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Published: August 7th 2007
Summer Palace
Temple in the Summer Palace groundsWe arrived in Beijing after a grueling day of travel. Well, for Ashley it was more like 2 days of travelling. She had a 7 hour flight to Dubai, a 3 hour layover, another 8 hour flight to Beijing & then she had to wait for Laura for 3 hours at the airport because Laura's flight was delayed 6 hours from Korea! Luckily we both landed safe & sound & were happy to be heading to the hotel.
Once we arrived, we were welcomed by a familiar face from the Bay Area. Che is here on business & has been very helpful because he is fluent in Chinese. We've been able to spend some time adjusting to the time zone & relaxing, but also managed to visit some of the interesting tourist attractions.
Our day at the Summer Palace was the first time we ventured out on our own. It wasn't very difficult really, since we have an amazing travel book that lists all the important information in both English & Chinese. We just pointed to the destination in our book & the taxi driver took us where we wanted to go. It was really hot out that day,
but felt cool in the Palace grounds. It has several lakes & lots of trees to shade the stone which helps keep everything nice & cool.
Another highlight of Beijing was the Houhai Lake area, which has a ton of bars & interesting nightlife. You can rent paddle boats to ride on the lake, which was a lot of fun. We also enjoyed the Great Wall a lot. We got up at 6 AM & rode a bus 3 hours north to the Jinshanling Wall area & hiked about 10km to the Simatai Wall area. Once we got close to the end, we decided to ride a zip line down instead of hiking the last little bit. That was really fun! 😊
Oh, another amazing day was when we walked around the Wangfujing Street area, which has tons of stores to go shopping at. They have this one street that is just lined with a bunch of exotic street food. The meat skewers are very popular & we tried some grasshopper & snake! Che was brave enough to try the starfish, but Ashley & I weren't that adventurous.
Bathrooms here can also be somewhat of an adventure.
Forbidden City
Stone carving of a dragon in the Forbidden City grounds. We need to always remember to take toilet paper with us everywhere because none of the restrooms have them unless you're in a hotel. Most of the restrooms are also squat toilets, again hotels do seem to have the western toilet seats. Che seems to be pickier about the restrooms than we are though, but some of them really are pretty gross.
The weather here has been rainy & when it rains, it pours. But it's actually a good thing when it rains because it clears some of the pollution out of the air. It's so smoggy here & so much traffic congestion it makes you wonder how the Olympics are going to be held here. Not sure much of the pollution can be cleaned up in a year. Also still a lot of building going on. Will they be ready???
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Emma
non-member comment
Yummy Food
How did the grasshoppers taste?! What did your friend say about the starfish? Wasn't it a little hard? The Great Wall looks steep and rugged in places. In Laura's photos that I received by email, it looked as if someone had fallen and skinned their knee - but the extent of the wall is hard to believe. By the way, on the news yesterday, an Olympic official stated that the pollution was a problem.