Choose Your One-Day-Tours!

Tour A—Bath &Stonehenge including entrance fees to the ancient Roman bathrooms and Stonehenge—￡37 until 26 March and ￡39 thereafter.

Visit the city with over 2, 000 years of history and Bath Abbey, the Royal Crescent and the Costume Museum. Stonehenge is one of the world's most famous prehistoric monuments dating back over 5, 000 years.

    Tour B—Oxford & Stratford including entrance fees to the University St Mary's Church Tower and Anne Hathaway's—￡32 until 12 March and ￡36 thereafter.

Oxford: Includes a guided tour of England's oldest university city and colleges. Look over the "city of dreaming spires (尖顶)" from St Mary's Church Tower.

    Stratford: Includes a guided tour exploring much of the Shakespeare wonder.

    Tour C—Windsor Castle &Hampton Court including entrance fees to Hampton Court Palace—￡34 until 11 March and ￡37 thereafter.

    Includes a guided tour of Windsor and Hampton Court, Henry VIII's favorite palace. Free time to visit Windsor Castle (entrance fees not included). With 500 years of history, Hampton Court was once the home of four Kings and one Queen. Now this former royal palace is open to the public as a major tourist attraction. Visit the palace and its various historic gardens, which include the famous maze (迷宫) where it is easy to get lost!

    Tour D—Cambridge including entrance fees to the Tower of Saint Mary the Great—￡33 until 18 March and ￡37 thereafter.

    Includes a guided tour of Cambridge, the famous university town, and the gardens of the 18th century.

    One summer I was driving from my home town of Tahoe City, Calif., to New Orleans. In the middle of the desert, I came upon a young man standing by the roadside. He had his thumb out and held a gas can in his other hand. I drove right by him. There was a time in the country when you'd be considered a jerk if you passed by somebody in need. Now you are a fool for helping. With gangs, drug addicts, murderers, rapists, thieves lurking everywhere, "I don't want to get involved" has become a national motto.

    Several states later I was still thinking about the hitch­hiker. Leaving him standing in the desert did not bother me so much. What bothered me was how easily I had reached the decision. I never even lifted my foot off the accelerator.

    Does anyone stop any more? I wondered. I recalled Blanche DuBois's famous line: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". Could anyone rely on the kindness of strangers these days? One way to test this would be for a person to journey from coast to coast without any money, relying solely on the good will of his fellow Americans. What kind of Americans would he find? Who would feed him, shelter him, carry him down the road?

    The idea intrigued me.

    The week I turned 37, I realized that I had never taken a gamble in my life. So I decided to travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic without a penny. It would be a cashless journey through the land of the almighty dollar. I would only accept offers of rides, food and a place to rest my head. My final destination would be Cape Fear in North Carolina, a symbol of all the fears I'd have to conquer during the trip.

    I rose early on September 6, 1994, and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge with a 50­pound pack on my back and a sign displaying my destination to passing vehicles: "America".

    For six weeks I hitched 82 rides and covered 4,223 miles across 14 states. As I traveled, folks were always warning me about someplace else. In Montana they told me to watch out for the cowboys in Wyoming; in Nebraska they said people would not be as nice as in Iowa. Yet I was treated with kindness everywhere I went. I was amazed by people's readiness to help a stranger, even when it seemed to run contrary to their own best interests.

    BELJLNG—Eating at a Beijing restaurant is usually an adventure for foreigners, and particularly when they get the chance to order "chicken without sex life" or "red burned lion head".

    Sometimes excited but mostly confused, embarrassed or even terrified, many foreigners have long complained about mistranslations of Chinese dishes. And their complaints are often valid, but such an experience at Beijing's restaurants will apparently soon be history.

    Foreign visitors will no longer, hopefully, be confused by oddly worded restaurant menus in the capital if the government's plan to correctly translate 3, 000 Chinese dishes is a success and the translations are generally adopted.

    The municipal (市政) office of foreign affairs has published a book to recommend English translations of Chinese dishes, which aims to help restaurants avoid bizarre translations. "It provides the names of main dishes of famous Chinese cuisines in plain English," an official with the city's Foreign Affairs office said, "Restaurants are encouraged to use the proposed translations, but it will not be compulsory." It's the city's latest effort to bridge the culture gap for foreign travelers in China.

    "The book is a blessing to tourist guides like me. Having it, I don't have to rack my brains trying to explain Chinese dishes to foreign travelers," said Zheng Xiaodong, a 31-year-old employee with a Beijing-based travel agency.

    "I will buy the book as I major in English literature and I'd like to introduce Chinese cuisine culture to more foreign friends," said Han Yang, a postgraduate student at the University of International Business and Economics.

    It is not clear if the book will be introduced to other parts of China. But on Tuesday, this was the most discussed topic on weibo.com, China's most popular micro-blogging site.

注意：词数100左右；可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯；开头和结尾已为你写好。

Dear Michael,

Yours,

Li Hua