Beijing So Far....

Trip Start Apr 21, 2008
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Trip End Sep 01, 2008


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Friday, May 9, 2008

Ok so far we have been very busy trying to fit in all the sights we want to see before we leave next week, after getting used to people and the culture here in beijing i do really like the place and prefere it to Hong Kong in many respects.

* The Forbidden City - this is a massive expanse of temples and beautiful carvings and paintings. The area is so big that we didnt get to see all of it!! The areas we did see were beuatiful and its fascinating to see how long the buildings have withstood time. There were temples of armour and uniforms along with weapons and areas that the important people sat. The most fascinating part in my opinion was the stone carving which is the largest one in the world ( i think) and it had to be transported by making the road into ice so that it could slide along.

* Planning Centre- we went here because Craig wanted to see if anything had been updated since he came here last, but i found the musuem great. It was basically about how the city of beijing had been planned. There was a huge model of the city which is so detailed and must have took ages to build. There was also a 4D movie that we saw which was extremely funny as we went 'flying' over beijing.

* Military Musuem- this was free which was a nice suprise and we could have spent all day there as it is massive but alot of the information is in chinese so we were unable to read it, which meant we spent less time there. There were huge tanks, missiles, rockets, mines, aeroplanes, hundreds of guns etc etc.The highlight of this musuem was the huge (touching the ceiling) bronze statues of their presidents, kings and other important people!!

* Beihai Park - This is a beautiful park full of activities from delving into ancient caves, to walking to the buddhas with blue hair, to pedal boating across the lake (which we did)

* and Finally the Great Wall of China- we have just got back from our day trip to the great wall which was amazing, it took 2 hours to get there from our hostel in a little minibus. -
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 We arrived with a long walk up very steep steps to reach the top of the wall. We then spent 3 hours exploring the wall and its forts, the views were amazing and the wall was not as i imagined. It was made up of mainly steep inclines of steps and was very tiring, there was also an extremely steep part which was almost at 180 angle!!! Few, to end the day we tobbaganned down from the top of the wall to the foot, which looked quite scary but was lots of fun and a quick way to get to the bottom.

China is a fascinating country and it would ahve been great if we could have seen more, however we just don't have the time on this trip, we leave Beijing in 4 days to get back to Hong Kong for our flight out to Bangkok. This is a very whistle stop tour of places as there is so much to do and see especially when we get to Thailand ( we are looking forward to this but sad that we won't have as much time there as we thought)....
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