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Published: August 12th 2011
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Up, breakfast and magically we were all out of the hostel by 9am, despite some of the group trying to go for breakfast at 9am as we were leaving. We headed to the Northwest of this sprawling, traffic logged city to begin the day in the Summer Palace. The Palace was the summer home of the ancient Emperors, hence its name. Again this place was heaving with tourists, although strangely most of the tourists seem to be Chinese themselves as it is also the school holidays over here. It wasn't as hot as it has been today, the rain has cleared the air though so it was much brighter than it has been and it seems to have lifted some of the smog which is great. The Palace was less of a Palace in the Western sense of the word and more of a huge garden with a massive lake in the middle. It must have been at least 10 square miles and it was beautiful. The lake was full of pedal and motor boats, and surrounding the lake were temples, pagodas and other incredibly beautiful decorations making the whole place somewhat magical, despite the hordes of bloody tourists. We were given some free time in the Palace and we headed up to one of the temples on the side of a hill, where from the top you had an incredible view of the lake, the surrounding temples and the city skyline in the background.
We stayed in the Palace for a couple of hours before heading back out into the city to sample some of old Beijing on a traditional Hutong Tour of the older part of the city. We headed out into this older and different sie of Beijing on rickshaws (like tuktuks but with bikes instead of motorcycles) to see old Beijing. We were slightly disappointed, old Beijing was not as old as we had been expecting, and to be honest I expected it to look a lot more like the slum areas I saw in Cambodia and Viet Nam before, but it looked nothing like this. It was very nice and well presented, and did not look run down really at all. The rickshaws took us to a local housing estate, wher several families share facilities all together. This was a little more like the real China I had been expecting, however it was still fairly modern as when we did enter one of the houses for lunch we were greeted with air conditioning, coca-cola and modern table and chairs set ready for us to eat.
We had a nice lunchtime getting to know the family that were hosting us, we were fed an array of local Chinese food and we got to ask them questions and learn about life in this part of China. They also taught us to make dumplings, let us check out their house and surroundings and they showed us the paintings that they sell for a living. From here we headed out of the Hutong on the rickshaws and made our way to a teashop. Tea is very popular in China and there are thousands of different varieties. We got to sample about 6 of them howeever we didn't buy any from here as it was very expensive.
We had the evening free so after grabbing some more water from the supermarket (and a checky ice cream!) we headed back to the Olympic Park to see it at nightfall. It was beautiful at nighttime as everything was lit up and it was far cooler to walk around at night. We walked around for about 2 hours before getting really tired and heading back to the hostel in order to get a fairly early night as we want to be up early tomorrow.
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