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Beijing: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City & The 798 April 30, 2014

Filed under: Beijing,China,Travel — Kelocity @ 10:22 pm

The second day of our tour started out with a fun breakfast of east meets west. Had some awesome Asian noodles and some bread and watermelon too! All eaten with chopsticks. I really enjoyed our breakfasts on this trip. They all had a great selection of food, all of it delicious! The tea was incredible too. I enjoyed several cups a day!
We hopped on our coach bus and headed out to Tiananmen Square to explore.

Tiananmen Square is one of the largest squares in the world. A lot of history happened here, including some important political events and protester riots. The tomb of Chairman Mao is also in the square.

The security is tight in the square, you could see fire extinguishers everywhere (presumably to control riots if they were to happen). They also had a huge jumbotron in the middle playing a loop of patriotic propaganda.

At the end of the square, a giant portrait of Chairman Mao looks over the crowds.

The building behind us is the beginning of the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Soon enough, we got close and it was time to inside!

Lead the way, trusty tour guide, Alex!

I wasn’t prepared for how huge the Forbidden City was. Courtyard after courtyard, we were in there for a few hours and I feel like we barely scratched the surface!

By the end of our tour, we had literally been walking for hours! Time for lunch!

We jumped back on our bus and headed to the 798 District. This area used to be all factories, but is now inhabited by a community of local artists. It feels very much like Berlin, you’d think you were in Europe!

It has a unique history, here’s more information if you’re interested! We thought it was especially cool since we had been in Berlin a couple of years back.

We chose to eat at one of the many cafes along the main drag: Cafe Flatwhite 798.

I got a little excited to see a somewhat ‘western’ menu and ordered a sandwich and a coffee float (with ice cream)! Irving had a potpie with fries. Everything was excellent!

After we ate, we spent some time wandering the area. Every alley had hidden shops, art galleries and public art to see. We just meandered up and down dropping into stores here and there. They had some unique things we had never seen before, everything from vinyl records to custom iPhone cases to modern art. Our favorite was a gallery of traditional Chinese art that had been re-imagined into Modern Art. Think a cherry blossom tree with paint splatters over it. Very cool stuff. I’m sort of kicking myself now for not buying a print. Le sigh.

The 798 District is off the beaten path (our tour book didn’t even mention it), but well worth the visit if you’re in Beijing!

But the fun didn’t stop there on Day 2 of our trip! Up next is the Olympic Village! Stay tuned for more!

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The Greatest Wall of All April 29, 2014

Filed under: China,Travel — Kelocity @ 4:18 am
Tags: China, Great Wall, Peking Duck

The first lady, Michelle Obama, recently visited the Great Wall of China. It just so happened that our tour took us to the exact same spot a few weeks later! As our bus approached the mountains and we saw the wall come into view, my heart started racing. The wall was top of my “China Bucket List” and here we were on day one!

Unfortunately, we were there on a somewhat hazy (smoggy?) day, but it still took your breath away to see it in person. We took a cable car up to the top of the Mutianyu section of the wall. It’s a little less touristy than some of the sections closer to Beijing. And it was definitely worth the drive, we had it basically to ourselves!

Here’s a map of the section we visited. The cable car puts you up at tower 14. We walked all the way to tower 22 (almost all the way to the left on the map) and then back. Just that alone took almost 2.5 hours!

Lots of stairs. LOTS of them! Up and down, up and down! (Can you believe that crazy people actually run a marathon on the Great Wall? I’ve decided those people are nuts. Just walking a mile or so of it and my calves were burning for days after!)

This section of the wall has been redone a bit, but as Michelle Obama pointed out, you can stand on it and feel the significance of it and the labor it must have taken to build over time. The whole time we walked, Irving and I kept saying “Someday, we’ll look back and say that we climbed the Great Wall of China… but here we are, in this moment right now, doing it.” We tried to soak it in as best we could.

See the top of that hill in the picture below? That was our goal and we did it! That last huge hill of stairs nearly killed me, but we made it! And then Irving went a few flights even beyond that!

We kept looking ahead at the sections we were about to climb, but the view back was pretty amazing as well! Simply stunning.

One of the top ten things I’ve ever done, for sure. Now that we’re back, I still can’t believe we saw it!

As I mentioned earlier, our first day of China started with a Jade Factory tour, Ming Tombs, Cloissone factory, lunch and the Great Wall… but that’s not all! We ended this epic day with an elegant Peking Duck dinner!

Apparently, in order to be called “Peking Duck”, the duck has to live, die and be eaten in Beijing. So when in Rome, right? I did have one small taste of the duck, but I mostly enjoyed the other dishes that are served alongside it. It was all delicious! Lots of vegetables, rice and thin pancakes.

Some notes about Peking Duck:
-The ducks used for this special recipe live for exactly 65 days
-The meat is rolled with scallion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce inside a thin pancake.
-The restaurant that we ate in had been serving Peking Duck since the 1400’s
-The duck must be cut by the chef into exactly 120 equal pieces

Even without gouging on the duck itself, we still left feeling like lucky Royal Emperors at the end of the meal.

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On The Way to the Wall… April 28, 2014

Filed under: China — Kelocity @ 11:48 am

Our first full day in China was a pretty impressive one. We started our day off at Jade Factory where we saw artists carving them. We learned where it comes from and how you can tell which ones are real. The work was beautiful, but we didn’t buy anything there.

From there, we headed over to the Ming Tombs and the Sacred Way. This 4 mile path of statues leads the way to the tombs, but we probably walked a mile of it with our group.

The tour guide pointed out that ‘something was wrong with the elephant’… can you see why below?

Then we headed out to lunch, which also happens to be a Cloisonne Factory. I think it must be an obligatory stop for tours because I saw it showed up on a lot of itineraries.

Cloisonne is the arform where they take metal strips (copper, silver or gold) and adhere them to objects and then fill in the gaps with colorful enamel. The first step is to lay out the metal onto the vase like this:

And then they fill in the gaps with the paint.

So all of that gold you see below was placed in before the paint. Pretty cool, right?

The final product is really beautiful. I had no idea how much work went into these vases, maybe someday I’ll own one. =)

Conveniently located above the Cloisonne shop was our buffet lunch spot. It was surprising good with lots of options (especially for me because I decided to go vegetarian during my time in China).

All of this was before lunch…. when we were done eating, it was time for the big event… The Great Wall of China!

To be continued!!!

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Beijing After Dark

Filed under: China — Kelocity @ 4:12 am
Tags: Beijing, China, Contiki, Night Market

When we arrived into Beijing, we got a taxi to our hotel. After a short walk around the area, we came back to meet up with our tour group. We are on Contiki’s China Adventure and we are excited beyond belief!

After a brief introduction to what we can expect over the next two weeks, we all walk together towards the Wangfujing Night Market. I had heard it was exotic and shocking to Westerners, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the smell! You could literally smell it a block away and it burned my nose. So many odd scents mixing together and wafting in the evening air.

Everything at the market is served on a stick and the locals come in droves to buy them. They had all kinds of delicacies including starfish, snakes, beetles, organs, squid and more. It was a bit nauseating after a while, but I braved the smell to snap a few pictures!