7th October 2016, on the train from Beijing to Pingyao

Welcome back, friends. We would like to let you know how we passed the remainder of our time in Beijing.

After having recovered more or less from our colds, it was time to set out and explore the city again. Kathrin was not really feeling up to it yet, so I made my way alone to the Summer Palace on Monday. Since the weather was nice and it was still Golden Week, it was completely overcrowded like all the sights but I jumped right in anyway and climbed up and down the hills for about two hours. The pathway around the giant lake was so crowded that it would probably have taken me another two hours to walk around it, so I went back to the hostel, and we tried our luck online booking train tickets to our next destination Pingyao for Friday.

Birgit (and many, many Chinsese people) at the Summer Palace

We also booked seats on a tour to the Great Wall, organized by our hostel, for the next day.

It was a 2.5 hours bus ride from the hostel to the Wall, so we started at 7:30 am already. The streets were not as busy anymore, the English people from the hostel in UB had gone on the same tour the previous day and it had taken them about four hours one way.

We were taken to a less frequented spot called Badaling Ancient Wall. It is close to Badaling where practically everyone else goes on a daytrip from Beijing but a little further up in the mountains, and while there were still a lot of people, most of them didn’t walk on the wall very far and after about half an hour we had it pretty much to ourselves. Let me tell you, it is exhausting to walk on the wall. The steps are all different in height and width, with a lot of sections being very steep and some not having steps at all. In the end, we only walked for about two hours including the way back to the hostel at the foot of the wall. Also, the weather didn’t help. All those sunshiney pictures of the Wall that you see? Honestly, everyone can walk the wall under a blue sky. Nothing special really. We, however, were blessed with a rare(?) occurrence of fog, wind, rain and general cold which made for some very atmospheric pictures which we do not want to keep from you. Kevin, a Scottish guy we met on the trip, said that selling those pictures made enough money to pay for the next couple of weeks of his trip, so unique are they. 😉

At least all the rain coats made for some colour. 😉

Look how steep it was!!!

Well, never mind. We still had fun.

The next day, we met up with Mak again and picked up our pre-booked train tickets to Pingyao. Also, we bought tickets from Pingyao to Xi’an, lucky that there were sill some available in spite of the end of the Golden Week.

After that, we strolled through the park of the Temple of Heaven which was very lovely since a) the sun was shining and b) there were a lot of things to see like women dancing to music in the middle of the park.

In the evening, we met Mouna and Rémy, the French guys from the Transsiberian at their hostel on the busiest street in Beijing. We honestly could only walk caravan-style, putting our hands on the front person’s shoulder in order to not lose each other. Mak took us to a restaurant where apparently Angela Merkel has eaten once when in Beijing. You wouldn’t have been able to tell, there was no picture of her or anything; also it was a place that foreigners probably didn’t frequent very often. It was a typical local restaurant, a bit dirty (don’t look on the floor), noisy, crowded, serving food that was cheap and good if somewhat experimental and we enjoyed it very much.

We might meet Mak and also Mouna again in Xi’an; Rémy is going back to France to work.

On Thursday, we went to the Forbidden City aka the Palace Museum together with the Scottish couple, Kevin and Fiona, who are honestly the loveliest people we have ever had the good fortune of meeting. The hostel receptionist had ordered the tickets online for us but all we had received was an SMS confirmation. So we had to try and find the right queue first. Well, actually we had to get to the Forbidden City first, all the way across Tiananmen Square, through underpasses and security checks, and then there were already several hundred if not thousand people waiting in front of the Palace gates which were not even open yet.

We asked a member of security for directions but soon realized that he had sent us to the wrong queue. Two tries later we were eventually at the correct counter to get our tickets and almost 1.5 hours after leaving the hostel, we had finally made it into the Forbidden City.

The moat around the Palace.

Red walls as far as the eye can see…

Guardians of the rooftop

It was pretty impressive, entering through the gate and standing on the giant square that we had seen in so many movies. The City consists of a number of large palaces along a central axis and numerous smaller palaces to the east and west, as well as a pretty garden. But to be fair, impressive as it might be, after a while it all started to look the same to us. Red walls, yellow and blue tiled roofs, like a maze. After wandering the place for about four hours, we made our way back to the hostel, took a nap and then spent a great evening chatting with Fiona and Kevin as well as several other backpackers instead of packing.

After that, it was a pretty short night since we had to leave the hostel at 6.15 am this morning to go to the station and catch the train to Pingyao. Finding our way around Beijing West station was also a bit of a struggle since the trains depart from a different building than where the ticket counters are and in order to get there we had to go through security checks like at the airport including showing our passports and having our tickets checked at least three times before arriving in a giant waiting hall where people were queuing to get on the platform. We hope that this is only Beijing and/or only the end of the holidays. In any case, we have found our seats and are now speeding through the country at 240 km/h.