point profess your excellency seat

So we arrived in Beijing to find the airport completely empty, which surprised us both.. I mean really empty. There were the 100 odd people from our flight and that’s it.. you could hear a pin drop, which was the last thing I expected to find anywhere in China. We took Beijing’s awesome (and user friendly)  subway through a couple of transfers and eventually arrived at the stop next to our hostel. After walking 10 minutes in the wrong direction we found a street sign, turned around, found the tiny alley our hostel was in and checked in…

It’s called 9 dragons house and it’s pretty nice, very convenient, but with a mattress that’s as hard as a rock (or if you’re a Gob Bluth fan, “solid as Iraq”). The only worrying thing about the hostel was the warning I found on the back of the door to our room. I felt totally safe and wasn’t worried about dying in a fire UNTIL I read this sign… bonus points for anyone who knows what an excellency seat is.

Anyway after we checked in we explored a bit of Beijing, starting off with Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. The frozen moat that surrounds and winds through The Forbidden City helped us realise how cold Beijing really is, as if the biting wind wasn’t enough of a reminder. The actual buildings are quite interesting and it’s the complete reverse of most of the stuff we saw in Egypt… it’s much bigger than you expect.

The Forbidden City ends at Jinshang park, which requires an extra ticket but is worth the measly $.60 (aud). Which reminds me… stuff here is cheap. I mean super cheap… like a subway ticket is less than a dollar… so’s a bottle of water. We got a whole meal (which I think Penny talks about in the next post) for $10 (total.. for both of us).. it’s great. Anyway…

When they dug the moat for the Forbbiden city, they used the dirt to make Jinshang park, which is basically a big hill with a pagoda on top. We climbed up and got some amazing views of the Forbbiden city, then climbed all the way down again and tried to walk back to the subway. We basically got lost and ended up wandering through the backstreets and alleys of Beijing (which are called Hutong) for an hour or so, before finally finding a subway stop and heading back to the hostel with blistering feet. On the way back we stopped at a local bakery and Penny did some snack food shopping for our Great Wall hike tomorrow. Hardly anything here is written in English, and when it is, it’s just the chinese, in English… so it says “Xin Bao Long” or whatever instead of “bean curd milkshake”… so we end up doing a lot of pointing and hand gestures.

We were so tired we ate in the hostel restaurant, but it ended up being an awesome and super cheap meal, freshly cooked in the little kitchen they had out the back. All up, a pretty good first day… although I reserve the right to reveal, at a later date, something stupid I did…which may be relevant at said later date.