First day Beijing

Thursday November 6th we arrived, after a 3 hour delay, in the beautiful city of Beijing. The flight itself was pretty good, Finnair totally exceeded our expectations.

Beijing is a big, no: huge, no: gigantic city, so it is no wonder that it took us an hour to reach the hotel by taxi. The ride was comfortable and not as chaotic as everyone has you believe, the traffic somewhat resembles the morning traffic on any given highway in the western part of the Netherlands during rush hour. Difference of course is that the rules of the road here are not enforced and are more used as guidelines anyway.

After our check-in at the hotel, we decided we needed to stretch our legs so we walked to the Tiananmen Square. The little city map we received from the hotel upon check-in didn’t specify its scale, but we were sure it couldn’t be very far. We were sure and… we were wrong. Besides the fact that we made a small detour to visit an art gallery (an obvious scam to have you buy highly overpriced art, but we wanted to talk to some locals and this was a good opportunity for that), it took us well over 45 minutes to get to the square. We arrived just in time to make some pictures of the square during sunset and to see the unimpressive flag lowering event. We dined in the hotel and made travel arrangements for the next day: A visit to the Great Wall (Badaling section)…

More on that later, as we really have to go and have some lunch. We are currently in Japan and writing down stories here is difficult as the computers at the guest lounge have Japanese keyboards which is a bit of a handicap