4 days in Beijing!

Long time no see! It’s been a while since my last blog post, sorry for that. No worries since this will be a long one :) We’ve had holidays this week from the school and we wanted to visit Beijing now.. At first we were planning on going with a total of 10 or 11 students but due to some coincidences we were only 5 in the end. However, it probably was almost better that way as it’s always quite a challenge to organize one big group.. We left Shanghai for Beijing on Saturday morning, so we arrived in Beijing at our hostel already at 1pm. After a quick check-in we walked directly to the closest subway station and drove to a famous, very Chinese food street called Wangfujing. There we had some local foods and as the street is famous for offering scorpions and snakes and other species, we wanted to try the fried scorpions :) wasn’t that weird at all, they tasted basically as anything fried..

After eating we took a look at a big mall close by and we also walked around the pedestrian street which was full of shops. Before returning to the hostel we walked through another food street called Donghuamen Night Street. Ther you can find all possible foods from various Chinese provinces, for example some centipedes, chicken hearts, dog meat, silk worms and goat testicles. We just walked around the market without eating anything. Our hostel was called Sanlitun Youth Hostel and it was located very close to a big shopping area and the Sanlitun bar street. The hostel itself was really nice, there were a lot of Western tourists and the staff was really nice and everybody could speak English too.

Sunday was a day full of tourist attractions. At first we went to see the Forbidden City, which surely is a must-see location for every tourist in Beijing. It’s one of the UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage objects and listed as one of the five most important palaces in the world. With its 72 hectares the palace was truly huge and it consisted of a total of 980 buildings and 90 palaces. After several hours in the Forbidden City we took a look at Tiananmen Square. Because there were some Congress meetings during the week in Beijing, the whole area around Tiananmen Square was closed from the public, so that’s why I said we took a look at it.

In the late afternoon we drove with the subway to the business district if Beijing as we wanted to have a look at the city from the local World Trade Center. We’d read that there would be a observation deck on the top of it but as we got there, there was only a restaurant and a bar. The windows were in need of a wash since they were very dirty and you couldn’t really see anything from there. After the WTC we drove a long metro drive to the Olympia Park to see the National Stadium and the Aquatic Stadium. With all their lightening the stadiums looked really nice in the dark.

The third day started very early for us. We’d booked a trip to the Great Wall via the hostel as we thought that it’d be the easiest way to get there and the price wasn’t bad at all. So, in the morning our guide came to the hostel to pick up us with a minivan. The trip included a lot more than just the trip to the Great Wall. At first we stopped at a Jade workshop/museum/shop to see some traditional Chinese art and jewelry work. After the Great Wall we visited the Ming Tombs. All the 13 emperors of the Ming Dynasty were buried in that area that covers around 40 square kilometers and is full of temples built in their honor. Not all of them are open for visitors and we visited only one of them. Another part of the trip was a visit to a silk factory and store and the last part was a visit at a famous tea house that has been visited by many famous people, for example Vladimir Putin.. But now back to the Great Wall! We went to a part called The Badaling Great Wall. We agreed with our guide to spend 90 minutes there walking on the Wall but we ended up staying there over 2 hours because we wanted to climb to the very top of the Wall there. It was quite a long climb as the height difference was several hundred meters. But it was worth the climb on the stairs as the weather was great and the view from the top was really nice!

We spend almost the entire fourth day in the Summer Palace in Northwest of Beijing. It is the largest and most well-preserved royal park in China. The park is built around the Kunming Lake and the park has many pavilions, towers, temples bridges and corridors. Maybe the funniest occurrence was as we walked around one small island. There were dozens of Chinese taking pictures of the biggest temple located on the other side of the lake and as we walked by them, many of the turned with their high-end cameras and started to take pictures of us :) It felt quite weird as there were many tourists besides us too and the people in Beijing shouldn’t be that unfamiliar with foreigners.. But maybe to blond Finns at the same time was pretty unusual for them.