We finally arrived in China after a fairly long (but straightforward) process of getting our visas. Turns out the best way in the end was to go to the consolate directly in Hong Kong instead of being gouged by booking agencies claiming to make the process "easier." The first price we got was around $800USD for two visa from a travel agency called CTS. Going to another office of the same company the price suddenly dropped to $400USD. Fed up with being ripped off we went to the consolate directly and actually got the correct price of $100USD per visa.
Staying in the center of Beijing in the hutongs near the Forbidden Palace we got a real feel for the old city. The hutongs are a crazy network of narrow alleyways packed with all sorts of shops, and traditional courtyard houses. We spent a day just wandering around these narrow streets (some of them not wider than a few meters) just getting lost, and watching the day to day routine of the locals who live here. We saw mobile food carts selling everything from roasted taro root to BBQ meat skewers, vegetable and fruit shops packing into a space no larger than a closet with fresh fruit spilling into the street, couriers and rickshaws weaving in and out of all the people clogging the narrow roads, and of course many locals just sitting on their front steps staring at two strange foreigners walking by.
One of the best parts about Beijing was the food. We tried to sample as much of the local specialties including Beijing hotpot (a charcoal fired, boiling pot of spicy broth that you add an assortment of veggies and meat to), handmade pork dumplings, steamed pork buns, spicy bean paste, deep fried "crackers" topped with garlic sauce, and of course Peking duck carved tableside with rice wraps, cucumber and a good strong garlic dip.
As Beijing was the home of many of China's emperors over the last 1000 years, you can imagine that there are a ton of palaces to see. The shear magnitude of some of these places is just mind-blowing. The Forbidden Palace was the home of many of Chinas emperors and is litterally an entire city unto itself.
One of the things we learned while visiting this temple is that a major holiday in China happens to fall in the first week of May. So what do 1.3 billion Chinese do? They go and visit Beijing (well, maybe not all of them, but enough to really pack in the tourist sites). Litterally every doorway, passage and nook and cranny of the Forbidden Palace had a line up of people jostling for photographs. To give you an idea of how busy it was and to persuade you to never ever come visit during this time here are a few moments captured.
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| Is that the line for the ticket booth? |
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| Marie trying to get a picture of the emperor's throne |
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| Marie trying to find her inner peace, at the Hall for Supreme Harmony |
We also hit up some other notable sites in Beijing like the Drum and Bell Towers:
We also took a trip to the Temple of Heaven (more of a park, than a temple). This was the place where emperor's would perform several sacrifices and ceremonies to ensure a bountiful harvest and prosperity for the people of China:
Mandatory stop at Tian'anmen square:
We also made a stop at the Summer Palace, which is definitely a must see site. This was the royal garden of the emperor and contains temples perched on the top of a large hill overlooking Kunming lake. Apparently, the emperor at the time had a 100,000 strong army of workers actually dig and enlarge the lake!
The highlight for me of our time in Beijing, was actually not in Beijing at all, but out at the Great Wall. It turns out that some of the best preserved stretches of the Great Wall are within a days drive of Beijing. Being that the wall is over 5000km long, you don't go visit the Great Wall, you visit a small SECTION of the great wall (which there are many options). We decided to avoid the more popular fully restored sections, and go to a more remote area called Jinshanling. This turned out to be a great choice since this section of the wall is actually only partially restored, so we got to see the full range of what the wall would have looked like 800 years ago when freshly built, to what it looks like today in its "wild-wall" form complete with crumbing bricks and trees growing from mortar joints. As Mao Zhong famously said "He who has not climbed the great wall, is not a true man" (Of course, I am sure that he meant this to apply to WOmen as well). So we did - climbed/walked a 7km section from Jinshanling to West Simatai.
