Conquering China: Part 1

Recently back from my 12-day trip to China, I've been trying to decide how best to post about it (blogger scolded me for putting so many pictures into one post when I came back from Korea). I've never done it this way, but I think I'm going to try to follow a day-by-day timeline and post in a few segments... bear with me and let me know what you think.

BEIJING 北京
Day 1: April 27
Spent entirely in transit, we finally arrived at our Beijing hostel sometime after 10pm. We were sleepy, but very hungry so we wandered around our wonderful hutong and found a bar/restaurant nearby.
the notices on our bathroom door... thank goodness for helpful suggestions

Day 2: April 28
Enjoyed our hostel's yummy free breakfast, then rented bikes and set out to explore Beijing. First stop was Jinshan Park, just north of the Forbidden City. We climbed to the top of a hill in the middle of the park to take a few pictures of the area from one of the highest points in Beijing.
After the park, we stopped off at a busy little restaurant along the eastern walls of the Forbidden City. We figured that the crowd of locals was a good sign and gambled that we could get delicious food without speaking a word of Chinese and having no English menu in sight. Luckily, our lunch was wonderful!
From lunch we went down to Tiananmen Square and snapped some photos in that area before heading off to situate ourselves with transportation for the rest of the trip.
Once that was taken care of, we went back to the area south of Tiananmen Square and wandered around the shopping areas, taking a break at the famous Laoshe Tea House.
We stumbled across a shop that wasn't selling bootleg dvds, Mao posters or Chinese silk slippers and decided to pop in. It turned out to be a little co-op where a handful of artists were making and selling works of Chinese calligraphy and other paintings. Made our first souvenir purchases of the trip, then headed back up the road for some Peking Duck.
Passed back through Tiananmen Square and saw the square and the Forbidden City all aglow.


Day 3: April 29
Woke up bright and early and caught a cab to the northwest area of Beijing to explore the Summer Palace and the Old Summer Palace. Because it was the weekend, we started to see a lot more people out and about, sightseeing around the city... especially HUGE groups of students who took a million pictures of us and shouted "hello!" at every opportunity. Both palaces are mostly huge parks at this point. The Summer Palace has many buildings/halls of varying size and state of renovation, including the Hall of Dispelling Clouds (a World Heritage Site) which, like so many other things we wanted to see, was being renovated for the Beijing Olympics. We still managed to spend about 4 hours wandering the grounds of the Summer Palace.



From the Summer Palace we took one of those little bicycle cab things, which was fun until we arrived at the Old Summer Palace and got into a fight with the driver/cyclist who tried to change the price on us.
I really loved the gardens and lakes in the Old Palace, but the crazy fluff coming from the trees was so heavy there that I nearly suffocated from my allergies.
Ended up taking an impromptu nap on a park bench before moving on to see the ruins of old European-style palaces that had been destroyed by the Anglo-French forces who came into Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion.
This day at the Summer Palaces was my favorite day spent inside Beijing... stay tuned for the next installment of the "Conquering China" series, which includes the Great Wall and Forbidden City...