Beijing

My next stop was Beijing. Taking morning flight meant short sleep for me, and leaving Qingdao in the early morning. Getting taxi in the morning was as easy as always in Qingdao, for some reason, specially in nearby the hostel, taxi drivers seemed to have excellent eyes to spot potential customers and headed right through the junction to where I was standing and waiting for free taxi. So I managed to get to the airport without any problems, and flight to Beijing was as usual, boring short-haul flight, but did had breakfast at least.

From Beijing Airport I was taking airport train to the city and while trying to figure out if I could find my hotel by metro, took off from the station that I should been able to transfer to another metro line. However, as my only metro map was Google Maps and for some reason it seems to be impossible for Google to update their map in China to anything newer than decade ago, I ended up having few problems figuring out where to go and decided to take taxi. At which point I started to realize that my hotel was not so easy to find as taxi driver had no idea where to go. After trying to call to hotel reception, and getting hanged up cause I was speaking English, I finally got someone on the other end who was able to speak and understand enough English and I was able to get her to explain to taxi driver where to drive. My hotel ended up to be a somehow far from tourist center but was good and nice. But as for me as I like to use metros to travel, its position to be 10~15min walk from nearest metro station was not so convenient.

My first night to Beijing was just visiting Tiananmen square and surrounding at evening. For my surprise actually I found out that square was closed already around 5pm so all I could do was just looking the area at its night lighting. Even though, there were lots of people doing same as I, walking around and taking photos of lighted walls. I also decided to find my dinner at nearby night market that was recommended by travel guide book that is worth to visit. Which was quite a mistake as I learned soon. Place was just a big tourist place, lots of people selling small stuff that nobody needs and as its specialty, more or less weird food with heavily overpriced. I saw one seller selling dumplings which were priced 10RMB per each… For some reason I decided that I’m not interested of dumplings. But for that market its specialty was all weird food, such as grilled octopus (yeah right, like that’s something weird), or scorpions. I skipped those as well as everything looked just not so special to me and still way too overpriced. Looking that they were asking more for bbq chicken stick than I spend for my whole bbq dinner in Qingdao…

Next day I was getting back to Tiananmen square but this time while it was open. I am not sure what I was expecting but whole square and place area was just amazing. It is hard to imagine but whole area is just huge. It took long time to walk from place area from one side to another and seeing all museums there. One of the most interesting places was Clock museum which showed all old clocks that has been bought or given as a gift to the emperor. Some of the clocks were just amazing and hard to understand how they could have been made. Some clocks were just stupid, as they were huge, around 3m tall and then the actual clock was just about 1cm as its diameter. It was difficult to find the clock from all the decorations. But one amazing clock was writer, which was writing greetings in chinese on the paper with real pen. Quite amazing, too bad that it wasn’t operating so I couldn’t see working with my own eyes.

Otherwise palace area was not so interesting in the end. Mostly I was just starting to wonder why it had to be such a large area, and for example, there was own building where emperor changed his clothes for the ceremonial events. Why to build big house for just one occasion only, what was wrong with normal bedroom… Thinking about all the resources and time and manpower that has been used to build whole palace area, just makes to think what else China could have achieved in the old times instead of building amazing, but kinda useless buildings…

But then the gardens. As it was winter, they were at the same time really boring and really interesting. It was nice to walk in old gardens and feel the peace and quietness but still I was just wondering how it would look like in the spring or summer when all flowers are blooming.

I was originally planning to stay in Beijing about four or five days to see city around, but quite fast I realized that first, it was too cold time to visit the city and second, it was definitely not my type of city as it was just full of tourist. Everybody were just selling stuff to tourist or trying to scam our money. It felt that it was just big city where everybody were only tourist, even Chinese. So in the end of second day I spend about two hours experiencing Chinese railway station ticket selling queues while queuing up to buy my train ticket. And in the next morning I checked out from my hotel, took taxi to railway station and got onboard to Chinese train for my 9 hours train trip…