Email: Greetings from Beijing
Yesterday we went to the Great Wall. It is a portion of the wall that sees very few visitors. With all the buses and subway, it cost us Y66 or $7 per person. Pulling the whole thing off wasn’t easy though.
Yesterday we went to the Great Wall. It is a portion of the wall that sees very few visitors. With all the buses and subway, it cost us Y66 or $7 per person. Pulling the whole thing off wasn’t easy though.
We left Beijing’s West Train Station at 12:45pm on Wednesday to begin our ten hour journey to Luoyang. We were able to get hard seats (for about $12 each) on a ‘K’ train, which is an express that makes very few stops.
My butt hurts and it’s only one hour into our 17 hour train ride from Xian to Chengdu. We only expected to spend two days in Xian but we had to stay three days because there weren’t any seats available to Chengdu.
We took a three-week trip to five countries in Europe, using the train and bus as our primary modes of transportation. Our children were six and nine during this trip, which was their first taste of extended international travel in a hostel setting.
Munich was our first stop on our Europe trip. We stayed with a family friend and spent time in the city center as well as a church and beer garden just out of town. We then began our time in Switzerland by visiting Lucerne.
We spent four days in the heart of Switzerland taking several different hikes. These ranged from day hikes to overnighting at two different huts nestled in the Swiss Alps.
Zermatt is a classic Swiss town in a fairy tale setting with views of the Matterhorn mountain in clear weather. We were fortunate to see the mountain from the town center as well as during day hikes.
After spending time in the German speaking portion of Switzerland, we made a short stop in the Italian section of the country, in Lugano, before continuing to Milan, Italy.