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Published: September 10th 2007
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Well I've safely made it to Beijing, capital of the largest populated country in the world. Pretty much everywhere I've gone has been PACKED with people. Although, I guess it doesn't help that I've been travelling in major tourist areas. The Beijing airport was easy to navigate and find a taxi. We had gotten some help inside the terminal with writing down the address of our hostel. We then hopped into a cab, showed him the paper of where we wanted to go and we were on our way!
It took us about an hour to get to our hostel. The highway and city streets were bustling with cars and bikes - tons of bikes! I've never seen a city with such a high dependency on bikes. I remember reading about two lanes - one for cars and one for bikes - but I didn't remember prior to coming and didn't think there would be so many. The majority of important roads have a bike lane about the width of a two-lane road. These bike lanes are also filled with rickshaws (both manual and motorized).
Our first night we headed out to check out Tian An Men Square. It was getting
dark out, but there were still thousands of people hanging around. Just before entering the Forbidden City there is a large painting of Mao. This is a popular tourist photo site. Across the busy road (about 12 lanes) is Tian An Men Square where you can see the memorial for the People's Heroes, Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, National Museum of China, and the Great Hall of the People. We took a few photos, then headed back towards our hostel to find some food.
The cuisine here has been delicious! As much as I liked Korean food, it's nice to get a little change. Chinese food has a lot more vegetables, and dishes here seem to be cooked in many various sauces.
The following day we rented bikes and toured around the city. We went into the Forbidden Palace, walked around Tian An Men Square again and then afterwards we just biked around other parts of the city. That night we just hung around the hostel drinking with a few other travellers. The major beer in Beijing is called Tsingtao. It's not the best beer I've ever tasted, but it's $0.30 for 600ml - so I'm not complaining!
On Wednesday (05/09)
we were off to the Great Wall. The tour started at 6:20am where we waited for a bus. Once on the bus, it took us 3.5 hours to get to Simatai (a popular area of the wall to visit with a lot less tourists). This portion of the Wall involved a 10km hike. Initially there was a small hike upwards to get to the actual wall. Most views were obscured from mountains on either side. However, once we got up to the top and the starting part of the Wall for our tour, we could see much more. The scenery was amazing! As far as the eye could see the wall would wind up and down the top of the mountains. The whole journey I kept wondering in my head how they built this over 400 years ago.
The first 3 km's of the trip we were actually accompanied by a large group of marathon runners. Lucky us, the one day I come to visit the Great Wall it's full of runners. It wasn't as bad as it may seem...they were patient when crossing a narrow area, and really didn't bother us too much. As we kept trekking on, there
would be crowds of woman that we would have to walk through. A few would proceed to follow us, telling us some useful info as to which side of the Wall was Beijing and which side was Mongolia. We knew they were going to try and sell us something...it was just a matter of time. Sure enough, before the next ticket check-point they brought out books, postcards, bookmarks and cold water. We really didn't want anything, but they were very persistent. Eventually out of our group of 4, 2 bottles of water were purchased.
We carried on, hiking up and down the wall. Some areas were very easy to walk, other areas were quite steep and you had to be careful with your footing. Nobody with us slipped down a hill or fell off the Wall, so I'd say it was a successful hike! Once we got to the end, there was an option to take a zip-line down across a river to the bottom, or you could hike the extra 1.6km. At first I was a little hesitant, but after watching several other people go, I asked myself "why not?". So for roughly $5 I got to zip-line down
from the Great Wall!! So the next time someone asks me: "If someone jumped off a bridge, does that mean you'd do it?" I'll be able to reply: "Yes!"
Later that night we went to a club with 8 other travellers, one of which had also been teaching in South Korea. The place was called Propaganda. It wasn't too different from anywhere else I've been. But it was nice to say that I've been out in Beijing.
Thursday (06/09) was a slower day since we went out the night before. We wanted to leave Beijing that night, but the travel agent said that the tickets were all booked. She recommended that we go to the actual station and see if we could get something there. Luck wasn't on our side. We couldn't get a hard sleeper (a "bed" to lay on, rather than a seat) for the next 4 days, so we had to take the hit and travel on a hard seat the following day. Most long distance trains in China leave at night, arriving in the morning the next day. Our train ride from Beijing to Xi'an was 14 hours, so we were a little scared of what
lay ahead.
On Friday (07/09) we had to check out of our hostel, find a bank and then kill some time before our train left at 5:20pm. We hopped into a rickshaw and went to the Temple of Heaven. After living in Korea for a year - many of the temples start looking the same, so we decided to just walk around the grounds and not pay the ticket to get up-close to the temple. This was fine for the both of us. We then headed back to the hostel, grabbed some food and headed to the train station.
Getting onto the train with one large bag on my back and another smaller bag on my chest was a challenge. People were EVERYWHERE! The trains allow for standing passengers, so the aisles are just FULL of people. At one point when I was getting hot water for my soup, I saw several people laying in sinks, the aisles and anywhere else one could fit.
The people sitting around us were very shy around us for the first few hours. We then brought out some playing cards and this opened things up a bit. Kovats and I can speak about 5
words in Mandarin, so we weren't much help. Thankfully a few of them could speak a fair amount of broken English. We tried to teach them Crazy Eight's. This didn't last long. So I asked them to teach us a game. I'm not sure the name of it, but I think it's similar to Asshole, except with runs. We played this game for maybe 2 hours. Unfortunately we still had about 6 hours to kill. It seemed like the never ending train ride. In total I figure I caught about 2 hours sleep, so when we arrived in Xi'an I wasn't the happiest person. Luckily I had arranged to get picked up from the train station by the hostel we were to stay at. This made life a lot easier at 8:30am when we hadn't had a solid sleep.
I think future posts will be much smaller. As I've said in some of my Korean posts, it's more of a chore than anything else. Also, uploading pictures takes a little longer here. I'll try and keep posting my pictures, but with less of a story. Be creative when looking at the pictures and make up your own story! haha
Hopefully everyone is doing well back home!
Charles
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