Wednesday 22 May 2013

"It's funny, all Westerners want to go to Tiananmen Square... It's because it's the biggest square in the world!" - Fashion Glasses John

After having such a fantastic time in Mongolia all the members of our group were quite apprehensive about China. What would it be like in a communist country? Would it be as dirty as many people say? Would we all catch bird flu and die? We agreed that in the West we are constantly confronted with a negative perception of China so it would be hard not to go with some preconceptions.Thankfully this was mainly unfounded and we had an amazing time in this very busy, buzzing capital city.

 
We were met by "John" our honcho for Beijing who was about 5"3 and wore "fashion" glasses with no glass in.... That afternoon we went for a delish meal and explored the main shopping street in Beijing along with the rather exotic night market.




 
 
 

As Monique (one of our vodka train buddies) only had 1 full day in Beijing we decided to go to the 2 main tourist attractions namely the Great Wall and the Forbidden City first. The Great Wall is quieter the earlier you can get there so we started out early to get to the Mutianyu part of the wall which is meant to be slightly less busy than others. It also has a ski lift to get up and a very traditional Chinese toboggan run to get down!! It was so impressive to actually be at one of the most famous sites in the world and to see the actual size of the wall... We could never comprehend it from photos, but wow!!




 
 
 
After enjoying a walk along the wall, a super fun toboggan ride down and a bit of bartering at the market stalls that filled the walk to the car park we headed to the Forbidden City. It's name is because during the time of the Emperors, the Forbidden City was only for the emperor and his family (and presumably his servants). It is in the centre of Beijing and is absolutely massive. It makes Buckingham palace look like a doll's house!!! 


 


The following day we parted company with our honcho and ended our Vodka Train tour (Monique flew to Turkey) and we spent the day with Rachael and Anna before they headed for the Silk Road. We all went to the main shopping street for a much needed coffee for breakfast and discovered a pretty cool market full of random things to buy.
 
 
 
After a bit of haggling and coffee guzzling we headed for a walk around Beijing and ended up in a Halong neighbourhood (traditional Chinese streets/alleys) After much negotiating we got 2 rickshaws to take us for a ride which was really fun, we saw a lot of random stuff!!
 

 

 
 
 
After a well deserved lunch we headed to Tiananmen Square to see the place where students had been massacred, where that infamous photo of "Tank Man" was taken and where there is a big fat picture of Chairman Mao.
Having mentioned the square to John you could tell that he was Chinese from his response "Oh lots of tourists want to go there, as its the biggest square in the world"....sadly untrue.



 
The first day of just the 2 of us (we miss you VT guys) was spent going to various temples including the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple. Both were beautiful and full of people waving incense around. We were pleasantly surprised to see the freedom people apparently had with religion (it being a communist country and everything) but did notice that there was not a single picture of the Dalai Llama anywhere to be seen....



 
 
In the evening we headed to a street that had been re-modelled to look like a traditional Chinese street from the early 1900s and contained many old Beijing stores such as the original Peking duck restaurant as well as the multinationals such as H&M, Zara and of course, Starbucks (looking really out of place in the traditional building).


 

 
Our final day in China was spent at the Summer Palace and Beihai Park. Both were beautiful. The day was very cloudy and I think it was then you could truly appreciate just how polluted Beijing is.
 
 
 
 
In the evening we headed to the Olympic park and got to see the Water Cube and the Birds Nest up close. It was pretty cool to visit after all the Olympic hype of London and to see how they had maintained their Olympic park. We also spent a long time at the wall of medals which had engraved on it all the medal winners from the 2008 Olympics, however there was no velodrome cyclists at all!! We think the absence of Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and the other medal winners may be a conspiracy as we win all the medals, but for some reason they really were not there!!






Overall we had an absolutely amazing time in Bejing and we both would like to visit other parts of China. The people were generally really friendly (apart from the man who punched me in the boob because I wouldn't buy his knock-off book) and we often felt like celebs with the amount of photos that were taken of us!! It was amazing to see a country that is so often in the news and to see other sides to what we always see as negative. One of the things we both noticed was how well looked after and happy all the children there were. Everywhere you went you would see Grandparents/ Dads/ Families with a child looking exceptionally well looked after and cared for. The one child policy in China means I guess that the one child/Grandchild is very precious and the parents and grandparents have more money, love and time for them. Although of course this is an extreme breach of liberty and leads to terrible cases of infantcide and abandonment it was interesting to get another view on something that before our visit was to both of us only a terrible law to live with.
 
 
 
Beijing itself does not feel at all Communist as there are signs of capitalism and multinationalism everywhere. To us it felt like a very capitalist country run by an autocratic dictatorship, which I suppose in reality it is.


 

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