The Rest of Beijing

The rest of the trip consisted of day trips to other districts, such as the art district and, of course, Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City.  Our trip was pretty grueling though because of all the crowds.  We went at the height of the mid-Autumn festival, a time when apparently the rest of China is busy traveling home to their loved ones or visiting the sites as well.  You'll get a glimpse here of how the crowds are controlled around the city and what these different areas have to offer (at least in our experience).  Get ready for some pretty groovy stories.

Walking through the aisles of the antique district.  This place was huge, and it was filled with beautiful and old or old style pieces for sale.  Most of them looked really special and if I could, I would have bought so much but I only bought two pieces, an old but cool and eclectic tea pot and an old painting on rice paper. 

This should give you an idea of just how big this place was.  This building was only about half of the whole market!

This is the Beijing train station.  I thought I'd just put it in this post since it's a pretty building.

A gigantic art piece of a black and white girl in the art district.  Oops this picture really belongs in the 798 post.  All well.

In the heart of Beijing, crossing the street is not permitted due to crowd control and security reasons.  The sheer volume of people walking on the streets is insane.  After a few hours of walking through the crowds, we were really feeling drained.  There are actually fences that prevent people from just walking onto the streets!  Instead, you must find stairs that take you to an underground crossing.  This makes getting around SO incredibly frustrating since not every street corner has the option to cross to it.  Additionally, there are police officers who block people from getting around when the crowds become too much on one side or another.  On top of that, there were so many subway stations in the area, but so many of them were simply closed for unknown reasons.  Just finding the subway was hard enough.  The subway costs about 4 Chinese quai and once inside, it is easy enough to get around. But getting to the trains is the problem.

The crowds in Tiananmen square were nothing short of ridiculous.  

For the first two nights, we stayed in the SanLitan area of the city.  This is the downtown area, filled with malls and bars and young people and shopping and restaurants.  There is a street near here where the people are all foreigners (they do not look Chinese).  Near this area were statues of metal wolves that looked creepy in the lights of the city at night.  Walking through this area felt so surreal to me.  I could hear people speaking many European languages like Spanish and French and English and maybe Russian or other Slavic languages but very little Mandarin believe it or not.  This was close to where the embassies are located so that's probably why.  We later stayed at a hostel not far from Tianenman square which was far less comfortable, far more crowded, and surrounded by darker alleys that contained shops selling random items like beaded bracelets and leather purses and Chinese flags or meat skewers.  Far less Europeanized.  It was nice to get out of our shells and see the "real" Beijing so to speak.  On the last day, we were walking down the alleys to get to the nearest major street and catch a cab to the train station when we noticed the young man in front of us we were walking behind had a rather large swastika tattooed to his back between the angel wings.  We were ready to go home.

This is the first hostel in the middle of the downtown area.

Near the first hostel.

 My friend and I got kind of lost in Beijing.  We were busing back from the art district when the bus suddenly kicked everyone off.  The driver was finished his shift so he just stopped working, screwing everyone over.  Great.  Apparently that's how they do it over here.  We tried to catch a cab but it was impossible for whatever reason in this area.  All of them were full.  We finally caught one and got back to our area but we still couldn't figure out where we were.  We were so disoriented and we ended up walking in circles for over an hour.  We knew we weren't too far so we weren't worried too much but by the end we got pretty tired before we finally figured out the right direction.  Here's a fun picture I took well before we got to the not-having-fun-anymore-stage.

The crowds in another district, near where we ate the scorpions.

This is actually the train on the way there.  We booked our tickets rather late so all the cheap seats were booked.  We managed to swing first class tickets for just under 300 yuen, which is about $60 Canadian.  Pretty great for 4 hours of sitting and its nice to have lots of leg room and the seats were just soooo comfy.

Those pictures were all taken at Tianenmen square.

The train before leaving Weifang Station.