The Beijing Forest Hotel

Dear Sophia,

The last few days I have been staying at a hotel in a forest by the city of Beijing, which is the capital city of China.

This hotel is at the bottom of some small mountains, and every morning I have been following the path behind the hotel up to a pagoda (which is a word that means shelter), at the top of one of the mountains. From here you can see all across the city and surrounding valleys.

From here there is a path along that takes you along a ridge, to another pagoda on an even taller mountain.

I followed the path to this other Pagoda and from here the views were even better, and there was another path that weaved and curved downwards into the valley. I decided to follow this path down and do you know what I found at the bottom of it? A nature centre full of different types of animals!

On the first day I did my walk, I came across lots of different people walking along the paths up and down the mountains. Because I do not speak Chinese, I could only smile and wave, rather than talking to the people I met.

That evening I sat down with my Chinese dictionary and decided to learn the words in Chinese to say ‘Good Morning!’ The words are:

Zow-shang-how!

The next day, I walked the path up the mountain again and along the way I ran into people and said …zow-shang-how.

I think they were very surprised.

Love Jason