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Published: January 2nd 2009
I flew into
Beijing because I didn’t want to spend 18 hours on the train. The 2-hour flight only cost about $75 and I got to see the Yellow River basin and landscape below me.
I got settled into my hostel in the evening and went down to the hotel café. I was grumbling to the waitress about how the menu said they could make vegetarian food, but they wouldn’t make it. Another guest at the hostel overheard me and said that someone in her group was vegetarian and they were getting ready to go out to a veg restaurant. Everyone in the café started talking with each other and it was such a fun atmosphere. I went out with these girls but we never found the restaurant. We did have a fun small adventure with a creepily odd cab driver who kept driving us in circles, but we wound up at back at the café because it got too late.
New Year’s Eve Day I have such a hard time getting out of bed and moving around when I’m on vacation. I knew Beijing was out there and I should see it, but it was cold and so I
moseyed out to the streets of Beijing around noon and walked down to the
Forbidden City. I have seen many palaces in Korea and I figured this visit would take me about an hour. I had no idea how immense this place is. It just kept going. The buildings are a lot like I had seen in Korea, but they are so much bigger and colored in powerful red and gold. It was very impressive. I rented the audio guide compete with a map and GPS to tell you where you were and listened to about three hours of Chinese history and palace intrigue. Personally, I found it a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
I left at closing time and wound up in
Tienanmen_Square. There was nothing really to do at the square and it’s heavily guarded, but I remember the pictures on the news of the uprising in 1989 and I felt the power of what that meant. I got there too late to see Chairman Mao’s mausoleum and the rest of the buildings looked too unimpressive (or maybe too oppressive) for me to spend time trying to see any of them.
On my way back, I wandered
Forbidden Ciy
A main Hall in the outer city.through the neighborhoods and back alleys. A pleasant evening.
New Year’s Eve I had long since decided that New Year’s was not a big deal and that going to bed early was not a bad thing. So, I had booked a trip to the Great Wall leaving at 6 AM the next day. When I got back to the hostel and shuffled into the café, the crowd from the night before was gathering to go out to dinner and a rave for New Year’s. While a rave is not my thing, I followed along for dinner. One of the guys in our group is a Chinese-Australian who did all the ordering for us and got plenty of vegetarian dishes for the veg ladies. I love Chinese food! We ate ourselves silly and in the end my share was about $3.00. Incredible! The group wound up going out for drinks before the rave and, being New Year’s Eve, I decided to follow along for that. It was an interesting side of modern Beijing that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Actually, I had a lot of fun in a place that usually isn’t my scene. Loud rap music, techno laser lights
moving around the crowd and cheap alcohol… I couldn’t help but smile at it all. I gave everyone a hug at 11:00 and saying that it's New Year’s in Seoul. The group left the bar at 11:30. While going to a rave was tempting just for the experience, I decided that really I’d rather not and happily took a cab back to the café just in time to see the count down on TV and off to bed for a 5:15 wake-up to go to the Great Wall. It was all together a much more exciting New Year’s than I had planned.
Happy New Year everyone!
There are a bunch of photos waaaaaay down at the bottom of the page. Scroll down to the bottom of this page or double-click on the pictures to see more photos connected with this blog.
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