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Thursday was dedicated to the legendary Forbidden City, which is located in the heart of Beijing and houses the Palace Museum. This sight mainly served the Emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasty starting from 15th century. It took us (Felix, Raphael, me) quite a while to get in there. Even we raised a new denotation, serving as the superlative of ‘crowded’ – ‘Forbidden City-crowded’! This was the first time when I actually thought how anybody could enjoy these world heritages under this condition. After getting pushed through the Forbidden City exiting in the north, we walked to the Beihai Park (北海公园, Beihai gongyuan) lying northwest respectively. In former days this place even was connected to the Forbidden City and counts among the biggest largest parks in Beijing. One literally outstanding thing of this sight is the Bai Ta, which is a 40m high sculpture wholly made of white stone (Source).
In the evening Felix and I were invited for a traditional Beijing Duck dinner by Madame Cai and her lovely daughter. I got to know the generous Madame Cai during the Hometextile fair in Shanghai while I was supporting the LFS in my internship. She told me, whenever I make it to Beijing, I can get back to her offer. Finally we ended up in a restaurant which is very famous for its Beijing Duck dishes.
On Friday we first met the Belgium guys Diego and his brother Jean-Baptiste and we showed them the Silk Street Pearl Market. Originally Felix and I planned to spend the whole day in this fake market. It turned out that we really could make it for 9 hours there and in the end even had to buy a suitcase to get all this stuff home again. We only stopped by at Lisa’s Taylor, where Felix received his 17 tailored shirts. Following that we had some nice dinner at an Australian Steak House at the Workers Stadium and went to the amazing club VICS directly afterwards. On Saturday, after having a really too short week in Beijing, we first tried to get all of our purchased stuff in the suitcases, and went to the Capital Airport to get to Shanghai again.
All in all for me the Beijing trip was a long awaited dream coming true and therefore I enjoyed the few days very much!
As the flood of pictures we took in Beijing isn’t manageable on this blog I hosted them on picasa, which is a fantastic service of google (for those who don’t know yet). Moreover I’ve introduced a new link-category called ‘picasa web albums’ where you can easily access ALL the 北京 (Beijing) pictures and even further albums of my China experience.
ENJOY!
On the same morning we somehow realized that it’s the national holiday in Beijing. We thought – let’s go out to the masses! So we went to a place where we expected the most people crowded in one place. Suddenly it came up to our mind – Tian’anmen Square might be quite cosy for this intention. Seriously, it’s hard to describe it by words, but I haven’t seen so many people in one place so far. Check out the video of getting into the tube:
On the Square we experienced some celebrity status as everybody wanted to take pictures with us, especially with Felix who is with his almost 2 metres a unicum in China. 啊，很高老外！(A, hen gao laowai – Oh, what a tall foreigner)
As we could forget entering the Forbidden City that day, we decided to make our way to the Summer Palace, Yi he yuan (颐和园) where even more people spent their spare time. We met with a colleague of mine – of Vienna sinology studies – who is currently studying in Beijing. I appreciated this because he knows the city a little bit and therefore accompanied us. Some facts: UNESCO declared the Summer Palace a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design in 1998. The natural landscape of hills and open water is combined with artificial features such as pavilions, halls, palaces, temples and bridges to form a harmonious ensemble of outstanding aesthetic value (Source).
After that and a little snack, we targeted the famous Olympic Sights: the Water Cube (水立方) and the Bird’s Nest (鸟巢). I think any further comment on these sights is redundant – except: our famous “Olympic Sights Dance” as you can see on this picture. This place reminded of an open-door disco with some very loud music dashing through enormous speakers. Following that we went home and managed to get some extra bed for Rene in our room, because he didn’t have accommodation for one day before he left to Qingdao.
The next day the Forbidden City was on the plan. Entry follows!
At least 8.02 million people visited Beijing from September 29 to October 5, including 2.35 million overseas visitors, bringing in 5.25 billion yuan in tourist revenue, up 27 percent from the previous National Day holiday (Shanghai Daily).
On Tuesday Felix, Rene and me went to a place of the Great Wall (长城), called Mutianyu (慕田峪), which is said not to be that crowded because it’s not easily accessible by public transportation. It’s in the northeast of Beijing located in Huairou District and said to have the largest construction scale and best quality among all sections of Great Wall. The many watch towers and the scenery surrounding the wall make it a really unique place. On the advice of Kim we took a private driver there. Arriving there after one and a half hours, we made our way up by Cable Car. We had a marvellous and actually very hot day and the place fortunately wasn’t that crowded as for instance Badaling is supposed to be during the national holidays. After walking/climbing on the Great Wall for several hours we had to get down somehow. A really funny part followed as we went down by speed chutes as you can see in my badly filmed movie while going down. It would have been more fun if we had the whole track for ourselves because we always had to brake for the people in front. Though it was a very nice experience and we were pretty much exhausted and depleted from that trip.
In the evening Felix and me went to the Lisa Taylor place for fitting, where we ordered some shirts on Monday. In case of Felix it’s literally not ‘some’ shirts – it was 17! He really capitalized on finding a good taylor in Beijing. My shirts were already finished completely and fitted perfectly. Following that we met with Raphael our friend from Quebec, who just arrived in Beijing and we had dinner together at Hooters Beijing ;) [Please spare the ‘Oh man, you’re in China, why are going to Hooters’ – comments^^]
The stories of the rest of the week will follow soon, so stay tuned!
Related: Beijing (北京) (Tian’anmen, Tian Tan)
This trip to the capital city as well as traditional and cultural hot-spot China’s means a lot to me. That’s why I’m eagerly looking forward to writing down the experiences of the wonderful six days in the post-Olympic period during the Golden Week. Arriving on Sunday afternoon in the Beijing Youth Hostel opposite of the Beijing Railway Station we directly went to the Silk Street Pearl Market – which wasn’t very far from this place – in order to meet Kim and Rene. Felix got to know Rene coincidently on his flight to Shanghai. He is doing the rest of his civil service here in China, precisely Shanghai and we happened to be in the Beijing at the same time. Rene on the other hand knows Kim from University and visited her at her place of studies. Since she has been living there for about two years she already feels very familiar with the place and could give us some helpful information and sightseeing tips.
After a stroll through the chaotic idles of the Silk Street (which serves as an enormously famous fake market) and probably spending too much money for the fake stuff, Felix and me made our way to Tian’anmen (天安门) square. Normally this sight of course is the first thing to look at as a tourist and is referred to as the entrance of the forbidden city (The Gate of Heavenly Peace), so we were quite impressed of the wide-spread area of the apparently biggest square in the world. The white fences besides the streets and around the square sometimes give a feeling of being cattle as you hardly ever can walk direct ways there. As a result Beijing and its fantastic sights require a lot of walking and patience.
The next day we planned to visit Tian Tan (天坛), Temple of Heaven, which counts to one of my favorites and most impressing sights in Beijing. It served the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties as a Taoist temple to pray to heaven for good harvest. So far I knew ‘The Hall of Prayers for good Harvests’ only from pictures with a cheesy blue sky in the background. What a coincidence that the Golden Week in Beijing (national holidays) was blessed with terrific weather which caused some déjà-vu’s as I’m looking to the pictures in retrospective. After a lot of walking through the extensive temple area we had an appointment with Kim, Rene and two more Chinese girls at a very specific place for Beijing. That’s when the difference to Shanghai manifested further as I got the impression that the capital city is friendlier, calmer, has much charm and great art resources. Actually we had a lot of discussions which lead to the result that it’s not possible to compare Beijing with Shanghai. In fact I’m very fond of both places. What really surprised me is that people in Beijing seem to be happier and therefore more cooperative. On Monday we went out of the hostel to have a short look at the map. We weren’t standing there for half a minute till a Chinese man with perfect English offered us his help. The English skills also very much surprised us, because we didn’t count on anybody to speak English. Apparently the Olympic games had really good influence on the population in terms of open-mindedness towards foreigners. We kind of had the feeling of being appreciated and welcomed more in Beijing.
