Bailey's Tours checkout Beijing .
Our first impressions of Beijing on arrival was very interesting to say the least, A vast ,yet empty arrival lounge that took a long walk, followed by a train ride to find the baggage collection point. Also a sense off efficiency was apparent, right from the start from observing not only people but also the infrastructure a lot of new cars, mopeds and many people, with not half as many push bikes as we expected.. We found walking across the road was very scary and debated whether or not the Chinese people had ever heard of the Green Cross Code!
Most takeaway restaurants in the area had a tendency to use a very loud speaker system to try and draw attention to passers by to draw them into their shops. The noise was incredible.
On arrival we looked around the local area near the hotel for about an hour for a quiet restaurant, as we still had jet lag. We couldn’t find one that appealed so we decided to take a taxi to Hou Hai Lake, as this place was recommended to us by the taxi driver as a good place for bars and restaurants. Hou Hai Lake was an eye opener, lively as you might expect for a Saturday night ,very pretty with numerous bars and restaurants situated around the lake . Our guess would be there were approximately 200 bars, 30-40 restaurants. It was a sight and sound we could say that we have never seen on our travels to date. Every bar had a singer or a band and when walking past the bars you could hear the three different artists at once singing, it was a sort of karaoke style so and as you can imagine it was very noisy. We never did find the quiet restaurant. In all an amazing first night and were really pleased we had made the effort ,even after having had only about three hours sleep in the previous 48 hours .
The following day we had our own time as we were not meeting up with the group until 6pm , so we found ourselves ending up in one of the oldest observatories in the world ,which was just around the corner from the hotel; once again, just what we needed after our trek to get here.
Group Meeting.
We met the other 8 people we will be spending three weeks with and felt much better after doing so. The meeting was led by Michael, our Chinese tour guide and it was very informative and really great to meet the rest of the group. We were the only English, five people from the group were Australian, two American and one German and the mix of ages was good too, We were not the oldest and all were professionals in their own field of work .)
ITINERARY; So not to bore you ,we are listing places visited followed by the odd comment if we felt it was necessary or interesting to do so . Photos will be added to supplement our comments.
Monday 5th of September;
Tiananmen Square- Not much we can say about this place as it represents so much to the Chinese people and also to the outside world. We can now see how one million people can stand here and we were so impressed with the cleanliness and pride shown by all the Chinese people who were also visiting in many ways their own sacred site.
Forbidden City – Unbelievable! You have to see this place to believe it .Once you enter the first walls you think that is it. However it goes on and on and gets bigger and better. Also it took over 500 years until 1925 before ordinary people could cast their eyes on it .
Hutong home visit and Rickshaw trip.
Hutong means’ alley’ and these homes are entered through on gate ,where you go into what feels like a Victorian back yard. All four homes in the quadrant share one toilet and there are no showers. Each home has a kitchen ,living area and a couple of bedrooms.
A Very humbling experience having food cooked in the home of a Chinese family who have lived in the ‘Old ‘ town for four generations. The rickshaw was entertaining too and very much needed after tramping
Drum Tower – These are what you call drums !
Evening Kung Fu Show – The standard of acrobatics and physicality and aggression of these wannabe Bruce Lees was great to see.
Tuesday 6th of September –
Great Wall of China visit (Jinshanling)- This was the main reason we came to Beijing , to get a glimpse of the wall. Well we certainly did that as we had a trek up, along and down it and were totally lost for words. What an amazing piece of engineering, so impressive even now and we are really pleased our tour guide brought us to the Jinshanling section as we were he only tourists really there.
Food Market- Another eye opener ! The following local delicacies were all skewered and ready to eat;
Scorpions (These were still wriggling), Cockroaches, Lizards, Starfish and Seahorses!!! Needless to say both of us declined and failed the challenge. A very colorful market area, with many other types of recognisable Chinese food. However the smell of the whole market did resemble the smell you get near the bait section in a fishing tackle shop back in the UK!
Hai Ho Lake – We took some of the group down to the lake after we’d had a meal as we saw on Saturday it was once again very lively and entertaining. A little quieter, but it was a Tuesday night. Another very unique place, as where else in the world do you get a large lake that you can walk around, totally surrounded by hundreds of bars and restaurants?
No comments:
Post a Comment