Hello from Beijing!

My husband and I have been here for about 5 days; tomorrow (Saturday) we leave for Shanghai. This past week we've taken a Chinese tour bus to the Great Wall of China, visited the National Library of China, walked all of the central part of Beijing exploring hutongs (neighborhoods), Tian'nemman Square and the Forbidden City. We've gone shopping at the enormous shopping malls including Pearl World where you can buy pearls, jewels, leather, silk, shoes, electronics, and all sorts of Chinese goods for very inexpensive prices. The people have been friendly and helpful. We've done a lot of walking but we've also taken the subway, taxis, bus, and tomorrow, just for fun, we'll rent bikes to tour around our neighborhood. We're taking an overnight train to Shanghai. The weather has been sunny and warm during the day with the nights cool -- very pleasant.

When we visited the National Library we had to get a temporary day pass to sit in the reading room. This meant showing our passports and business cards, filling out two forms and giving all of this to the attendants at the library card registration desk. The attendants used the information to complete a database version of the forms, then took our photographs. We got pastic cards that we had to sign and use upstairs to gain entry to the reading room. The cards were swiped into the computers and our photos and the official data popped up on the computer in the reading room. My photo didn't show up so I had to go back downstairs to the registration desk and get the attendants to fix that problem. I then went back upstairs and we gained entry to the reading room where we sat for several hours just readng books that we had brought (everything in the library is in Chinese) and writing up postcards. None of the attendants, upstairs or downstairs, spoke any English. We just smiled at each other.

Watch this blog for another report, from Shanghai. -- Pat Laughlin, Library Director