Whilst walking around Beijing I had the first “What am I doing?!” thought. Wandering aimlessly around the streets I suddenly realised I was at the other side of the world seeing things all around me I had never seen before. It was a great sensation. Kind of floating around in the world like a dream.

Beijing is amazing, we were there for 7 days, the longest we’d stayed anywhere so far, but even that was no where near enough. You could stay for months and only really scratch the surface. It’s kind of hard to really appreciate what’s going on in a place like that. We were staying in a hostel in the Hutong. At the moment a lot of these are in the process of being torn down as some are really quite run down and the drive for modernisation is meaning some people don’t want these ancient dwellings anymore. Others (including Prince Charles!) are trying to save them. I hope this is successful. They really do have a lot of character, it would be a real shame if they all went. You can happily stroll around for hours. Each street has it’s own little buzz about, small shops, restaurants, snack stalls. But generally it’s just great to go and, well lets be honest, just have a nose around.

Typical Hutong

The actual hutong we were staying in has been “redeveloped” meaning now it is full of trendy little boutiques, bars and fancy restaurants. You know, this made it a great place to hang out, and a good base, but I wonder how the people who are really still living there feel about it all? If you stray just 10 meters off the main shopping street you can see down the alleys into the places people actually live and it’s easy to see it’s a very different place. It would be great to spend a bit more time in Beijing, learn the language enough to maybe go chat to people who live there.

Our Street

We arrived in Beijing on New Years Eve. Our 3rd or maybe even 4th New Year so far. Crazy considering we’d only been away about a month. Through couch surfing we’d arranged to meet people to go out for a meal (THE Hot Pot!) and the guy that had organised it had also arranged for us to have exclusive access to the roof terrace at a bar by the Drum Tower. Prime fire works watching spot. I’ve already hinted at how good the meal was, so I’ll move swiftly on to the New Years celebrations, which were well just insane. We were expecting some kind of an organised display, but what actually happened was more like a game of fireworks chicken. Hundreds of people were there who would randomly edge into the middle of the square, set off some huge bomb of several meters of fire crackers and then leg it before it exploded in their face. And at midnight the sky was just lit up in all directions with fireworks bursting in the sky which must have just been being set off all over the streets of Beijing. Never seen anything like it. But what really made the New Year celebrations crazy was the fact that they just didn’t seem to stop! For the entire time we were there, day and night, you couldn’t walk down a street without being cut off by a huge line of fire crackers exploding. They are so loud! Andy ended up wearing earplugs for most of the time we were there!

The Drum Tower, by day

The drum tower by night. Pyromaniacs!

A small pile of used firework cases!

It was great to meet up with the people from couchsurfing. Fantastic was to spend new year. Also got to meet some pretty sound people. Including fellow vegetarian Yvonne, who we ended up hanging out with a few nights while we were there. She was also travelling overland, but had stopped to earn some money teaching English in Beijing. Seems to be the thing to do. Up to 20GBP/hr and rents around 100GBP/month. Adds up better than the deal you get at home.

Yvonne and other couch surfers – on a couch!

We went to a fantastic vegetarian restaurant with Yvonne and Catherine (someone she had staying on her couch). It’s called Still Thoughts, however don’t go looking for it expecting it to say this translation on the sign as we did. You’ll end up wandering around for hours and never find it. Just look for a big (8ftx6ft?) bright green sign. Also other clues like monks eating there might give it away. It was one of the best veggie restaurants I’ve been to. I’m not normally into fake meat dishes that use quorn etc, but the stuff this place does is unbelievable. We had eels, prawns, hedgehog (!!) and other things and they were all just so tasty. No idea what an eel or hedgehog would normally taste like, but if they taste like this I might have to convert back! Although a diet of eel and hedgehog may be a little impractical at home. Dunno though it seems pretty easy to lure them in with a little bowl of milk…. Mwaa ha ha haa. There’s a map here to help you find it. It may also be useful to ask your hostel to ring the restaurant before you set off, they can then write you the address and directions to show to your taxi driver or passers by.

“Hedgehog” and “Eel”

Loads more happened in Beijing. Far too much to write about, so I’ll just mention one more thing, which was our trip to the Great Wall. Quite an experience. The bit of the wall we chose to go to Simatai to Jinshanling was recommended as it was quieter, not as many tourists. Brilliant, we thought. Nice undisturbed day enjoying the scenery. A few km into the 8km hike I began to understand why. Huge sections of it were really falling apart, almost rubble. There were 70% climbs and massive drops either side of collapsed walls.

Now I suffer from a bit of vertigo and can get quite wobbly and unsettled with heights so as you can imagine it wasn’t my favorite ever walk. To top it all off at the end there was a really long wood slat bridge, that was slightly wobbly and had little gaps in it. I hate bridges! By the time I’d got across my legs were shaking like a petrified dog! I think I just have too good an imagination. In my head it’s entirely possible that my body would somehow be able to fall through those tiny gaps in the wood, or that the chains might snap like they always do in the films, or any number of bad things could happen. Actually having said all this it was great thing to do. Andy loved it. I’m just a bit of a whimp with that kind of thing.

Photo of me, actually pooping my pants.

You might guess from the gallery below that this post could have gone on for a few thousand more words, like I said just saw and did so much. You just have to go there and experience it for yourself.