WARNING: I have not posted in four days do to a computer shortage in our hostel so the following post is likely to be long and boring. I don't expect anyone to read through it all and if you do that means you probably have too much time on your hands. Additionally the title will not make sense until Day 3 at the earliest, so if your curious go ahead and skip to Day 3.
Day 1: Arrival
After a quick 3 hour plane ride, on which we had two rows to ourselves, we arrived in the Beijing Capital International Airport. With a little effort and his skill of reading engrish Chris found our ride standing with a sign that read "CHIRS TOP." We followed him to the car and started the 40 min trip to our hostel. We were riding along comfortably, or as comfortably as you can in Beijing with people, bikes and cars flying all around, when all of a sudden our driver hooked a left down a small hutong street. Just to give you an idea the street was probably 10 ft wide at best, was part dirt part broken concrete, and had locals walking up and down it. About half way down he stops and tells us to get out of the car and points down the street indicating for us to walk that way.... At this point Chris and I are both thinking " what the hell did we get ourselves into and are we getting robbed." At the last second we saw a small sign that said "The Red Lantern" in English so we both started walking. We clearly over reacted a little and we found the hostel just down the street on the left. During check in were told we had to walk to get to our place, which was not so reassuring. Still rattled by our drop off we walked outside and some guy on a bike stops takes our bags and then rides off indicating for us to follow. Lets just say he really wasn't waiting for us and we had to speed walk to keep up or we risked watching our bags disappear down the street. By the time we got to our room and found our rock hard beds we were basically crying like little girls wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. What can we say, going from the Hyatt to the hostel in Beijing was a little bit of an adjustment.
Day 2: Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Temple of Heaven
Got up around 9 and decided to go down town. We asked the hostel the best way to get down town and they indicated to take the bus for 1 RMB, which is basically 15 cents. Even though the book said to avoid buses and no one else in the hostel seemed to brave the public transport we decided to give it a shot. It went pretty smoothly and we found our selves on the south side of Tiananmen Square in no time. First impressions... everything in the square is huge. In fact the scale of Beijing in general is gigantic. From the bus stop we walked north across the square toward the Forbidden City. Still a little skeptical of just about everyone and everything we were on edge checking our pockets and watching our stuff most of the day. We got to the Forbidden City without any issues and started walking towards the entrance. On the way in we were harassed a little by some people selling stuff and some young kids even tried to catch us in a selling art scam (thanks to the Beijing book we were pre-warned). Once in the city we took the english audio tour. It was cool, but we were getting hungry so we headed back across Tiananmen Square to get some food. After lunch we decided to walk down to the Temple of Heaven. It took about 15 min to walk through some interesting areas, but we got there pretty easy. The temple was cool, apparently built without any nails and lucky for us provided good shelter from the rain. It is hard to describe the rain here, but when it rains the sky just seems to open up in seconds and dump water for hours. After about an hour it slowed down enough for us to leave. We headed for the east gate and over to the pearl market. The pearl market was pretty much awful, complete with four floors of people yelling at you to come buy there stuff and jewelry that I cant tell if it is real or fake. Having our fill of the pearl market we walked the 15 min back up to our bus stop and rode back to the hostel. We grabbed a late dinner from there and headed to bed.
Day 3: Great Wall
We were up at 6:30am and on the road to the Great Wall at Mutianyu by 7am with a couple and another guy from our hostel. Arrived at the wall around 8:30am and bought the package deal complete with a ski lift ride to the top of the mountain to walk along the wall and a luge ride back down to the bottom (yes I said luge at the historic Great Wall site). The guide said we had 4 hours and once up on the Great Wall we took it all in. The Great Wall lived up to its name stretching as far as we could see and significantly farther and than we could walk. Chris had another Grand Canyon moment about a mile in. I won't lie it was humid as crap and steep, but it is still funny seeing Chris laying on the Great Wall. You should be able to check Chris out taking in the wall from all angles on flickr.... standing, sitting, kneeling, and lying down on his back. After hiking for about 2 hrs up on the wall we decided it was time to try out the luge ride back down. The ride was pretty much awesome and we got yelled at the whole way down to slow down. (Check out the videos on flickr). At the bottom we walked around a little make shift market area and got some t-shirts in our first haggling experience. We probably still got ripped off, but we haggled her down from 25 to 5 bucks. About an hour later everyone met up and we headed back to Beijing grabbing lunch at a small Chinese restaurant along the way. It was pretty good and we got a ton of food served family style. Over the course of the day we got to know the couple on the trip with us and talked about going to an acrobat show when we got back. After some quick showers we grabbed some food and headed out on our double date.... We got to the show late because of traffic and bought the cheapest tickets they had. We were headed upstairs when all of a sudden the usher, after seeing how cool and good looking Chris and I were took us in the lower seating area and sat us in the VIP section. The VIP section had more leg room, good for me, and a table for tea. The kids in the show were amazing ranging from like 5 - 15. I can honestly say I have no idea how they bend like that. Following the show we went back to the hostel, had some beers out in the courtyard. Honestly, though we were skeptical at first the Red Lantern is pretty nice. It is a traditional hutong building with a lot of open courtyards and everyone has been really nice and helpful for the most part.
Day 4: Summer Palace and Duck
Got up a little late today and ate breakfast at the hostel. Headed out for the Summer Palace and grabbed the 111 bus towards the zoo. Tickets for the boat ride to the Summer Palace also included free admission to the zoo so we checked out the pandas while we waited for the boat to leave. They had about 20 pandas in the exhibit and were selling some pandas for the reconstruction effort of the conservation center destroyed by the earthquake. We each bought one, took in a few more sites at the zoo, and then jumped on the boat at one. The boat was pretty boring, but it got us where we were going. Lucky for us someone on the boat spoke english because about half way up we had to change boats to actually get to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is centered around a giant man made lake that is part of the canal system we road up. The Summer Palace was pretty cool. On the way in I was asked to pose with some guys girlfriend for a picture (Chris had one earlier with some dudes so it is 1 to 1 so far). We spent some time walking around the Palace and hiked up to the main Buddhist temple there. That was probably the best part of the palace and had a great view of the lake and other structures around the area. On our way out of the area we passed a some kind of high school tour group that seemed to think we were interesting. Not sure what it was, but some said hello, others gasped and stared and some others giggled to their friend.
On the way out we tried to get a taxi to take us all the way back to the hotel, but he would not go down town during rush hour. In the end he agreed to drive us over to the boat dock to catch the boat back to the zoo. We agreed and hopped in thinking he would take us down to where we changed boats, however we went on a drive across the bridge that amounted to about 60 seconds and cost 10 yuan. Lucky for us that is only about a 1.50 usd. It was about 4:30pm by this time and we were convinced we were screwed because the boats were closed, but the lady at the counter sold us two tickets for the boat ride back saying they could not take us to the zoo, but could drop us off at the convention center... Not really having much of an option we decided to go with it and wait for the boat that would arrive in half an hour. The boat finally got there and everyone who was on it pretty much got off. The lady running the boat looked at us funny when we tried to hand her a ticket, but the lady who sold us the ticket said something in Chinese and she went ahead and let us on. By the time we left the Summer Palace area we were on our own private cruise down the canal back towards Beijing. As we went along kids waved and we saw tons of fisherman along the side of the canal. We finally reached the area where we had to change boats earlier and got off the boat thinking that was it. At that point the lady told us to follow her over to the other part of the canal, where there was some random speed boat waiting. She waved to them and they came over. She told us to go ahead and get on, which we did, the guys pushed off and we were on our way. To give you an idea the canal is probably 15 ft wide and the boat probably did about 30 miles an hour down the thing. So there we were in our own private jet boat, flying like VIP's down the imperial canal through Beijing. At one point the canal was even closed and we had to coast over the rope of bouyies lifting the engine out of the water so it would not get snagged. About 10 min later we were on the dock at the convention center saying thanks for the ride. From there the VIP treatment was over and we caught the 111 bus back to our hostel. A quick change at the hostel and we were back out the door to go eat dinner at a duck place. After taking a few wrong turns our 15min walk became 30, but we eventually found the place. We were seated immediately and ordered our duck. I honestly dont have any other duck to compare it too, but this was the best duck I have ever had. We stuffed ourselves full of duck, bread, rice and coke and then attempted to walk home. Lucky for us it started to rain and we were saved from our own stupidity. So we grabbed another bus, the 111 of course and headed back to the hostel.
That's about it for now. I can honestly say I was a little skeptical when we got here, but Beijing has turned out to be a lot of fun. In a matter of days we found ourselves dodging cars with the best of them, grabbing the bus all over and ..
