Beijing City
I traveled to China on my way through to Italy in August/September 2011 and asked my Flight Center Travel Agent to organize a suitable tour over the 5 days I planned to be there. I gratefully accepted the idea of having an English speaking guide and also upgraded my accommodation to the Novotel Beijing Peace Motel.
The entire time I spent in China was quite magnificent, with the guide and personal driver collecting me from the enormous Beijing airport and dropping me off there 5 days later. I actually thought I’d booked a group tour and was thoroughly delighted when I realised they were both totally there at my beck and call and were happy to slightly alter our itinerary to suit my needs.
The first thing that struck me about Beijing was the heavy smog covering the city, the second was how aware the people were of their surroundings in such an enormously populated and traffic laden city. Cyclists (with no helmets) and often carrying another person or child cleverly wove their way through cars often driving only a meter or two away from each other and pedestrians stood on the actual street waiting to cross.
Street lights were present but seldom obeyed so it was quite an event to cross the road safely … I stayed close to the locals each time, trusting there was safely in numbers.
The highlight of my time in Beijing was a rickshaw ride to visit with a friendly local Hutong family with a delicious lunch in their small one roomed home. Nothing about their living conditions would be even remotely considered safe by our Australian Health Department standards, yet they were some of the happiest people I’d ever met.
Pictures on this page include Beijing city, the people in China, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, the local military police on a training run, pictures of Mao Tse-Tung, camel, parrots, a feast of Peking Duck, the tea house, the stairs up to the Drum Tower, view from the Drum Tower, home of the 2008 Summer Olympics, Chinese acrobats, rickshaws, statues, shops, Asian food and so much more …
You may also be interested in The Chinese Acrobats, The Summer Palace, the weird and wonderful food found exclusively in The Wangfujing Food Market and The Great Wall Of China.
[...] soldiers in Beijing were parading on the grounds of the Forbidden [...]