It’s a warmer today so I’m free to write up about our last few days in Beijing…
We got up at 7 for our Great Wall trek. It took about three hours in a bus to drive a herd of groggy travellers to the great wall in the freezing cold – no snow, but cold enough to make everything pretty much totally numb. The wall itself was amazing and the views were spectacular, we’ve got lots of photos of it so don’t worry. And we’ve had some messages from people clamouring for us to put them up, we have taken lots, it’s just we haven’t really figured out how to put them up on this thing yet.
We managed to propel ourselves towards the Dongcheng street food market once back in Beijing for some dinner. They had all the usual, squid, scorpion, millipede, sea urchin etc. etc. but we went for some chili noodles and a baked alaska. It was interesting to see but the stalls mostly had the same sort of stuff on them, so full of food we pushed on for our night out on the town.
The trek was quite hard, and the cold made it more difficult because it didn’t really feel like oxygen we were breathing in, only cold. Once we got into the swing of things it got easier, and the route was quite good because it took us over some of the unrestored bits of the wall which not a lot of tourists get to see.
We headed tothe main bar strip to a bar called Cheers and took in some localband. The singer had a beard longer than his ponytail, though. We initially wanted to try Bar Blu, but it was scary as it had English bouncers on the door, and that was more disorientating than the whole of Beijing itself up until that point. It was full of business men with small Chinese girls – something to avoid. We headed out abnd were going to get a taxi home, but someone suggested a bar down the road and we decided to put our heads in and then head home. About 2 hours later we stumbled out of there and headed to Bar Blu until it closed and got a taxi home for sure this time. Heading back to the hostel.
Sunday we took it easy and decided to centre it around food. We went to a Tibetan cafe for some ‘meat momo’ and boiled lamb which was delicious. I had some butter tea which was lovely but Susan didnt seem to care for. For dinner we went to the Bianyifang Roast Duck for the best duck pancakes in town. They ere obviously used to tourists and rushed us in quickly, threw our duck at us and stood menacingly beside us until we left… the duck as good though, quite fatty, and we got some ‘duck soup’ with it, which is really hot duck fat. Neither of us really fancied eating the duck heart curdled unappetisingly on the plate. The district as pretty nice, quite new and busy. It was our first sight of inner Beijing.
We’d booked an overnight soft sleeper train to Shangai at 9pm on Tuesday, so we spent the rest of our time in Beijing ticking off the tourist sights, Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City. Parts of the forbidden city were closed due to resortation but it was beautiful nonetheless. We tried to go to the Starbucks there, but it seems to have been shut down. In the Square the Mao mausoleum was shut, so we didn’t get to see the pickled man himself which I found disappointing. We saw the big Olympics countdown clock, they’re nuts about the Olympics I tells ya. They bloody love it. Its on all the TV stations.
Beijing rain station was like nothing I’ve seen before. There are 1.6billion people in China, and apparently they all want to take a train on Tuesday nights. The queues were unbelievable – we’ve later learned this is because big snows have snowed off the major highways, and what with Chinese Spring Festival it’s all a bit mental. We got on our train with no problems, bunk beds,and settled down for a night of on-off sleep.
We arrived in Shanghai at about 8am only to find in my sleepy state I’d booked the wrong nights for the hsotel which meant we had to take a more expensive double room for one night, but now have changed to a 6 bed dorm. Shanghai is more expensive and cosmopolitan than Beijing. We went to the museum yesterday and saw some nice stuff, then ate in a veggie restaurant in the evening which was so so, which had horrible tea. Susan’s come down with the dreaded lurgie unfortunately.
That’s about it, we’ll hopefully see more of Shanghai and get a bit more used to it in the coming days.
by the way, I know people have been having problems with this site. I think it’s just got so much user traffic it crashes every so often. It’s so nice to hear from you all who have messaged us so far.
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