All of Beijing in one Blog

Many of you are aware that we recently took a trip to Beijing over the Christmas holiday. Now, obviously I'm not the most consistent blogger but we had a great time and I wanted to share some experiences and photos.

We started out on Christmas Eve with a morning flight from Seoul. When you live in such a large city and have a 9:30am flight you have to begin your morning at around 4:45. There is the hauling of the large shared suitcase (we made the decision not to purchase smaller ones to save money) to the elevator and down 13 floors, then the walk to the corner to catch a taxi, which took us to the express bus station to catch our 5:40 ride to the airport. The airport is one of the largest I've been to (although smaller than Beijing's new monstrous terminal) so it took us a while to figure out where to check in...good thing we arrived the recommended 2 hours before the flight. After a morning snack at Dunkin' Donuts we were off!

We were picked up in Beijing by our tour guide, David, and a driver whose name I never learned. Even though we were already tired from traveling we hit the ground running and started our sightseeing right away. We made a short stop at our 4-star hotel (as we were assured by our travel agent), the Days Inn, to drop off our luggage. I know what you're thinking, "Day's Inn? But that's not a 4-star hotel." You would be correct. I won't waste time complaining about all the reasons this hotel was not what we were expecting and just say that we will be getting a small refund from the travel agency for this matter.

We began by walking around Tiananmen Square (very famous for some riots back in the 80's), before moving on to the huge complex of palaces and temples known as the Forbidden City. We were able to snap a few quick photos of the square before David moved on...it was quite cold and I'm sure he's lead this tour hundreds of times before.

This is a photo of the first really old thing we saw. I was excited so I took several pictures, but don't really know what it is.

Standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square. The large building is the Chinese National Museum. Too bad it was closed for renovations...I do love a good museum.

Entrance to the Forbidden City taken from Tiananmen Square. Notice the huge portrait of Chairman Mao - they really love that guy.

Me standing in front of one of the many indistinguishable looking buildings inside.

After this trip I am officially in love with traditional Chinese architecture...the colors, shapes and attention to detail really blew me away. Sometimes I guess you have to see something in person to really appreciate it.

Day one ended with a visit to a traditional Chinese tea house where we learned about the many health benefits of drinking tea, and then a Chinese acrobatic performance. You know those Chinese Olympic gymnasts that everyone claimed were too young to compete? Well, I think some of these performers were their younger siblings. So sad...yet pretty entertaining. The crowd was sparse but they were still very enthusiastic.

Day two of the trip was exciting for several reasons: first, it was Christmas Day, and second, we finally got to see the Great Wall! After all my years of art history classes and obsession with this world's most ancient wonders, this was a very exciting experience. Now, it wasn't quite as green and lush as I'd pictured, and there were a lot more stairs than I'd anticipated, but even so it was pretty amazing.

At the bottom looking up at what was in store for us.

The view from halfway up - you can see the wall winding along the mountaintops in the distance.


The view from as high we had the energy to go. Our lungs were begging us to stop.

After the Great Wall we moved on to lunch at a cloisonne factory which just happened to have a tourist trap restaurant and a larger than life gift shop. Then...the Ming Tombs! I'd heard about these before but wasn't sure what to expect. Apparently, only one of the actual 13 tombs is open to the public, and most of the others haven't even been opened in order to protect the treasures of Chinese culture buried inside. Luckily, the opened tomb complex is the largest and grandest of them all.

A statue dedicated to the emperor buried there. I'm not sure what he's going to do with all that money since he's been dead for several hundred years.

Inside of the temple...such beautiful woodwork. They have added some museum display cases so as you walk around you can view random artifacts recovered from some of the other tombs.

I was surprised to learn that after walking through several shrine-type buildings looking for the tomb that it wasn't actually a tomb at all (in the ancient Egyptian sense), but a very large grassy mound (maybe the length of a football field, maybe more) which you can not even walk on. It was very anti-climactic. I asked David and he said that the emperor was buried somewhere beneath the mound, but they weren't really sure exactly where. I asked if they'd even tried to look for the actual tomb and he sounded unsure...I guess they are even more concerned with preserving the past than I'd originally thought. Good thing I didn't know how much my entrance ticket cost, because I probably would have wanted a refund.

After a semi-delicious Peking duck dinner that night we went walking around a shopping district and found the infamous "snack street". I'm sure many of you got those emails going around before the Olympics with pictures of the interesting things people find delicious in Asia. I think this was the inspiration for that email. Bugs, scorpions, snakes, silk worm larvae, and lots more! Totally gross, but fascinating.

Christmas in Beijing! We were surprised by the amount of holiday decorations around the city, but were told that they do it for the foreigners. How welcoming and nice of them!

On the morning of day three we had a delicious McDonald's breakfast - a huge improvement over the cold and stale food available at the hotel buffet - before heading to the Temple of Heaven. This turned out to be one of the most fun and exciting places we visited the whole trip.

The unique, circular temple is newly restored (courtesy of the Beijing Games) and the colors are so vibrant.

Inside view of the temple. It's amazing that all these old structures are constructed without using any nails.

Unique details were everywhere.

The Temple grounds were really large and picturesque. There were mass groups of people doing group exercises, dancing, having sing-a-longs, and playing games. We tried to walk through the place slowly, but David didn't let us linger for long.

From there we went to an old residential area of Beijing, called a hutong, to tour a traditional Chinese courtyard house. David arranged for us to take a rickshaw ride around the hutong. It was amazingly very comfortable.

This is the owner of the house we toured - standing in his doorway along with his cute, but very dirty, white dog.

Next, it was off to the Summer Palace - the complex of houses and gardens that emperors would use as a retreat from the Forbidden City during the hot summer months.

It was incredibly beautiful and we were surprised to learn that the whole thing was man made, including the giant lake.

This picture does not do it justice.

This is the entrance to the world's longest corridor - it's an incredible 728 meters long.

Day four was our Olympic day. We managed to tour both the Bird's Nest and Watercube and take an insane number of photos despite the cloudy/smoggy weather.

It was awesome to see such impressive and cutting edge architecture, although I pity the CAD monkeys who had to do all of the construction drawings for the Bird's Nest project. Wow!

Inside it just looked like a regular stadium except it wasn't as big as I'd anticipated from seeing it on TV.


Beijing is changing very quickly and the amount of new construction taking place is unbelievable. Another structure completed recently is "The Egg" - home to the National Theater. The ultra-modern looking building is covered by more than 20,000 individual titanium panels.

We ended our day with a shopping trip to a major tourist souvenir market. In the past all the vendors sold their wares outdoors, but at some point they built a large, 5-story building to house them all and no doubt clean up the streets. We spent a couple hours being bombarded with things like "Hey lady, you wanna scarf?" and "Silk pajamas, come and look!" It definitely didn't make me want to purchase their goods, but we managed to spend a few hundred yuan anyway. After that I had to visit the Starbucks next door (of course they had one...it's all about the tourists!).

Day five of our trip we slept in and took our time packing up. We spent most of the day just walking around the downtown area and enjoying the sights. We came upon a less touristy shopping area and it made us feel like we were experiencing the real Beijing. The shopping area quickly turned into a residential area with local markets and restaurants mixed in with the traditional Chinese houses.



This is our hotel. If you ever go to Beijing think twice before staying here...unless you want to sleep on box springs, walk on dirty carpet and deal with a leaky faucet.

We were so happy to get back to our "home" in Korea that night after being away for almost a week. Traveling can be very exhausting and it was great to have a familiar place to come back to. All in all, we enjoyed the sights in China and the food (an improvement over Korean food), but concluded that we much prefer the hospitable nature of the Korean people.