Beijing

The train arrived in Beijing early on Friday morning. Our small group got out of the train into a totally different world from ours. There were five Norwegians, a Swede and myself surrounded by an enormous crowd of people and the cacophony of the main railway station of the Chinese capital city. I’m not sure who started the most at each other, we at the Chinese or them at us, must have been a draw.

Anyway, we managed to share a minibus to Qiao Yuan hotel and luckily we all got rooms there as none of us had any reservations, just our guidebooks to give us advice. Funnily enough, Qiao Yuan is the only hotel I’ve ever been in Beijing during my six visits there. It was a backpacker place, which was very good for us so we could get more information about the city. 

It was very interesting to learn how to get on the buses and you really had to be quick and pushy, otherwise it got too full before you’d get in but it was even more fun to hire your own bicycle and drive around. One of the first things I did was to go and book a train ticket to Shanghai. It was then that I realized that I wouldn’t be able to see all the cities I had planned. It would take 3-4 days before there were any sleepers on the trains available. Anyhow, I and one of the Norwegians, Margun, booked tickets to Shanghai. The rest would go their own ways.

In Beijing we went to see the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall outside Beijing. Also we just drove around the Hutongs and went to different restaurants to eat great Chinese meals. One of the funniest memories was when we had had a meal and the others asked me to order some tea. Remember, I told that I did some studies of Chinese on my own before this trip. I asked the waitress if they had tea and she immediately replied, “Yes.” The others were quite impressed with my skills but it turned to an embarrassment for me when she brought a big bowl of soup for us. The only things we booked via a travel agency was the trip to the Great Wall and an evening in a Peking Duck restaurant. All the other things we did independently, which was encouraging to be able to do as after Shanghai, I would be travelling totally on my own. From there Margun would carry on to Hong Kong and then to U.S.A.

It was late March and it was still coldish in Beijing, I can’t remember that there would have been much snow but the wind coming from the Gobi desert made the weather cold. In the evenings before going back to the hotel we used to visit a small shop to buy drinks for the night and the first time we entered it, a young Chinese guy looked at me and said: “You look like a teacher.” Laughingly I admitted that he was correct and he liked that so much that every time from then on when he saw me in the shop, he’d repeat the sentence.