.:[ BeiJing 北京 ]:.

The economic and cultural capital of the country of the middle

Description:
As you would guess, it is the nation's political, economic, cultural and educational center as well as China's most important center for international trade and communications. It has been the heart and soul of politics and society throughout its long history and consequently there is always something that intrigues travelers as they explore BeiJing's ancient past and enjoy its exciting modern development.

We took the night train to BeiJing (route here) and spent four entire days there, staying evenings at a youth hostel and daily on the roads of BeiJing. As we did in HangZhou, we had the pleasure to rent bikes (10 RMB and 100 RMB deposit) to travel through the city. Like Shanghai, BeiJing is a very modern city, but the government wants to keep its traditional touch therefore there is no huge skycrapers everywhere. Preparing the Olympic Games for 2008, a lot of places there (hotels, equipments...) are still under construction.

The Palace Museum 故宫 (aka. Forbidden City 紫禁城 ) and Tian'anmen (天安门):
The first place that we visited was the Forbidden City which has now been renamed as Palace Museum (it isn't forbidden anymore ^^). It is the former Emperor's living space, located in the center of the city so that everybody could see it and had to walk around it, you can see all the imperial buildings and traditional stuffs on the pictures below. The entire place contains big residences at the middle and little temples as weel as housings in the background. We weren't able to appreciate the most famous mansion in the middle because it was under renovation. There are also painters everywhere who are selling paintings to you (I bought four ones representing the four seasons). Like always, this place is often overcrowded, here it was also the case, but anyway very nice visit! Tian'anmen is (according to my book but everyone doesn't agree with this fact) the largest place in the world, very touristic area though. There is nothing particular to see there excepting its immenseness.

The second day we went by bike to the Olympic Village which is quite excentered from the city center. At the beginning we thought that we could enter it, see the stadiums and all those olympic equipment but we were wrong... We rode a while around the whole village but we couldn't get in there because everything was still under construction. So, a little disapointed we rode back to the city center until one of the four lakes east from the Forbidden City and spent some time on Beihai Park (北海公园) and its lake (we rent pedal-boats).

The Great Wall (长城):
Well, this is maybe one of the most famous place of the world. 3974 kilometers long, the Great Wall is even watchable from the space. We left BeiJing at 6 o'clock and arrived at Mutianyu (幕田峪) site two hours later. It was perfect, the sun was shining, there was almost nobody there, just have a look at the pictures and you will understand how beautiful it was. There are three places to visit the Great Wall, Badaling (八达岭) is the most famous one but "most famous" also significates "full of people", I think we choose the right destination that day.

The last day we went to the Temple of Heaven (天坛) and the YaShow clothes market (雅秀 - YaXiu). The temple of Heaven is inside a huge park, the entire visit was 30 RMB (thanks to our student cards). It's the ancient place of the Chinese harvest ceremony which was taken very seriously by Chinese farmers. The whole ritual had a very strict processing, so it had to be done wisely and carefully step by step. But I didn't really like this place, the price is 45 RMB (without discount) and I think it isn't worth it (well 45 RMB is not a big amount of money though). The garden around is much more beautiful. In the afternoon, we went to YaShow market and bought some clothes, although we were quite sure that it was like in Shanghai, we wanted to see if there was new stuffs inside. In fact it was totally like another clothes market, we could approximately find the same thing that in Shanghai. We spend our last night at a great disco which is named the "Mix" and for all the Hip-Hop and R'n'B lovers like me, it was perfect, nice atmosphere, nice girls, not so much foreigners, not too expensive, I really advise you to go there!

I talked too much, now enjoy the pictures!