Beijing, China

After just one week in cold China, I (Carly) have developed a yucky cold.  It was only a matter of time really wasn’t it?!  Dave seems to be doing ok and hasn’t caught one… yet!

We have been really enjoying our time in Beijing.  Before coming, admittedly, we imagined a horrible, overcrowded, polluted city.  Nevertheless, we have had a great time in this clean, friendly city.  We have used taxis, buses, tubes and trains and have found them all to be quite easy to use.  From what we’ve been told, Beijing was cleaned up a great deal for the olympics and since then all signs have the English equivalent written on them.  We even tackled the tube during rush hour and found it simple to use.  To order food, you have to point at the menu, rather than try to speak, but that’s not exactly a hardship! 

The highlight of our visit has to be the Great Wall, but we are going to devote a whole post to that later, so I’ll tell you about the other things we’ve been up to!  The Forbidden City was definitely worth braving the cold for.  It’s a large area, right in the centre of Beijing.  We have seen many, many temples on our trip and were getting a bit ‘templed out’.  However, this one greatly impressed us.  There are various little ornate buildings that emperors have used and a great big moat surrounding the whole area.  Nearby is Tiananmen Square, the largest city square in the world.  In the middle, you can see Chairman Mao’s mausoleum and loads of Chinese tourists queuing up to go and see him.

We have also taken a trip across to Olympic Park.  We had heard that it looks really good when lit up at night, so we went for when darkness fell.  However, an ice-cold wind was blowing and after waiting for ages (and walking around a warm shop several times), we gave up and got back on the warm tube!  It was nice to see the huge stadium and swimming cube anyway.

We thought we ought to do the tourist thing and see as many temples as they have, so we headed across town on a local bus to the Summer Palace.  This was nice and set on a hill, so you can take a walk to the top and have a look around the area.  I remember having a nice hot chocolate!  We also visited the Lama temple, which is another intricate building.  I know I’m sounding templed out and we were beginning to feel that way, despite the amazing history of this city.  Don’t worry, the Great Wall totally sorted us out and restored our enthusiasm for tourism.  It was brilliant, but I’ll let Dave tell you about that in a new post soon. 

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