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Published: August 8th 2011
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After a 24 hour journey door to door we have arrived for our first day in China. The journey consisted of two planes, a pitstop in Finland (where we bumped into Adrian Charles, how random) and an argument on arrival with the hostel we are staying in, of which I will talk about later. It wasn't quiet the same as flying into Indonesia or Viet Nam, the sky was bleak and looked like wet concrete for most of the day but on leaving the air conditioned airport that sticky sweet smell of heavy humid air clinging to your skin hit us and it was then that it hit me that I was here, in China, back on the Asian continent with Bert the backpack and ready to explore!
We contemplated waiting for a bus but as the directions Real Gap had provided were about as useful as a chocolate fireguard we decided to hop in a cab instead, much more straightforward for our first experience of Beijing. It wasn't as crowded and noisy as we expected it to be, but then it was 8am on a Saturday morning so we decided not to judge to early. The built up city
seemed to all look the same as we drove through it, and we soon realised that the concrete sky would stay that way as it was actually the smog that covered the city making it feel very oppressive. We eventually were dropped off on the right road by the taxi but not at the right place, however our hostel was easy to find, the problem was that when we tried to check in, we did not have a room in the hostel that the tour operator had sent us too. This resulted in a bit of an argument, a trip to go and buy a phone card and an angry conversation between the hostel worker and the Chinese lady who was our port of call in emergencies. Eventually they let us in the hostel and we finally got up the five flights of dirty stairs to our room, greeted by two very hungover Portugese girls and a Chinese girl who had an array of fruit all over the place. We were tired and annoyed by this point, as we should have been in a much nicer hotel as we were orignially told we would be. We decided however to not stay in the hostel as we would fall asleep otherwise, so in our very tired state we dragged ourselves out to see some of the city.
We jumped on the subway (which was very easy to navigate) and ended up by the Olympic Village which was very cool to see, although with the city shrouded in smog it was not as awe inspiring as we had expected. We walked around for about an hour an a half and we were so knackered that we decided to get some food and head back to the hostel to get to bed. After a massive pot of 60p noodles we made our way back to the hostel, showered and met some of the other girls who had also arrived a day early, they were all really nice which filled us with confidence that we would have a nice rest of the trip!
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