Official trip to Beijing, China

I am working as a Software Engineer in Samsung India Softwares, Bangalore. So as part of my work, I got a chance to go to Beijing, China for Inter-Operatibility Testing(referred as IOT) of the Application I was working on.It was to be a short trip of 15 days.
We were a group of 4 people from Samsung.

We reached Beijing from Bangalore via Bangkok on a Thai Air Flight. Listening songs on iPod was the only thing I did during that time. I was very apprehensive of going to Beijing as I had heard that there was no Vegetarian food available. My fears increased when a fellow passenger told me that even "Veg Rice" is fried in Pig Oil :(( there.

Anyways we hired a Taxi to the Hotel we booked.It was very cold outside. Temperature was around -5 degrees. Beijing was all glittering in lights and there was sound of crackers bursting here and there. We came to know that it was because of Chinese New Year which had just passed.

After reaching the Hotel, we just crashed onto our beds as we had to be in China Mobile's Office at 9:30 a.m. sharp for kick-off meeting.After a great difficulty(why don't these Chinese learn English), we managed to reached there just in time. There we met representatives from Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola.

And from Next Day, it was all IOT work, work and work. Don't worry I am not going to those details. The only new thing that happened during that time was that we changed our hotel to a place nearby office. And, of course, I forgot to tell about lunch and dinner.

Luckily, we found out that McD was nearby, but unluckily (for me only), it did not serve Vegetarian burgers. So I used to remove the chicken cutlet from my McChicken and had to eat the remaining part. Dinner was better as we used to prepare rice and MTR's ready-made daals.

When the weekend started approaching, we started making plans of sight-seeing. The main attraction there was THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA, which was some 80 kms from Beijing. The other attractions were Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, Lama Temple and Wang Fu Jing Street.

On Saturday morning, we hired a taxi to The Great Wall after 10 minutes of bargaining.
When we reached there, it was very cold and icy winds were flowing.
We had to purchase gloves and caps as there was no other way we could have survived in that weather.After purchasing tickets, we went towards the Great Wall.There was a heavy crowd.
After seeing the wall for the first time, my first reaction was "WOW".
We went to the "Badaling" pass. This portion of the Great Wall is 7.8 meters (25.6 ft) high and 5 meters (16.4 ft) wide and is made of stone and bricks from the hills.

The Great Wall of China


It was tiring journey going upto the end of that portion of wall in that weather. But all of us managed it.
We were all very delighted to be there. This structure was simply fabulous and wonderful.
With Teammates at Great Wall(I am at extreme right)

In the way, we met some more Indians who had come to see the Great Wall.
After climbing down from The Great Wall, we purchased some souvenirs.

After that we returned to the Hotel.

We went in search of a bar that night and were told about an area called "Sanlitun"(Our pronunciation was Sanli"TUUUUNN" ;) ) where we would find many bars.
After traveling in 2 Metros and a taxi, finally we reached there. There were around 30-40 bars on the street. People outside were almost dragging us to their respective bars. Then after roaming around for an hour, we settled for one of them.
There we drank and enjoyed the songs/dances being played till 11.Then we came back.

On Sunday Morning, we went to the Tiananmen Square. This place is widely known for the Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989.

Tiananmen Square

It was huge area in the middle of the city. Anyways Police was not allowing us to go near it. So it was kind of frustrating.

Then we headed for The Forbidden City. Forbidden refers to the fact that no-one could enter or leave the palace without the emperor's permission some 500 years ago. It occupied a huge area and was quite big. At some places, renovation work was going on. After roaming inside for 2 hours, we got bored of of it. So we all headed for the Lunch.

After that, we caught a Metro to Lama Temple. It is a famous Tibetan Buddhism Temple. For the first time, we saw roads with potholes and mud in Beijing. We inferred that may be because of Tibetan area, it was under-developed by Chinese. The temple was also big and had little temples surrounding that. Snaps were not allowed inside the premises. Big Statues of Buddha were placed everywhere inside. I felt a kind of spirituality in that temple. Also some small bronze statues of Shiva, Saraswati etc. were there, which showed the similarity of Hinduism and Buddhism. After spending close to 2 hours there, we headed for Wang Fu Jing(a famous street in Beijing).

The street was very crowded. Here one can purchase all those cheap quality electronic stuff. But some Posh Malls were also there. The thing I like worst was the roadside eateries that were serving fried cockroaches, beetles, scorpions etc. I just could not stand the filthy smell there and disappeared from that place at once.

Chinese Delicacies

Then we went to some small shops there and began our window shopping. We had some fun while bargaining for the goods. We came back to hotel at around 10 p.m.

This was the only weekend that I got to spend in Beijing and we covered most of the famous places in Beijing.

From next week onwards, work started again and fortunately the IOT was successful. So it was a fruitful trip both on professional and personal front.

I returned back to Bangalore on 17th March, 2007 only to hear the news that India was losing to Bangladesh in WC'07 group match :( .

Trip to Belgium and Holland

This is my first blog on any site........Just penning down my experiences when I went for a short trip to Netherlands and Belgium during my final year training at Insead.
The trip started on 15th April, 2006 from a place called Fontainebleau(around 100kms from Paris)........
We refers to Teltia, Mehta, Aaroh, Sandy and Yours truly :)

15th April 2006

This was one of the most awaited trip. We got up a quite early as had to catch a morning train from Paris. We had to walk from the village(Fontainebleau) to the nearest station(about 4 kms) to catch the train to Paris . We reached Paris at 7:15 and caught a train(Thalys, Belgium's Official Rail) to Bruges. It was two and a half hour journey. The very frequent announcements in the train were very irritating and to add insult to injury, each announcement was being made in 4 different languages- 3 of which were like Alien to all of us.

Finally we reached Bruges at around 11 a.m.. The city was very small and peaceful with canals all around and people having boat rides. We reached a hostel that we had booked. After freshening up, we hired bikes (had to submit our Passports to get those). Then we went around biking in the town and saw some wind-mills. The weather was awesome there. We finally headed towards the country side which we heard was the main sight-seein attraction there. It was a village named DAMME at a distance of around 5 kms from the main city. Riding bike along the canal side in the spring was one of the most exciting experiences. But the final destination was a little disappointment to all of us. It was far less than what we were told. We felt it was like any other village- the difference being it was cleaner, had roads and was well connected to the city. May be we had expected too much from it. We roamed there for a while, had a chilled beer and came back. We were told by some seniors that the city has one bar. But unfortunately we could not find any.

The final conclusion was that Bruges was only meant for relaxing. I recommend you all to give it a visit when you retire from work.

Finally we returned to our Hostel and had a good, long sleep.



16th April 2006

We caught a train at 11 in the morning to Brussels, the capital of Belgium. As soon as we came out of the station, the scene reminded us of our own Delhi . There was a road market as crowded as any such market in India. Some Pakis and Afghanis were selling all kinds of stuff like T-shirts, Jeans, Utensils etc. They were offering a discount to us when we enquired about some stuff and they found out that we were Indians. The roads had ditches at some places; nobody was giving a damn to traffic signals. We had our lunch in a Pakistani restaurant named "NOOR". The food was really awesome - chicken curry, rice, nan, dal, lassi; very hard to find in Europe, and that too at a reasonable cost.

Then after having lunch, we left for the Railway Station to catch the train to Amsterdam. The train was supposed to reach Amsterdam at 5 pm, but due to some problem in one of the stations in-between, it got delayed by 2 hours. It caused us further problems regarding our reservation of the apartment. The person supposed to give us the keys left assuming that we would not turn up. By the time we had dinner, it was already 10:30 pm.
Then we just went for a stroll to see the NightLife in Amsterdam. We came back at around 2 a.m.


17th April 2006

Got up a bit late in the morning, had a light breakfast and then started planning of what to see in Amsterdam.First we went to Madame Tussaud’s Museum. We got a little discount as we were students. At the entrance there were statues of two famous persons - Pierce Brosnan (James Bond) and Julia Roberts. We were asked to select one and they would click our snap, which they sell as a souvenir. We chose Julia. Inside the Museum, there were statues of so many celebrities- Bush, MJ, JLo, Dalai Lama, Pope, Diana, Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin and so many; only Mahatma Gandhi from our own India. We had a photo session there. Some of the statues were so real that one feels like as if the person standing is real. Then as a souvenir we bought the snap with Julia Roberts. We all also bought a special souvenir - our face embedded inside a glass cube. They took out picture and using the laser technology, embedded a 3-D picture into a glass cube.

Then after a quick lunch we had a cruise ride around central Amsterdam. It was a one hour ride where they told us some history about Amsterdam.The ride was very enjoying.


In the evening we went to the Bar and had some beer. There was also a girl dancing on the Bar's table.

Then we had dinner at some local restaurant, but saw that even Anil Kapoor and some other Bollywood Personalities had dined there.

After Dinner, we went to explore some unmentionable Places (famous in Amsterdam). There we roamed around for some time.

We came back early as we had to catch an early train to Paris.

All in all, it was a great trip for all of us....

Hope You enjoyed this Post.....

PS: Some parts are directly copied from one of my friend's (Mehta's) Description.