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.
