Beijing

Beijing

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Around two a clock we arrived to Beijing and the heat and street life was smack in your face. Sure I was expecting it to be hot and a lot of people but I still wasn’t prepared for this. Anyone our Transmongolian trip was over and we had finally reached China and Beijing. Our trip doesn’t end here but our first mission was to get some cash, unfortunately I have region restriction on my card and guess who forgot to unlock China. So instead of finding an ATM we headed out to find WIFI so I could unlock my card. We found a McDonalds and after some struggling with the registration to get access to the WIFI we were online and I could finally unlock my card, normally its not that hard to register but at this place all text were only in Chinese and it was not that easy to understand what to write where but we did it! Finding an ATM was easy, finding an ATM which accepts 4-digit pin code, not so simple, apparently China use 6 digit pin code as standard but after some trial and error and tried several banks we found Bank of China and we had money again!

Next question was how should we get to the hotel, in our quest for money we had walked towards our hotel so we were only three blocks away. It doesn’t look that far on the map and it could be nice with a walk after all that time on the train. Well, we never thought of our backpacks and the head, we did succeed to get to the hotel but it was sweaty and I really did enjoy a cold shower once we checked in.

We spent the evening walking around close to the hotel, visited a apple store to get a network card for my laptop (yes, huge apple store), small markets and when we found an arcade we knew directly how we would spend the evening. For €5 we played for over two hours, from pinball to some old Rambo game (which was really bad). We ended the evening on a Chinese pub drinking beer with some chinese guys and to all you who say that asian people cant handle alcohol? You never met these guys, the evening got kind a blurry before we went back to the hotel.

 

The Great wall of China

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We didnt slept many hours before our phone started to ring and our guide told us that she was waiting in the lobby and it was time to go exploring. Our first goal was the great wall of China which I think is a must do when you are in China for the first time. Im not sure what to say about it though, I mean after all its just a long, really long wall, its pretty high but what impress me the most is that its built without any modern machines and they where smart and used the nature so its built on top of ridges. It is for sure impressive but at the same time, its just a wall. I really recommend you to go here and see it but at the same time I have to quote Karl Pilkington from A idiot abroad; “I’ll decide if it’s great or not. It might end up being the ‘All Right Wall of China’ to me.” . However I can now check another of the wonders of the world but I cant shake the feeling that you go here, you look, and you leave.

Straight after we visited the wall we decided to head over to the tombs of Ming Dynasty. And once we got there we realized that it was closed for restoration, bummer! We saw glimpse of it it and we could walk the holy imperial road  but that was it. Maybe not what we expected but how interesting can a number of graves be?

Since we were living the tourist way of life we continued to visit a cloisonnes factory were we beside looking at how the actually made jade jewelery and art had an huge lunch containing 7 or 8 dishes. This was our first meal for the day and the hungover from yesterday finally started to disappear and we finally started to feel like humans again. The factory was pretty interesting but it was kind a tourist trap where they kind a forced you to buy stuff after you looked at they created then. The day continued with visiting the former Olympic village, the bird nest (the stadium) was actually more impressive than the great wall. We visited a proper tea house and we had some traditional Chinese massage. During the massage where were a “witch doctor” who looked into your hand and could tell your health. According to him we were dying and of course he had the cure for it if we had the dollars. Well, I knew it was a hard night yesterday but I don’t need expensive medicine to cure that, all I need is some more massage and some rest so we firmly said thank you but no thanks and run away.

Beijing Zoo

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Today we spent the day at Beijing Zoo and of course their aquarium, it took around six hours to walk through the whole park and yes, we saw some pandas! My feet hurts after all walking, Im thirsty like a camel and sweaty like you don’t wanna know so I wont write much more today more than it was an awesome day. We saw Tapir, ant eaters, bears, ostrich, pandas and a lot of other animals. By luck we timed in so we also saw a dolphin/sea lion show. Of course if you seen one of those shows you seen em all but still, sea lions are always fun to watch and beluga was new for me. What was really weird though was the music to the show, it was German, in German, about Germany but hey, the Chinese loved it and me and Anton, we just laughed about it.

 

Starting to eat weird stuff

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Yesterday we started on our “lets eat weird stuff today”, it wasn’t really planned but we met up our Italian friends from the train together with two Swiss girls, a Russian and a German and since they was looking forward to try some Chinese specialties we joined em and I have to say that barbecued octopus is really good, Scorpion tastes like bacon and those beetles, they just taste weird. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera  but there will be more opportunities for pictures.

After all these starters we decided to go to a real restaurant and we ordered so much food. We came to the restaurant pretty late and just after we ordered our waitress told us that they were closing now but we can of course stay as long as we want but they will close the kitchen and the staff will go home. It felt a bit weird but we were a pretty big group and had a really nice time so we kind a forgot that they were closed. Instead we were reveled in food (Beijing duck is hard to eat with chop sticks, but worth it once you get any into your mouth). A couple of hours later and we decided to move out and then we realize that the whole restaurant is pitch dark except our VIP-room and there is no staff there, well there was one sleeping behind the bar. he looked kind a happy when we decided to leave so he could close down for real and go home but I mean come on, that is service mind!Today we were supposed to go on a guided tour in the forbidden city and the summer palace but because of bad weather (rain, fog and smog) our guide advised us to change it to tomorrow instead. For us that sounded good so instead we walked over to the railway station and tried to by tickets for our next stop, Shanghai. That was not as easy as you could think though, all signs were in Chinese, they only talked Chinese and we were totally lost. Sometimes I do use my brain thought so I ran over to the nearby McDonald’s and used their WIFI again, this time I used google translate, entered the text that I want to buy two tickets to Shanghai with the date and clock and pressed translate to Chinese. I then ran back to the counter and showed my phone for the girl and success, we got our tickets! A neat trip over 13000km which will take around five hours. That means no more slow trans-siberian rail, instead we go for Chinese high speed train!

 

Another day of being a tourist

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Today was another day of being a tourist and the camera was always ready to be shooting, almost like I was a Japanese tourist. Our goal for the day was to visit the forbidden city, the temple of heaven and finish the day with the summer palace which actually is so much more than just a palace. We were suppose to do this yesterday but the weather were really lousy and we did the right thing so wait another day because today we had blue sky, around 25 degrees with a warm breeze. Our guide picked us up at the hotel at 07.00 and I try to describe each place we visited.

The forbidden City:
A neat little area of almost 1x1km where the former empires lived. It was built somewhere around 1420 and it is a must to visit if you are in Beijing. We who were a bit lazy had ordered a English speaking guide and even if it was a bit confusing since we got all information in Chinese first but after 10 minutes our guide came and suddenly me and Anton had our own personal guide. It will be interesting to just walk around and look by yourself but I really recommend a guide. It was really interesting and when the guide started to talk about central heating and cooling using ice under the houses during the summer you really understand what kind of cavemen we norths really were at that time.

Temple of Heaven:
Straight after the forbidden city we went to the temple of heaven and this is actually the first time we saw a lot of other tourist. Of course we saw tourists at the great wall and in the forbidden city but here we actually saw western tourists and it felt almost weird to see someone who is not Asian. Anyway, the temple of heaven is a huge park where you will find the locals doing recreation like qi-gong, playing some sort f tennis and the old ones, they were sitting on park benches and playing chess and xiangi. The temple itself is gigantic and used to pray/sacrifice to the gods for good harvest and stuff like that. You could think that a tourist area like this should have signs in English and they kind a do, however Chinese people are not the best in English and neither me or Anton does still today understand if the sacrificed humans or not at this temple or if that just was a typo on the sign. I guess they are laughing at all western people who walk around this the Chinese sign for noodles as tattoos so I guess its even if we laugh everyday about some weird sign or T-shirt.

The summer palace:
Our last stop, well off course we stopped at a pearl factory/shop where they tried to sell us a lot of crap was the Summer palace. The summer palace is insane huge and beatuful park and house which one of the empires built for his mother. He actually built the lake on the pictures below together with houses and all kind of stuff. The area is even bigger than the forbidden city but then of course a majority of the area is the lake. We never took any boatride though, instead we took a walk along the lake and just enjoyed the beautiful area.