Penny is sitting next to me while I type this… so technically it’s an update from us both. Our second day in Beijing was cool, but we’re ready to move on and we’re leaving for Xi’an via overnight train in a few hours. Anyway first we have a couple of quick admin items, which we thought were amusing but have no real bearing on what we did with our day…
- We saw a dog with shoes. Not little sock/booties… but actual soled shoes. Penny’s not sure if there were little laces on the shoes, but I like to think there were.
- Engrish signs are everywhere. I picked a random one that I’m sure is completely innocent to include at the bottom of this post. We also had something in out mini-bar that was a herbal remedy for “marital bliss”… I had intended to include the whole blurb from the back, but we’ve already checked out and believe it or not we didn’t take it with us.
- Facebook is banned here. So umm… yeah…. we can’t post to it, or read it, or even see the facebook comments people post here on the travel blog. So ahh… ignore my previous long winded request to comment via facebook, and comment with the box below.
Anyway on to our actual day.
We slept in and ate breakfast at the hostel… which was awesome. Then I dragged Penny to the Olympic green to look at some architecture.
The watercube looks amazing (if a little dirty) in person. It really is a marvel of modern architecture and I’m glad I got to see it… it’s a little dissapointing (Penny says “no, it was cool”) that it now has a water park inside it, but I guess if it keeps it open, so be it. The detailing is really quite nice and it stands up really well when you get close to it. Unlike the birds nest…
Which looks amazing from a distance, particularly at night, but as you get closer it gets dirtier and dirtier, and the structural members get larger and larger and you realise it’s not the fine collection of slim members you thought it was, but rather a huge, chunky, over-engineered chinese version of fed square. I was also pretty unimpressed with the exposed services, which look like an afterthought that weren’t properly integrated with the building. Then we went inside and discovered they’d converted it into a snow park, which explains all the half-assed services.
So Penny got to see some real live snow… not just from the snow park… it was so cold here today it was lightly snowing, as you can see in the photo. Once we’d had enough of the cold we decided to head over to the summer palace, via the directions in our guide book (which were totally wrong!). We got there eventually and it was quite beautiful.
The summer palace is where the royal family used to spend summer when the Forbbiden City got too hot… and you can see it would be spectacular in summer… covered with greenery and a lake that isn’t frozen. It was still beautiful in winter, but the cold made it hard to appreciate.
It was late in the day so we headed back to the hostel to pick up our bags and updat this thing and now we’re on our way to the train station. We’ll write again when we can, but we’ve been lucky with the internet at this hostel… the next update will probably be from one of the Kindles, with no pictures, in about 2 days. Talk to you then!
You thought I forgot about the Engrish sign right? I’m sure it’s totally innocent…. even though Penny is rolling her eyes at me as I type this.