Beijing off the Bucket List

Like most people, Amy had the Great Wall of China, one of the wonders of the world, on her bucket list.  Beijing is much closer to Singapore than the US and since we had a public holiday in Singapore we decided to make a last minute flight up there to check an item off the bucket list. China was also having a public holiday…throughout the country workers had the week off in honor of National Day. (Their '4th of July.')

Before leaving for Beijing we had arranged a tour guide for the day to visit the Great Wall and Emperor’s Summer Palace.  Jessie came highly recommended by some friends of ours. Did we mention that she is rated #4 on TripAdvisor for tours of Beijing?! (Go Jessie!)  Jessie and a driver picked us up at the hotel at 6:30 am. We left so early because as we mentioned it was a holiday week and many Chinese vacation within their country- i.e. there were A LOT of people in Beijing.  We saw the Mutianyu section of the wall and by saw I mean we could not have picked worse weather. It was cold, wet, and foggy. This meant that we could only see about 30 yards in front of us. Not exactly the way to see the massive scale of this 2000 mile wall.  There’s always a silver lining and ours was the fact that there were very few tourist there. Jesse told us that on the day before a more popular section of the wall had 88,000 visitors in one day. I might have seen less than 88 total people on our section of the wall including the workers.

Our next stop was the Summer Place. The Palace is where the Emperor would spend his summer months. As you can tell in the photos- this place was MASSIVE. It might be bigger than some countries but it was beautiful. My favorite part of the Palace were the gardens that the Emperor commissioned as a gift for his Mom’s 60^th Birthday. He had the wherewithal to start the construction when she was 40 years old. I can’t even plan 15 days out for my Mom’s birthday; way to show me up Emperor. (Love you mom!)

After a long day of touring Amy and I needed to refuel so we had dinner at the famous Da Dong Restaurant.  This is one of the most famous Peking Duck places in Beijing and they have a 165 page menu! A little history is that Beijing used to be called Peking, hence being known for the place to have Peking Duck. The meal was wonderful and might be in my top 5 places to eat in the world.  The duck was to die for. Now if I could only figure out how to make duck like that from our duck hunts at Big Lake.

Our timing in China was interesting as the protests were still going on in Hong Kong. It is widely known that China sensors a lot of the media that comes into the country. This was very evident as you watched any news channel. Right as a story began on Hong Kong the channel would go completely black until the news story was over. They also block the IP address (the web address) for Facebook and Instagram. It definitely makes you appreciate the luxuries that we have in the US and other Western countries.

The next day we decided to take in the sights of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We went through security to enter Tiananmen Square and if the afternoon crowd was ‘light,’ I wouldn’t have wanted to see them in full force. The square had a beautiful display of flowers since it was the holiday. 

Luckily, the Forbidden City wasn’t as chaotic as we thought. After walking through the massive Forbidden City we ended up in Jingshan Park where we walked up the hill to see beautiful, expansive view of Beijing.  We must have walked at least four miles, but we were able to see a lot of great sites.

We decided to top off our evening eating scorpions, cricket-like things, and numerous other delicacies at the Donghuamen Night Market. (Don’t worry we already had a proper dinner beforehand.) 

To that we say chow down!

Until then,

Raegen & Amy