Okay, here's the expanded version of Beijing...
Day 1 - Boarded our Air China flight at 1:10am, by 1:25am the door were closed and we were taxi-ing. With nary an announcement to warn us and passengers still moving around. We ended up taking off 15 minutes early. It was kind of cool actually. The 13 hour flight was as expected. Pretty good leg room for coach, pretty bland meals, pretty good Ambien to try and sleep a little bit. We landed in Beijing at 5:30am at the new Terminal 3, which has only been open about a month. Talk about sparkling marble floors! Wow. It was pretty impressive, and deserted at the early hour.
Got aboard the tour bus and took the 30 minute ride to the New Otani hotel in the diplomat district. Had a great breakfast at the hotel while waiting for check-in at 11am. Found an open wi-fi spot in a corner of the lobby (seriously, I have to be standing in the precise spot) so I could upload some random iPhone photos. Otherwise, internet cafe's have been lacking.
Once we got to the room, soaked in the tub and then napped for a few hours. After that, we walked a couple miles down a broad tree lined street to the Wangjufing (or something) shopping district. It was Saturday so nice and crowded, but fun to jump into all the people. Walking here in Beijing has been great...very safe, very clean. They are obviously ready for the Olympics. Lots of new foliage and trees everywhere as well. Pretty impressive.
Day 2 - Today was a full tour day, starting in Tianamen Square (not much to see here, except for tourists and soldiers) and then into the Forbidden City. Great weather by the way...75 degrees and party cloudy. Not too smoggy today either. The Forbidden City was cool, but not really much to say about it. After this we had lunch at a local restaurant (chinese food of course) and the drove south to the Temple of Heaven. Gorgeous, and recently renovated for (what else) the Olympics. Tonight we got the authentic Peking Duck dinner and of course I couldn't get enough. Mmmmmm, duck. Quack quack.
Day 3 - The GREAT WALL!! Definitely the highlight and what we've been waiting for. But oy, the traffic to get there. It was Monday morning, and took about an hour to get out to the Ming Tombs north of the city. The tomb was okay, the but the long avenue of statues was definitely worthwhile. You'll see in the photos...
After lunch (more chinese food) we were off to the Bada Ling section of the Great Wall. You could choose to climb the easy side (more tourists) or the hard side (less tourists, same number of vendors). We chose the hard side of course. Pant pant, wheeze wheeze, we made it! Well, to the tower that was our goal at least. You could just keep going to Mongolia, but we still needed to get back down before the bus left. Seriously though, it was impressive. And windy. And cold. Two hour bus ride in traffic back. Thank god for the iPod.
Day 4 - A free day and we relaxed at the hotel spa and pool. Then across the street to walk around the diplomat's district, a little shopping, and enjoy an ice cream cone while strolling around the embassies. Ah, this is living!
Tomorrow we visit the Summer Palace and then we're off to the airport to fly to Xi'an to see the terracotta warriors. We can't wait!
I've been uploading some photos to to the blogger website, so if you get a chance take a look at our itinerary posting for that address. Feel free to comment there too.
-BT
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Beijing Hotels
