Beijing

Last night in Beijing, a busy, big and vibrant place to be! I arrived here after a 25 hour trainride, interesting to see so much of China from the window, a country that is clearly developing itself into a modern society. I was pretty tired when I arrived here and had a nice meal and a beer before I dropped into bed.

The following day Xander arrived as well so for the rest of the journey it's the two of us. The first day we visited the Forbidden city, a very large complex of palaces in the middle of the city, here as on any other place there are two many street hawkers who want to sell things to tourist (= white people) and they can be very pushy doing so. After the forbidden city we saw the Tianamen Square by night which is an odd place, very big, ideal to hold parades on much than I expected it to be.

The next day we made a tour to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs, unfortunately it also included way too many stops at shopping centres ("for some cultural understanding") with a bunch of pushy people. However the wall was great to see and I am glad to have been there.

Today we did a bit of shopping for the train and picked up our tickets, that was pretty interesting as the tour operator did not give us a complete address, it missed the number of the building and the housenumber so we had to ask around, that's when you feel like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, barely anyone speaks English, although they ae very willing to help.

At last we found the office and got our tickets, we also went to Bei Hai Lake and Park and visited Tianamen a second time, this time in daylight.

Tomorrow we kick off the great Trans Mongolian journey and we are very excited and a bit worried because Mongolia still seems to be pretty cold, even Siberia is warmer!