J54-59 - Beijing

Finally, here we are in Beijing with Djou for the final part of my trip.

On the 20th, we caught a China Airlines flight from Guilin near Yangshuo towards Beijing. Arriving at around 1am in town, only one place agreed to rent us a room that night... I strongly discourage you to go to this same hostel having slept one night there. It is located on the fourth basement level under a big mall  10 minutes East of Tian An Men square and it is definitely not nice staying there! Although relatively cheap for Beijing (120 kuais a night), the room we got was just big enough for our two single beds and we struggled to fit our luggage in as well... Moreover, it was humid, dark and the shared bathrooms were disgusting.

So we decided to move somewhere else first thing the next morning which did not prove very easy since everything appeared to be fully booked for the next days. We eventually found a 260 kuais a night double room at the Far East International Youth Hostel which turned out to be awesome! If you are on a tight budget, the 60 kuais dorm beds are also apparently very nice. The location of the hostel itself is great, in a hutong (ie typical small street in Beijing) 15 minutes walk South-West of Tian An Men.

The rest of our first day in Beijing was then spent strolling from the South of Tian An Men square to the North of the Forbidden City. We also climbed the hill of Jingshan Gongyuan to enjoy the view over the Forbidden City before stopping for a cocktail in a v nice bar just off Beihai Park. After a Beijing-style roasted duck in the Chaoyang area, we headed towards Sanlitun Jie which holds a strip of bars but we did not feel really at ease there in the middle of people proposing us Ladies' Bars and other bad boy stuff... As a matter of fact, the Beihai area is a lot more nice for bar-hopping from our perspective.

Looking forward to an early visit of the Forbidden City, so as to avoid the crowd of tourists, we finally woke up quite late and got there at around 11am (!), when everyone in Beijing seems to be in there! I guess the experience would be a lot different being alone but amongst thousands of chinese tourists it's not the nicest place to visit in Beijing. Basically, you have to fight your way through if you want to get a glimpse of the thrones in the different imperial pavillions. The way out was a lot more enjoyable since we took the small alleys off the major attractions. One good point though, we managed to get the student entrance price which is 20 kuais against 60 for the normal price!

After a quick Mongolian hotpot in our hutong, we unleashed the shopping spirit at the Pearl Market near Temple of Heaven Park. Djou did not resist the appeal of doing the Vuitton joke we had planned for months already: when a girl at a stall jumped at us saying "You want Louis Vuitton bags?", he flashed his Louis Vuitton card (where he had been working) to the girl saying: "Selling counterfeit stuff is strictly forbidden!". It was quite funny to see how pannicked she got... For the evening we decided to try another restaurant suggested by the Lonely Planet but decided it would be our last one since it turned out to be quite expensive and not so interesting food-wise. After another quick drink on Beihai, we headed back home to find Godefroit we had met in Kunming sipping Tsingtaos in front of our hostel. We ended up drinking with him and some other people for quite a while and went to bed at around 3.30am...

Not surprisingly, we woke up quite late the next morning and after some prep-up time took the tube and a bus to the Summer Palace in the North-West where the Chinese emperors used to settle down during the summer season. Even though it is quite crowded, as soon as you climb up the hill you can find some peace and really enjoy this wonderful park and its big Kunming Lake. By the way, should you want to rent a boat there, take an electric motored one and not the pedal boat... Same price but a lot more comfort and a lot less hassle! (For some reason, our pedal boat appeared to be the slowest on the lake. It must have been broken somehow...)
For dinner, we had a dumplings feast  in a small restaurant in our hutong which cost us something like 3 euros for two, drinks included! I love China.

And the next day was Great Wall day! Having signed up for transportation with our hostel towards the Jinshanling and Simatai site, we woke up at 5.45am and got on a 3 hours ride. It was definitely worth it: the 10km-5 hours walk form Jinshanling to Simatai was just great and we were the only group of tourists walking there that day. Even the weather was awesome! However, since something has to go wrong I had left my camera at the hotel and Djou's battery was dead so that we managed to get only 3 pictures of the Great Wall... That gives us a reason to come back there later!
Back in Beijing, another dumplings feast in an even cheaper place where we also enjoyed some marvelous roasted aubergines!

There it came, our last day in Beijing, which also meant we had to spend our last kuais and do some shopping indeed! After a quick hop at Pearl Market again and a short stroll in Temple of Heaven Park, we stormed Silk Street Market which actually is a building since the original Silk Street was razed by the Chinese authorities. (This is were Dominique de Villepin had looked for counterfeit French brands last Spring). Djou and I had had enough time at this point to perfect our bargainning speech (speaking Chinese a bit doesn't harm) so that we managed to get decent prices for everything we bought there that day. According to our story, we are two students living in Shanghai and returning there soon so that we know the real prices... I think we now miss not bargainning every single thing back in France.

Last dinner in Beijing = last dumplings orgy!! 15 kuais for 40 dumplings is definitely too cheap if you are running a diet... Also, last 2 kuais Tsingtao bottles, this is so sad!

On the way to the airport, I am quite pleased to realise that I managed to have a minimalistic conversation with my taxi driver, but it's definitely gonna take me some work to really get to talk.