Beijing - the City of Multiple Palaces with Auspicious and Prosperous Names

My weekend in Beijing was fun. Exhausting, but fun. Rachel and I didn't have time to take in all the usual tourist sites, so there was no hope of us getting a taste of 'real' Beijing, but everything we visited seemed to have more than it's fair share of Chinese tourists so the experience wasn't as 'Disneyfied' as I'd read in some guidebooks.

We flew into Beijing on Thursday night and took the airport shuttle bus into town (something I'd highly recommend if you don't want to spend a fortune on a taxi) and then a taxi to our hostel (http://www.xihuahotel.com/eng/zhide/index.asp) where we enthused over the TV in our twin room and then promptly went to sleep. When you're on a weekend tourist mission you don't have much time for bars and clubbing!

Friday was Ching Ming Festival, which was a public holiday, so the Forbidden City (or Palace Museum as the signposts in Beijing call it) was swarming with visitors. This doesn't detract from the immensity of the various palaces and halls inside the city, or the huge courtyards in between them, but it does add to the sense of claustrophobia when you've taken a few turns through the narrower alleyways and then find yourself face to face with a few locked gates. I'm not sure what I was expecting of the Forbidden City, but it didn't really fill me with awe. I could be impressed by the scale of the buildings and admire the intricate details and paintwork on the roofs, but perhaps it was all just too big to take in at once. The most interesting bit was an exhibition in one of the smaller, shadier courtyards, about the imperial concubines! It was full of little artefacts like snuff bottles and dominos that you could connect with on a human scale.

Me in the Forbidden City

Crowds between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Gate

From the Forbidden City, we joined the flow of tourists gushing out the Tiananmen Gate, under the 6-lane freeway and back up on the other side in Tiananmen Square. The square was sprinkled with groups of tourists, in between which there were very serious marching guards in their green uniforms and little yellow camper-van shaped vehicles emptying the rubbish bins. I smiled at some little kids running around with Chinese flags and their mum asked me and Rachel to be in some photographs with them!

Tiananmen Gate from Tiananmen Square

In our attempt to conquer as much of Beijing as possible in one day, Rachel and I then caught a taxi (which we overpaid for as we tried to bargain instead of using the meter!) to the Temple of Heaven in Tiantan park. The temple is another impressive building with a beautiful roof, this time in blue and gold rather than the reds and yellows of the Forbidden City. The park around the temple immediately seemed a million miles away from the buzz of the city centre, even though we'd been less than 15 minutes in our taxi to get there. We heard some music and joined the crowd around a group of (I assume) amateur musicians playing traditional Chinese instruments for a few songs. The crowd and the group really seemed to be enjoying the music and they smiled at us as if bemused that foreigners would be interested in the show. We did take some time to admire the beautiful buildings in the park, but the best bit was when we copied the locals and stretched out on a patch of grass in the shade of some trees. There is very little grass in Hong Kong so to find a whole lawn of it in Beijing was a great suprise, especially as the grass was really lush and green and springy. The park is planted with lots of ancient cypress trees and has long treelined avenues that reminded me of the jardins in Paris.

The Temple of Heaven

Paris or Beijing?

After our busy day, Rachel and I set out in search of some Peking Duck for dinner. The hostel recommended a restaurant to us, but it had a 30 minute wait and wasn't cheap at all so we checked out a few more places close to the Dong'an night market (where they sell interesting things on sticks). We eventually settled on a place that would do us half a duck, but it turned out to be mostly fat with a bit of skin and a hint of meat so we were quite disappointed really.

On Day 2, we were in our hostel lobby at 6:15 to head out to the Great Wall of China. The bus took about 3 hours and was filled with a French school group, which Rachel was eager to leave as soon as we started walking. We walked the section between Jinshangling and Simatai, although we cheated and took the world's slowest cable car to miss out the first 2 towers. This section of the wall is steep and involves climbing up many many many steps and then carefully scrambling down the other side where the bricks on top of the wall are broken and loose. Although there were lots of tourists, it didn't feel overrun, and there was a nice feeling of cameraderie as we all struggled to deal with the rollercoaster like route. Rachel and I adopted an English guy called Tom who was also on our coach trip and was on Day 2 of his round the world trip.

The Great Wall of China!

Me and Tom debate which way to go

At the end of our section of wall ("Cross the chain link fence and then turn left at the second tower" as the guide said) we had to walk down a well paved path to the carpark... OR... take an entirely authentic Chinese zipwire across a reservoir followed by a little boat trip! The three of us stood and contemplated our options for at least five minutes. After our guide whizzed off on the zipwire, I decided to give it a go. We were carefully hooked on with some lower body harnesses and after we'd sat down and kicked off it was all rather relaxing really. It almost blew the fine loess dust out of our hair.

Rachel and I wave goodbye!

On Day 3, Rachel and I had arranged to meet Tom at the Summer Palace - a highly landscaped park where the Emperors and Empresses used to laze around in summer. The guidebook makes it sound a bit like a park, and it's possible that there are park like areas, but the place is SO vast that we only managed to cover a small corner of it. We admired more red and yellow and blue buildings, saw an acrobatic show and girls dancing with long sleeves on the Great Stage (apparently the biggest of the 3 imperial stages in China), dressed up in some imperial outfits for photographs and had a ride on a pedalo! The Summer Palace contains a MASSIVE lake - so big we could barely see across it in the haze - and lots of Chinese people take pedalos and battery-powered boats out on it, so it felt like a 'real Beijing' experience even although it was clearly a frivolous tourist activity.

Rachel through the painted glass in one of many courtyards

Pedalos on the lake

Empress Jill, Emperor Tom and Empress Rachel

After all that, it was time to catch our (delayed) flight back to Hong Kong. I was sad not to get the chance to see more temples, wander the 'hutongs' (alleyways) or take a bicycle ride, but I'm glad a went for the short time I had.