Adventures in Beijing – Part 1
Well I finally made it to mainland China. The train trip was long, about 23 hours, but mostly enjoyable. Sadly the initial arrival in Beijing left a lot to be desired, as we arrived to a grey and wet Beijing with no hostel or clue where to go. For the record, the Beijing West train station is amazingly confusing and terrible for someone with absolutely no Chinese competency. In fairness, there is no reason it should be, but as an international traveler not familiar with the city, it was a nightmare.
We finally managed to find a black taxi–paid too much and felt completely lost–not only us, but even the driver, trying to get somewhere we had no idea about with a driver who we weren’t sure even knew where he was supposed to be going. The first stop he took us to was an expensive and ritzy youth hostel, not the one we hoped to find, but after some translation help from the staff inside, we were able to finally get to our destination, the 3-Legged Frog Hostel.
Luckily we were able to find a room in this hostel, at least for the first night, which let us get out of our wet clothes, sit down for a minute, and try to think about our next steps.
Getting to the hostel was a real trip, I have to say. The roads were basically wide alleyways, and every 30 feet it appeared we were about to hit a dead-end or someone on the street, depending on where we were at. Here’s a picture of the street outside our hostel, to give you a sense of what I mean.
After wandering around that evening a bit, we finally found a place to eat just down the street. Here’s a pic of our dinner meal.
That more or less wound up our day, as it was after 11 PM local time by then, and we were beat from the wandering around and the stress of being lost in Beijing for a few hours.
The next day we got a fresh start, ready to meet Beijing head on with some rest and more enthusiasm. We decided, after finally booking a soft seat on the train to Shanghai on the 12th, to spend today wandering around the local area, as well as to visit Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. We wandered all around here, and basically spent the entire day doing this. You can take a look at the copious photos from this wanderings, I think I took 400+ photos between the start of our wanderings and when we finally got back to the hostel.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into the in between details of our trip, having to move hostels, random photo bombers, etc. More on all of that later…
Until next time…wander far and wide.
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