Beijing Friendship Hotel
- Youyi Binguan
The
first part of our trip involved Tom's five-day,
international engineering education conference in Beijing,
which he and his colleague in Beijing had jointly developed during
the past year and a half.
Tom selected this
large hotel complex for the conference.
All of the meetings were held here, and most of the attendants from
outside China stayed in rooms
here.
| Beijing
Friendship Hotel is the largest garden-style hotel in Asia.
Originally built to house fellow communist visitors from Russia
in 1954, it covers an area of 335,000 square meters. Its style
is a mix of modern design and traditional Chinese architecture.
It offers a full range of amenities, several restaurants, a business
center, halls for meetings, a western grocery store and recreational
facilities and offers a large variety of services. There are 1700
standard rooms, deluxe suites, apartments, and offices. It is
25 minutes from Tiananmen Square by car. |
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enlarge.
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enlarge.
Left image is
clickable.
Click map to enlarge.
Meet Chor and YuLin
Click image to enlarge.
and "John"
Zhang
Our first night in
Beijing was spent with "John" Zhang, Tom's counterpart at
CMES in Beijing,
who took the four of us out to dinner. Chor and Tom have been working
with John for a couple of years.
Last summer Chor and Tom made two trips to China to train Chinese faculty
at numerous universities,
for an ASME program which will prepare their Chinese students for an
international Certificate in Engineering Management.
For
the rest of our trip we would be accompanying Chor and Yulin.
Chor is Tom's former boss at ASME. He is originally from
Malaysia and Yulin grew up in Hong Kong. Both have recently
retired. One of their first retirement trips would be this one,
to the outer reaches of China, after the Conference. They very
generously invited us to accompany them... a once in a lifetime
opportunity for us to see China with our Chinese-American friends!
Click
image to enlarge.
Yulin
and I trecked around Beijing with other spouses during the conference.
There were several tours arranged for us. We also ventured out
on our own:
Yulin's familiarity with parts of the city and her ability to
speak the language were a godsend ...
and kept us out of trouble most of the time!
|
Continued... a brief glimpse
of The Conference
Click
here
|
