Peking a little early :) - Beijing, China
Beijing, China
General Travel Tips:• Hard sleeper seats in the slow train was our favorite way to travel between the cities. • Buying train tickets – get them as early as you especially if you are going during summer or around holidays – you can get them online through a travel agency or a Chinese friend can get the for you – we got them at the train station in person, which is the cheapest option – but you get what is left available, which might not be what you are exactly looking for, like standing tickets 8( • Buy a metro card in the major cities, you can use them on the metro or busses, super easy to use and worth the cost, but you have to get a new one in each city. • Get the internet/sim card for your phone – most of our friends use China Mobile and we had Unicom• To get around, you can use the apple maps to find where you wanted to go in English then follow the link to open in another app to open the directions in Bydu to figure out the busses to get on or give the info to the taxi drivers.• If you need to buy something online ask a Chinese person to help you get it on Taobao – Chinese ebay. It was the best deals and mail is superfast here! • A metered taxi driver has to take your fare – they might try to tell you no, but just show them you will call the police and they will take you where you want to go. A few told us no, because we lived too far away from down town, but our friends told us that was actually illegal for them to do. • Couch surfing is super easy here and the Chinese people are very excited to meet you and hang out with you. It was the best experience for us to get to meet them, they were so generous and kind. • Research possible scams in the cities before you arrive i.e. tea ceremony or directing you to higher paying taxis to the Great Wall of China. • China in July and August – Hot, summer, and high travel season. I don’t know if I would recommend coming to China during the summer and I also heard Dec and Jan can be a little hectic also.
BEIJING – As our very first experience in China, we have found it to be so very welcoming. All the people we met are kind and helpful, friends from couch surfing set us up with a chat forum for foreigners in Beijing. Overall, without being able to speak Mandarin well at all, Beijing has been very easy to get around. There are a lot of English translations everywhere and more people than we expected speak very good English. I think we are spoiled here. :)
1. People: Angda and Li Can - are a couple of really sweet people. When we arrived at their apartment, they already had to other guests from Egypt. learned that Angda is working at an internet cloud storage start up and Li Can is interning with Audi and will be finding her first job soon. She comes from the same providence as Chairmen Mao, where life is very different from Beijing. People there are not as rush rush busy and more focused on leisure activities in their spare time. Sounded like Austin to me :) Angda was really interested in the USA politics. I think we are all excited to see who will be the next president with the potential characters currently in the race. On our last morning I said good bye to Li Can and Angda while Mark was still asleep and I was so excited we would have the apartment to ourselves for the day before we catch our train so I could clean it up :) Li Can and Angda we so surprised when they got home. She said it was cleaner then it was when they moved in two months ago, awesome! If I could have found some bleach I would have made it sparkle, haha!
Egyptian Guys - who were also really great guys. They are in China to volunteer teaching kids English. Nicy - We walk through the square on our way to meet another CS friend Nicy, she is going to tour the sight with us today. We finally found Nicy in front of the Forbidden City but even though we arrive at 3 pm and it closes at 5 pm, today they sold out of ticket at 1pm, so instead of going in we walk around. Nicy is the sweetest girl. I was so glad we met her today. She explained everything around to us while we toured the city center. We left Nicy at the subway station. She lives near us but on another line and she was so sweet, she even gave us a little souvenir for our trip :) I do hope we will be able to see her again someday. Taiwanese Girls we met on the Great Wall of China Malaysian couple on mini bus from GWC Michael who lost his phone :(2. Accommodation: Angda and Li Can’s couch in their apartment3. Tourist Activities Olympic Park – On day one, we slept in to catch up from traveling in our moving movie theater (we were able to see some good flix 8) and when we finally woke up, we walked over to the 2008 Olympic Greens and Stadium Park. Beijing has some great buildings. The park starts with super tall tree like observation tower that is at the head of a dragon shaped lake. I recently found out that in China, the dragon is a water spirit, so it is quite appropriate to made one into a lake, so cool! From there we walked down to the birds nest stadium. It was so huge and beautiful. Right outside was a great big tower with the Olympic rings on it and on the other side of that was a huge IBM building that looked like the Olympic torch. We were wondering if they did that on purpose. Also in the area is an aquarium they called the water cube, which is a very neat building that was translucent and looked like a lot of bubbles stuck together in the shape of a cube. At night all these buildings light up in rainbow colors, which look like the aurora borealis against the Beijing night sky. There were a lot of people in the park that day and some amazing kite flyers.
Great Wall of China - Today we tackled the Great Wall of China! Dominic, who I met in Taiwan, gave me a great tip from his travels to China about visiting an unrestored park of the Great Wall, where we would find less touristy attractions and heckling and more of the just wild wall. He went to Jiankou, but Mark researched it a bit and figured out if we went to the North side of Jiankou, we could hike the Great Wall all the way from Jiankou to the restored area called Myatanou, a 10K hike that turned out to be a great adventure. The Egyptian guys we met also gave us a tip that on the bus to the closest big town to the Great Wall, people try to scam you by telling you to get off the bus early which then forces you to have to take a more expensive minibus or taxi. :/ That happen to them, so luckily we told them no when at four different stops people tried to tell us to get off. But we made it :) and were able to find ourselves a better minibus driver who took us directly to the remote spot on the North side of the Great Wall we were looking for. I don’t think we would have ended up in the right spot without him. We read in some blogs that a ride for 100 CYN ($18 USD) is a good bargain and we were able to talk him down to 120 CYN from 180 CYN. Mark had some good haggling skills today :)
After a breathtaking 45 min ride through the countryside, during which we saw a giant black building that is shaped like an huge egg, an aquifer, and many luxurious looking resorts, our minibus driver dropped us off right in the middle of nowhere we were looking for and from there we had to walk through this itty bitty village, which was mostly just houses to a gravel trail past the corn fields to a well-worn dirt trail. Yes, these are the directions we had to go off. Once we went the wrong way twice I was sorry our minibus drive had already left us…. But then we finally found the right gravel trail, yay. Now we hiked straight up the mountain to the wall. It was pretty tough for us and even harder when the little old men passed us up, haha. They are so amazing! We had to rest often and drink a lot of water, but we finally made it! At least to the wall, now for the 10k hike back to our ride home.
At the wall, a lady had a couple of ladders for us to use to climb up onto the wall. She charged 5 CYN each (90 cents). After I saw what she was doing, I was trying to figure out other things she could do to earn more money with souvenirs or Great Wall tower coins. I think each tower we passed has a specific name, so if each were made into a coin I bet people would want to collect them and she could bank! Haha. We actually found the wall to be a little crowded. I am sure not as bad as the touristy area, but we met a guy from Oregon there, Michael; 3 girls from Taipei, Taiwan; 2 guys from Manchester, England, another group of like 15 foreigners from Shanghai, and a little Chinese family. All super friendly and tackling the wall like a boss. The unrestored area was no joke and even the resorted area was hard. A lot of the wall is over grown and in areas it was straight up or straight down, I was thinking a slide would have been perfect, and they actually do have a toboggan near the touristy area. Haha, slide down the Great Wall of China! It was a tough hike, but the scenes and landscape was breathtaking. All the work that must have gone into building a 3,000 mile great wall, I can’t even imagine. I decided if I had too, I could probably only bring up one brick at a time and it would have taken forever to build. I think it did take a few dynasties until building walls went out of fashion. By the time we got to our destination, Mark lost his hat, we had tons of great photos, and my legs were shaking with each step. On the restored side, there were over 400 steps and funnily, we kept seeing sign from the opposite direction we were coming from that said “No Tourist beyond this point” so it was like okay no tourist beyond the point, okay not this point, okay wait, not this point…. We don’t know. Here there were a lot of vendors and Mark, like a rock star, drank a beer on top of the Great Wall of China! Finally and luckily, we reached our destination and caught the last cable car down to the busses home. If we had not caught it, we would have had to hike back down again and I don’t think I could have taken one more step.
The cable car was pretty fun, we zipped down lickety split and at the bottom we ran into Michael again who had already arranged a minibus back do to the town where we can catch the regular bus. Awesome! On his bus we also met a couple from Malaysia. Super sweet couple we hope to see again when we visit Malaysia. They told us we were all on the wall today with Linkin Park, so cool! Maybe we saw them and didn’t even noticed, haha! Overall it was a tough, amazing day. When we got home we zoned out in front of the TV watching boxing while we had dinner and I knocked out. I don’t know who won, us or the wall :)
Train Station - After sleeping in for a while after the long day on the great wall of China, poor Mark was beat. We headed off to the Beijing City Center to first buy train tickets. The train station was an adventure just by itself and a very grand building with people all over the place. It was so crowded everywhere. We had thought we could get some simple tickets but it turns out in the summer a lot of the tickets sell out fast and we ended up with a combination that is going to take us on a complete tour of not just the Chinese countryside but also every tier of seats available on the trains: standing, seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. I think this is going to be very harry potter and I am so excited about our trip :) The first one should be 6 hour to Hohhot, then 14 hours to Xian, and then another 14 hours to Shanghai. We were at first going to go from Hohhot to Shanghai, but Angda suggested we break up that 20 hour train journey and swing by the terra cotta warriors instead and no we have the tickets to do so! Tiananmen Square/ the Forbidden City - Now to Tiananmen Square. It is right in front of the Forbidden City/Imperial Palace (It has two names) and in the very center if the Beijing. The city is perfectly well balanced with the palace in the middle that lines up with building all the way up to the Olympic Park, where we are staying and all the way down to I don’t know where, then on each side of that line, the city fans out evenly. It is so pretty! The government buildings around the square are quite imposing and right in the middle of the square is Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. On the exit side of the Forbidden City, which is really far from the entrance side, there is a hill with a temple on top of it and you can climb up and see all of Beijing! It was amazingly gorgeous :) the skylines in every direction. I think Beijing has some of the coolest looking buildings. The CCTV building looks like pants and there is a performance hall that is shaped like an egg. They are all so creative and fun!
Houtong - We spent a while around the palace, then walked through Houtong to the subway station. Houtong is a very interesting part of the city, where people live the very traditional Chinese way in walled communities of 4 houses along the wall and a square in the middle. Then when whole area shares toilets which are evenly spaced throughout the neighborhood outside the walls. Very interesting. Nicy said that you have to have a lot of money to live in this area because it is so close to the palace and we could tell it was true because all the cars were very nice and foreign. 4. Food Peking Duck Spring Rolls – Our first very meal in China and it was amazing. I wanted Peking Duck because this is where it all started. Beijing used to be called Peking and the roast, crispy duck was delicious, the pancake that went with it was not so great, but the duck was yummy. Lots of people make roasted or BBQ’d duck, but I think I prefer the crispier kind. Mark says they make it similarly in England, yay! BBQ’d Bull Frog – Okay, so we ordered this because it was weird and it turned out to be one of our favorite dishes in China. The frog was spicy and so crispy. Way better then what Mark has had in France or what I have had in Mexico. Again I think it was the crispy, made it taste so goodly! Yoghurt drink - we even stopped to have these drinks in a white ceramic container with a foil top and a straw you poke through it. We have seen them everywhere around but didn’t know what they were and it turns out they are yogurt drinks and were so yummy and refreshing. Hot Pot – On our first evening we were able to finally get out of the heat and have a wonderful hot pot dinner with Angda and Li Can. They have a car so we drove to a super good restaurant Taco Dinner - On the way home from the city center, we stopped at the grocery store and pick up stuff to make dinner for Li Can and Angda. I am so excited. I am making tacos. We found this Chinese flat bread that kind of works like tortillas and I brought some taco seasoning from home. The grocery store was interesting. I guess a night everything goes on sell and all the workers were shouting out the bargains. It was very noisy, but we found everything we needed to make dinner. Dinner was amazing the tacos turned out with the Chinese flat bread, I sort of made gorditas and on the side we had salad. Li Can and Angda loved it and we had some great conversation.
5. Transportation Subway – The metro in Beijing was a little complicated. Not the easiest we have ever used. It was helpful, because it spans the whole city. Impressive especially since the city is so old. I guess it was the connections that were the problem. Sometimes we had to walk almost 1000 meters to the connection. I think that is what made the trips so long and with the city being so big we always had to make at least one or two transfers with every trip we had to make. Cars – So last time Mark came to China he said the driving was crazy. His taxi driver, hopped up on the side walk to gain one cars length worth of forward. So we came here expecting crazy drivers and having to dodge them even when we walked around, however, we have actually been quite safe, most especially as a pedestrian. The driving is aggressive, just like the queuing, you gotta take your space the second you get it, any hesitation and someone else will jump on it. And people on bikes, need to get out of your way. Now car honking is another topic. There are like three different levels and some vehicles even do have different horns. 1. You have the little beep beep, “Hello, Ni hoa, good morning :)”, 2. Then there is Beep Beep, “I am here and I am coming your way”, 3. Lastly there is BEEP BEEP, “get out of my way!” The busses use that last one a lot. Pedestrians - people walking are totally safe. If the car slows down for you, cross the street, any hesitation, and you missed it. Once you get out there, just keep walking, the cars will whiz right around you. Our friends said they feel like China is one of the safest places to be a pedestrian that they have ever been. If they were completely blind and had to cross the street, they were feel completely comfortable do it. Train - Catching the train to Hohhot.So we underestimated how long it would take to get to our train station. We left out of West Beijing Train station and we bought the tickets at Beijing Train Station (where they have an English speaking ticket counter). According to the map, the west station should have only taken 45 mins to get to, and it ended up taking almost 1.5 hours. So we had to run through the station to catch our train and that was not easy. We didn’t know where to get in line to get our ticket validated, so with only like 15 mins to catch our train we get into the wrong line, and luckily the girl in front of me in line, understands that we are confused and points us in the right direction. So we get through that and make a dash to our platforms, following our train number on the signs. When we finally make it, we are totally beat, hot and exhausted, and probably quiet a mess. But we have hard sleeper seats on this ride, which are actually quiet soft and I just pass out. Our train left at 3:30 pm, so by 4 I was out like a light. It was a little hard to fall asleep though, because the Chinese country side was so pretty. From the train we saw so much, valleys, mountains, villages. I didn’t want to miss a thing, but it was hard to keep my eyes open also, so out I went. When I finally woke up, Mark told me we were still just outside barely outside of Beijing and had been stopped for a long time. Something was wrong the stewardess kept coming over to tell us what was going on, but we had no idea what she was say. After about 3 or 4 hours we finally started moving again. At least we had the sleepers, so we were able to sleep through the 10 hour train ride, that was supposed to only be 6 hours.