Monthly Archives: May 2009

the market in La Bastille and skating in Paris

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IMG_9222.jpgUpdate: long-awaited gallery is here!

In last post I made some mentions about the open-air market in “place de la Bastille”. Unfortunately I do not think that I had any picture showing this market. This is going to change now. About the delicious strawberries I already talked so I will not insist on that.

Also on Sunday just I was strongly considering the benefits of talking my rollerblades in my next trip I stumbled upon a pretty big event. With the ocasion of the “Red Cross Day” some of Paris skaters met to do a march (on skates, of course).

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WiFi blues

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At this moment I have 2 posts ready to publish. They just await some picture – after all this is mostly a photo blog.

Right now I am in Paris, trying to upload the pictures with Picasa, from the WiFi in the hostel lobby. However, it seems that the hostel employees are trying to ration the bandwidth excesivelly. A lot of services are not working, and the ones that do are sluggsh as hell. It is annoying as hell – first Skype breaks, Picasa, I get timeouts on all the webpages.

SO for the moment I have to find alternate ways to upload the pictures. And beside trying that at 3am, I have no better idea. Hopefully I will find something.

photos from third day in Paris

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IMG_9109.jpgYesterday (Sunday) was a pretty interesting day in terms of visiting. I arrived at Centre George Pompidou but discovered that the interesting exhibition was closed. Then Hotel de Ville proved also closed. Brancusi expo (near Pompidou) opened at 2pm. So, seeing as visiting museums was not in the menu I started to walk around.

Beside Place de Vosges, Place de la Bastille, Ille de la Cite (again), the greatest discovery was the open-air market near Bastille. It was huge – and there was literally everything available for sale. From delicious food to clothes, vegetables and shoes… As I am not a great fan of shopping I just took pictures and ate a lot of strawberries (a little shop was trying to finish the day so they were selling 500g for 1euro). 4 hours later I was still feasting on strawberries (I had more than 1 kilo with me!).

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third day in Paris – Dacias, Red Cross skating and about museums in weekend

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IMG_9174.jpgHow time flies. I feel like I just arrived in Paris, yet the third day came to an and. Probably today I walked the most, although interestingly enough at 10pm I was still looking for new places to visit. Paris is so much fun that I almost cannot stop walking…

I will have to split this post on smaller bits as so many things happened. But also because the wireless connection is annoyingly unstable.

continue reading third day in Paris – Dacias, Red Cross skating and about museums in weekend »→

Paris, mon amour

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IMG_8524.jpgToday was the second day in Paris. I know I should have written about my arrival here, but a lot of factors contributed to the complete blog silence. Without entering into too many details, let’s say that tonight’s post will be a brief list of what happened yesterday. And of course my friends – in order to compensate for the lack of a nice story – I will post a lot of pictures.

I flew Wizzair to Paris. Not the greatest but not the worst company. The only real complain is that Wizzair (keeping Ryanair company) arrives on Beauvais airport, the farthest from Paris. So beside the flight I had to enjoy a 1hr30 bus ride to Paris. However, the beauty of the Paris quarters (we did pass through La Defense) made it all worthwhile.

So at around 2pm I arrived at the hostel – Le Village – which is situated 5minutes from the metro station, but most important it is just at 3minutes from the famous Sacre Coeur. Montmartre is an amazing quarter.

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a visit to the Forbidden City

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IMG_6473.jpgThis is the second post in the series about sights in China which I did not have the time to write about when I was still in there. The first post was  Along the Great Wall – a description of that trip and a photo gallery.

Today the theme is the Forbidden City – with it’s countless palaces and gardens. This huge area contains a huge number of beautiful buildings and squares, a lot still not open to the public. Some of the smaller palaces have little museums opened inside (like the jade or bronze museums). The main series of palaces and courtyards – following the north-south axis – is the focus and highway for tourists, but the buildings on the east and west sides are also impressive. At the north entrance there is a beautiful garden complex – complete with rock formations, ponds and small wooden buildings.

You can find 50 more photos in this post.

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along the Great Wall

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IMG_2960.jpgThis post was long overdue, always in the making and always left for “another time”. Well, what with the weekend around the office corner I finally found the time to write about one of the “must-do” visits in China: a visit to the Great Wall.

I finally organized this trip on the last day I stayed in Beijing, right before going by train to Shanghai. It was not the smartest thing, as right after I returned from the Great Wall I had to go to the train station. However, this is my usual lack of planning. In the evening before I made a reservation to one of the two available tours to the Great Wall (available at my hostel).

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3 short video clips shot in Beijing

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Before I write a more consistent blog post, probably with some photos as well, I wanted to share these 3 short video clips I had around. The quality is not great, but they are somewhat interesting.

prayer wheel at the Lama temple in Beijing

prayer wheel at the Lama temple in Beijing

people dancing in Beihan park

people dancing in Beihan park

impromptu orchestra at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing

impromptu orchestra at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing

The first video was shot on the last day I spent in Beijing, at the famous Lama temple. It is a moving prayer wheel, which Buddhist believers use to spin thus giving life to the prayer written on the wheel. The second video was also shot in Beijing, this time in Beihan park. The park had a lot of people singing, dancing and playing a lot of games. I went there on a weekend day, and the atmosphere was very pleasant.

The last video – shot at the Temple of Heaven – is of a group of people forming an impromptu orchestra. A lot of people joined as the music went on, either participating in singing or just enjoying the music.

There were a lot of sights and sounds that I could capture in video, however most of the times I either didn’t have the little digital camera with me, or I first thought in photographic terms and only as an afterthought in video terms.

last day in China, going home

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IMG_3274.jpgWell, all good things must come to an end. Tomorrow at 11:40am I have a flight for Amsterdam then Bucharest. And I do not really hate the fact that I will fly for almost 19 hours (huge layover in Amsterdam) as much as the fact that I have to leave this beautiful country. But before leaving, I did have to visit a few more areas today. As there are so many nice places to see I had to skip a lot of places of course.

After checking in this morning, I took the subway to Lama temple, which is the second most important Buddhist temple. It is part working temple, part museum, part tourist attraction. All parts pretty interesting for me. Even though it’s Sunday there weren’t that many tourists, which was a welcome change. Lots of people praying at the temple, so it was a nice thing to see people really using this place of religion instead visiting it as just tourists.

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transportation by sybway (but not only) in China

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This is the second part of the post I have written regarding moving around in Shanghai, Beijing and in-between. If you are more interested about the trains and planes you can get to get from city to city you should check that post first.

In this post I will post a few pics from the subway and try to explain a bit how one should get from place to place. Maybe someone who was thinking about going to China but had concerns regarding the means of getting around. Well, all those concerns were definitely misplaced. I cannot tell anything about other places besides Beijing and Shanghai – but I do plan to continue the research. Until then – I have to do a bit of praising for the subway systems in these two cities.

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