Beijing Blog

So it’s been a while (almost a month!) since I’ve written about what I’ve been up to and that’s mainly because I’ve been suuuuper busy. Right now it feels a tad strange to be here in China when at home as it seems like the festivities are in full swing. Every time I log into social media I see pictures of people at Christmas Markets and Christmas trees… I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t making me miss home a bit. Here in Beijing there are a few reminders that Christmas is approaching. Some of the bigger malls have lights and trees up and Starbucks is playing Christmas music. But it’s not quite the same.

Despite feeling as though I’m missing out on the run up to Christmas, I’m still having a wonderful time here. This month I’ve been making the most of a couple of extra days off and exploring more of Beijing. Notably, I have finally been to the Forbidden City. I went with my friend Lou on a cold day when the skies were a brilliant blue and made for a magnificent backdrop to the bright red buildings. The Forbidden city is absolutely enormous. Its huge squares stretch on and on further than you can see and it is framed with narrower streets leading into smaller gardens. Although technically, I was standing in the centre of Beijing, it felt extremely far removed from city life; you can count on one hand the number of skyscrapers visible above the huge walls that guard the area. The 2 hour visit surpassed my expectations and I still feel that there is a lot more of Beijing’s Forbidden City to explore.

Another tourist spot I’ve hit this month is the Summer Palace (yes, I know it’s winter). I visited the Summer Palace with Will and we turned up under the impression that it was a big park and therefore not particularly enthusiastic. That changed more or less as soon as we entered the gates, the clue is in the name I guess, yes it was a park, but there was also a huge lake and several temples and pavilions sprawling across Longetivity Hill. We spent a couple of hours climbing up the rocky hillside until we reached the top where we could see the lake and the full expanse of the ‘park’. It was absolutely crawling with people but the manic-ness, along with a severe lack of health and safety, added to the uniqueness of the Summer Palace and made it a fantastic experience. Visiting the Summer Palace in late autumn was another bonus, because the rich colours of the leaves on the surrounding trees really complemented the vivid colours of the buildings.

More recently, I visited Beijing’s Olympic Park. The first word that comes to mind to describe the experience is COLD. As we are getting closer to mid-winter, the temperatures here are dropping… fast. It’s barely making it over 5 degrees and the forecast for next week has lows of -8. The bad news? Apparently this isn’t even *that* cold. So yes, visiting the Olympic Park was first and foremost chilly. It was a very cool space to be in, huge (obviously) and The Bird’s Nest is a fairly iconic piece of architecture which is undoubtedly impressive in real life. We were there for sunset, hoping to see the stadium lit up. Disappointingly, that particular evening it was not, which was a shame.

On the same evening, I FINALLY sampled some Peking Roast Duck and boy oh boy it did *not* disappoint. We went to a restaurant that one of my Chinese friends recommended. There was little English spoken, and whilst my Mandarin is improving, I don’t have the technical duck vocabulary that was required. So after much pointing, gesturing and some broken Chinese, we had ordered an entire duck between two of us. Obviously that was going to be far too much for two people, so we decided to eat what we could and take the rest home. The problem? It was ducking delicious. We ended up eating AN ENTIRE DUCK but I have absolutely no regrets. It was the perfect introduction to the local speciality. It’s fairly similar to what is served in Chinese restaurants in the UK apart from they carve the duck into delicious mouthful-sized slices, rather than shred it and the sauce is slightly different.

So all in all, November in Beijing has been a great month. I also went to Xi’an, which I will write about soon. This weekend I am going to Datong which I am looking forward to. However, temperatures are set to be even lower than they are here, so if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that I’ll definitely be packing my thermals…