A Visit to Tianjin

In September a couple of friends and I went to visit the city of Tianjin for the day.  It is about 60 miles southeast of Beijing, and took us around 40 minutes on the high-speed train.  It didn't feel like we were going fast, but I quickly found out that you can't take good pictures out the window of a train that is moving at 190 mph.  Tianjin isn't a city that has a lot of foreign tourists, but we had a great day seeing the sights there.  LaDeana  and I have been on a few outings before, but this time we were joined by Erin and her cute little boy, Jake - who stole the show with his blond hair and blue eyes.

Our first stop took us to the porcelain house.  Every part of it was made of mosaic tiles out of pieces of porcelain.

Even the inside had murals and staircases made of the mosaics.

As I said before Jake was the hit is of show, but he wanted none of it.  Erin helped out by holding him, while people stood close by.  (I think she could have paid for her trip if she had just charged a little for each picture.


We left the porcelain house and began taking in the scenes around the rest of the city.  We hired a driver to take us to the different parts of the town, and he did a great job.  Tianjin has about 13 million people, but the pace is much more relaxed than Beijing.  Beijing is like New York, and Tianjin is more like Seattle. It was actually very peaceful and relaxing.  It's building in the main part of the city have a very European look.  There are even parts of the town called the French and Italian sections.

Very tasty chocolate!

They also have the very oriental plaza for the tourists where you can purchase Chinese trinkets. I was able to buy a beautiful Chinese jacket which I hope to wear when the weather gets warm again.

The buildings look old, but they are really quite new and just built to look old.

I'm not sure what this fountain represents, but it was a very popular tourist stop.  It was in front of the entrance of a little walking street with all kinds of restaurants from everywhere.  I even saw a few German ones, but unfortunately, we had just eaten pizza at Pizza Hut.  Small World!

Our driver fell in love with Jake, and even won him over by the end of the day.  The driver called his family and friends to meet us at the last stop so they could see him with Jake and take pictures. It was really quite fun to see how pleased the driver was.  And Jake was cool about it too.

We made our way back to the train station to start our journey back to Beijing.  Jake was done, and we were glad to be headed home.  It was a very fun outing.