End of January I went with Elise for a little weekend trip up north. On our arrival in Beijing, we immediately felt the friendliness of the people. First local policeman were guiding us to the proper train to reach our hotel then other strangers who don’t speak that much English were trying their best to help us out. Super friendly that really stood out in terms of how locals behave with tourist. Also we got in touch with an expat from Germany while waiting at a traffic light, well yeah waiting in traffic is a whole different level in Beijing, anyway the guy from Bavaria working for BMW since 5 year already in the capital of China guided us towards a nice area to walk along a small river.
The town itself feels different than Shanghai, not that many skyscraper a lot of low buildings, a lot of policeman just standing around guarding the areas, a lot of barriers in the middle of the road to prevent people from crossing the street in the middle because there’s a tall fence. Sometimes even cars need to take crazy routes to go from A to B as you cannot go straight. It felt a bit over regulated.
Also the traffic is crazy. There’s no high or ring road as in other bigger cities and when traffic lights have too long of an interval (Like 90 seconds in between the red and green phases) traffic gets crazy, especially on the big roads. It was way faster reaching the destination by walking or taking the metro on short distances.
The must see in Beijing is:
1. the forbidden city – the former residence of 24 emperors of Ming and Qing dynasties, build by Yongle a revolutionary who first burnt the former capital Nanjing to the ground and then rebuild a new one in big scale.
And 2. Tiananmen square, the biggest public square on the planet – 440.000 square meter, round about 62 football fields!
We had tickets for both but did not see any of the two. Timing, massive tourism and long queues plus the traffic din’t fit our agenda. The ticket are data and time specific, if you don’t make it that slot, buy another one, and yeah, the good slots are booked way in advance. Well in a billion people country, local tourism is even more massive. Now I know! Anyway, we had a glimpse from about and around, the sheer scale of the area is impressive.
As soon as we noticed we didn’t make it in time for the forbidden city we went to Jingshan Park, to get at least a glimpse of the forbidden city and Beijing from above at sunset. And for the square kind of the same thing, you can’t just go there, you need to enqueue with the masses. We wanted to circumvent that und cross the street at a subway tunnel and got stopped by a guard as we were not allowed to cross and he told us to turn around in a very authoritive way.
Despite of all those regulations, we really enjoyed the food, we went for the local speciality, peking duck. The way of preparation, marinating and heating in a special wood fired oven makes a lot of the taste, as well as eating it handrllled in small rice paper sheets with marinade, herbs and small cut veggies.
A lot of impressions for 2 days, fully stimulated we went home, back to Shanghai for more adventures…
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