Beijing: The Heart of China

Our third and longest vacation! We were given 7 days off so we decided to spend the time in Beijing and Xian. We spent 4 days in Beijing and 3 days in Xian. For the sake of length, I'm going to do a separate blog for Beijing and Xian (though this one is still quite long...)

Day 1

So, Wednesday April 30th, we brought our luggage with us to school and headed for the train station as soon as the days teaching was over. We took a short train ride to Guangzhou and from there caught our long train to Beijing.

Now when I say long train, I mean LONG. The ride was approx. 21 hours. That's almost an entire day on the train. And when we bought tickets there were only 4 beds left, so most of us were in seats the entire time. 8 hours in, it was announced we had arrived in Changsha (the place we went the week before and it took 3 hours on the speed train...). We were all a little depressed at that point, but we made it through with some good conversation and card games. And some sleep. We even played spaz Uno with a few neighbors :)

In reality, 21 hours wasn't as bad as I'd feared and once we arrived in Beijing we headed out to check in to our hostel. We stayed in older town Beijing, about a 15 min. walk from Tiananmen square.

The street where we stayed.

We took it slow after checking in. I hadn't felt great on the train and still wasn't feeling good at this point, so after finding some food I took a nap at the hostel while the others wandered around the shopping in the area.

Once they returned, we headed off to see the Olympic Nest and Water Cube.

I felt I had to take a picture with it after working
at Underwater Audio for so long :)

It was super windy! I felt like I was going to blow away a couple of times. On the up side, this meant that Beijing's notorious smog cloud was also blown away and we had beautiful blue skies the entire trip.

Day 2

The next day: the Great Wall!

We arranged a tour through our hostel and all met up the next morning. They fed us some McDonald's McMuffins for breakfast and then we drove out to the wall. We went to the Jinshanling section of the wall, which took about three hours to reach. The tour let us have about two hours on the wall- part on a restored section and part on an unrestored section.

The Great Wall is no walk in the park. It's a constant up and down full of stairs- each section different sized than the last. Some of them got pretty steep. At point we even climbed through a window.

Most of our time on the wall, there older ladies followed us and made themselves very helpful- offering a steadying hand or taking group photos for us. They seemed insistent on staying with us. When we finished, we found out why. They were selling souvenirs and wanted us to buy them since they had been so kind to follow us for the last 2 hours. They were extremely persistent.

Once everyone was back down, we ate lunch at a restaurant and then took the bus back to Beijing.

That night we decided to walk down to Tiananmen square and take a look around. This turned out to be easier said than done. We spent literally 15 minutes trying to figure out how to cross the street. Because it's a large road/intersection, there are tunnels to walk under the road instead of crossing the street. We didn't realize this at first, and then we had trouble locating the correct tunnel going the right way... But eventually we succeeded!

The square all lit up

Our first glimpse of the Forbidden City

Day 3

This day was filled with temples, shopping, and Kung Fu.

The first place we went to was the Buddhist Lama Temple (no, not the animal. The Dalai Lama). The temple was beautiful! The temple offered complimentary incense to burn, so the whole complex was full of smoke from so many people praying.

The temple wasn't just one building, but a complex of smaller buildings. Each one had one or more statues of different deities. All of the buildings had bright, detailed decorations and roofs- I love it!

The central building of the complex holds a large statue of the Buddha. I had a hard time getting it all in the photo...

Next up was the Temple of Heaven. It's located inside a large park, and again there are various buildings scattered around.

Me and the lovely Abby :)

Besides the main temple, the only other place we really checked out was the Echo Wall. It's a circular wall where you're supposed to be able to talk at one side and be heard on the other side. Chrissy, Colton and I tried but had no luck.

After that we enjoyed the park setting and relaxed. At one point we found people selling long, twirling ribbons and played with those for a while. We also came across an Asian choir performing on the street.

Once we had finished up we headed over to the Pearl Market, one of the two large and famous markets in Beijing. It's basically several floors full of stands where people are selling all sorts of stuff. Including knock offs and pearls.

I spent most of the time with Colton. We did a little shopping and a lot of looking. It's impossible to count the number of times I was asked if I wanted a scarf, Beats headphones, or chopsticks. Or how many times I was referred to as 'lady.'

That night some of the group went to a Chinese acrobats show and the others (including me) went to a Kung Fu show. It was arranged by the hostel, but did involve waiting in a side road and being driven to the theatre by a Chinese man in a strange little car.

Waiting for the show to start

The show was enjoyable. It had its cheesy moments, but it was fun to watch :)

Day 4

Back to Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City. This time we got across the road much faster and it was actually open :) We did have to go through a passport check before we could enter the square, and some lady in the line got into a fight with security. That was exciting.

We walked through the square up to the Forbidden City. Tiananmen square is so big! There were a lot of people there since it was a holiday, but it didn't even really feel crowded. It was also a little sad knowing what had happened there and that all the Chinese people don't know.

Now, as big as the square was, the Forbidden City is HUGE. It truly is a whole city within Beijing. We didn't see even a fraction of the whole thing. But we did see several building complexes and some gardens.

We spent around 1 hour going through the city and once we reached the other side we split up. Some people went off to try and find the street filled with strange food to eat and the rest of us hiked up a pagoda across the street. The top of the pagoda gives a great view of the entire Forbidden City complex to see just how big it is.

We then headed off to the Silk Market (famous large market #2). This was our arranged meeting place with the rest of the group. We thought it'd be easy to just catch the metro over there. We were wrong. The closest metro station we could find was clear back at the beginning of Tiananmen square where we had started. This meant we walked all the way back around the edge of the Forbidden City. This process took around 40 min. Funny thing, the other half the group had the same problem and never made it to weird food street.

Day 5

It was time to leave Beijing :( So we packed up all of our stuff in the morning and left it in the hostel storage for a while while we did some last shopping around the hostel. Then we headed to the train station. It was a 14 hour overnight train ride to Xian. The best thing? We had sleepers! This meant we each had a bed and slept most of the night :)