t see any form of aggression. Maybe it just was that way for … Read More