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Published: September 26th 2006
Tiananmen Square
The Gate of Heavenly PeaceWe’ve been here for a few days now after arriving early Tuesday morning. We actually ended up having a worse time on the journey to Beijing than when we were standing. Our packs were infinitely more comfortable than the ‘soft’ seats we were sitting on and although mine and Faye’s seat numbers were together our seats were on opposite sides of the train. Within an hour of leaving Tai Shan, the young Chinese gent next to me had put his head on my shoulder and was sound asleep and an elderly woman had almost put her head in Faye’s lap and fell asleep, both were squashing us against the windows. What a great journey this was going to be!
Beijing train station was packed, even at 6 in the morning and after fighting our way out into the streets we jumped in a pedicab (as he seemed to understand where we wanted to go) and headed off to find a hotel. We went to a youth hostel listed in our guide book and was told it was full, luckily we were directed a few minutes down the road to another, which although also full, we were told a room would
become free in a few minutes. As we got no sleep on the train, Faye curled on a giant leather sofa in the lobby and instantly fell asleep. I kept myself occupied on the free internet access provided while this few minutes turned into over an hour! Needless to say once we were checked in we both fell promptly asleep for the rest of the morning.
In the afternoon we threw on some clothes, and headed out into the city. Our legs were still killing us from the day before so I checked the map, saw that there was a metro station just down the road, so that’s the way we headed… After getting to the location on the map and seeing no station I studied the map more carefully and noticed that at the top it says Line 5 - under construction. Lonely Planet’s legendary maps strike again, here’s an idea, how about making it a dashed line? Stupid book! We had to walk a further mile down the road to another line, which we then took to Tiananmen Square.
Tiananmen Square is the largest public square in the world, and on the map its footprint is
Tiananmen Square
I came in search of tat... and tat is what I bought!! This photo doesn't show the full effect, the arm waves and everything *note* this watch has since stopped working!!! huge. In the middle of the square is the Chairman Mao Mausoleum, where the body of China’s famous leader now resides. This takes up a large proportion of the square as does a lot temporary exhibitions and other monuments, most notable is the ‘Monument To the Peoples Heroes’, a 37.9m high granite obelisk just north of Mao’s mausoleum. All of these plus the hordes of tourists visiting the square (I think there’s room for two more over there), make it feel a lot smaller than it actually is.
At the north of the square is the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’. This gate has a huge portrait of Mao hanging on it and is an important national symbol. To the left is written ‘Long Live the People’s Republic of China’ and on the right ‘Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World’
We spent a few hours at the square, wandering around and grabbed a bite to eat. At sunset we managed to catch the lowering of the flag ceremony then headed off back to the hostel to rest up. All this rushing around, and lack of sleep has given us both colds, I’m just glad we’re
Tiananmen Square
Just prior to the lowering of the flag! spending a few days here so we can kick back a little!
The following day we headed down to the hostel reception and booked a load of stuff at the information desk. Our flights back to Shanghai from Xian (when we finally get there) are bought. It’s a national holiday for a week from the 1st October so we wanted to make sure we booked these ASAP. We also managed to get a sleeper train to our next destination (Yay, finally) and booked the transport to the part of the Great Wall we wanted to see for Friday! While we were there we also hired two (of Beijing’s 9 million) bicycles as we’d decided we weren’t walking anywhere anymore.
Cycling to any destination in Beijing is like a suicide mission, cars run red lights when you’re on the crossroads, pedestrians walk out in front of you and other bikes/motorcycles cut you up. It’s also incredible fun and apart from saddle sore to add to our list of problems we’ve decided there’s no better way of getting around.
First off we went to the Pearl Market to see what tat was available to purchase… Although there are many
stalls and shops selling pearls at this market, it also has stalls selling, shoes, clothing, electronics and Chinese arts and crafts. Also in the basement there are stalls selling snake meat, shark fins, dried sea cucumbers and a whole host of other crazy foodstuffs so it would have been wrong not to have a wander around!
Across the road from the market is the ‘Temple of Heaven Park’. This is a 267 hectare park housing the Temple of Heaven, a perfect example of Ming architecture that has become a symbol of Beijing. There are numerous other buildings scattered around the park and it was easy to lose a few hours wandering around checking them all out. After plenty of photo’s we jumped back on our bikes and as the light was fading we pedalled back to the hostel.
That evening we went out to see some Chinese acrobatics that we’d booked earlier. We entered the theatre and the show started straight away. There were barely 10 people in the audience but that didn’t stop them from giving their all… I think we were watching students from an acrobatics school, and although they were a little rough round the
edges it had everything, plate spinning, contortionism, gymnastics, unicycle riding all with rather cool twists and besides it’s kinda funny when things go wrong and at least it shows that they haven’t glued everything in place! A couple of the performers were tiny children (no more than 6) and it was amazing to see them doing things which I can only dream of doing now let alone at that age! On the way back to the hostel we got chatting to some fellow English travellers and it was really nice to have an English conversation for a change!
The day after we hired two bicycles again as it made travelling around the city so convenient, as long as you didn’t mind a face full of bus exhaust every now and again. We cycled back to Tiananmen Square and parked our bikes outside the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and strolled through into the Forbidden City, so called, because it was off limits for 500 years. It is the largest and best preserved cluster of ancient buildings in China and one of the must do’s on anyone’s list in Beijing. After purchasing our tickets we walked into the complex with the
throngs of Chinese tour groups all following the flagged leader with the loudspeaker. We wandered around the huge complex, visiting some of the exhibitions of Ming and Qing artefacts and admiring the many buildings. Sadly many of the buildings were under scaffolding undergoing restoration work (in preparation for the Olympics) which although disappointing, comparing the buildings which hadn’t been restored against the ones which had, you could see that it was much needed. We wandered around the city for a few hours but were getting weary of all the crowds so we decided to head back towards the entrance to pick up our bikes. On the way, we took a detour down some alleys and found ourselves in the Western Palaces, in which there were plenty of quiet courtyards and buildings to walk around in much needed peace.
We picked up our bikes and headed around the outside of the Forbidden City walls to one of the parks towards the back. Beihai Park is mostly lake, and when we entered we noticed pedal boats all lined up so we darted straight to the ticket office to find that they were just shutting up shop for the evening… Boo!!! Oh
The Forbidden City
These were the handles on many of the large urns scattered around the city! well nice thought! Faye and I strolled around the lake, found a quiet bench to lounge on and watched the sun set over the water before heading back to the hostel as our time was almost up on our bikes.
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eartboy_rod
non-member comment
certainly worth reading
hey guys, i stumbled across your blog and read every entry, well done, you've helped me decide on my next trip - china. have fun with the world trip, i'm off to south america in 54 or so days.... i'm sure you'll have a blast over there. rod - wt2.blogspot.com