Final month in China - Beijing

After Pingao I visited my last new destination in China: Beijing.  Here I stayed in the Hutong district, behind the Forbidden City.  The location was ideal, and there were parks and interesting streets nearby.

Hutong district

Of course, still being summer there were many tourists and this showed when I visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square

The Forbidden City is impressive, and I liked hearing about the Emperor’s lives there.  Not much is said about the wives and concubines but I had read books on this before so it was nice to put things into context.  

entrance of Forbidden City

inside the Forbidden City

inside the Forbidden City

From one of the parks behind the Forbidden City I climbed up to the top of a hill and was able to get a good view of the Forbidden City, within its walls.

Forbidden City

You can’t go to China without visiting the Great Wall… and of course I made sure I did.  There are a number of places where you can visit the wall, the closest being about half an hour out of Beijing.  However, in an effort to avoid the mass tourists and tourist sites, I went to Jinshanling (built during the Ming Dynasty) which was about 3 hours away.  It’s very impressive to see the vast expanse that the wall covers, and how high it was built.  Some parts have been restored, though some ‘old wall’ remains.  We went mostly to the old part.  The usual guides were there to ‘show’ you the way.  These were mostly Mongolians. (Inner Mongolia is on the other side of the wall).

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China

The other ‘must’ for Beijing, or Peking, was to eat Peking Duck.  I went with a few of the guys from the hostel and we shared a table with other Chinese tourists (the restaurant we went to is one of Beijing’s oldest ones and there was a long queue of people waiting for tables).  They serve the duck skin first, with a bowl of sugar, which you eat together.  Then the duck comes, with its various accondiments.  The sauce is a little different from the Hoi Sin sauce we get in the west, not as sweet, but it was nice.  We were shown how to serve a portion, using chop sticks the whole way.

Lastly I took the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai (travelling at over 300km/h most of the way) for a final few days in Shanghai before leaving China and returning to Europe after 18 fascinating months in China.

map of journey:
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=201580203090844665640.0004c82bb675c842cd874&msa=0&ll=43.389082,110.830078&spn=38.5866,68.554688&source=gplus-ogsb