Beijing, China
We stayed in Beijing for 8 days spending our first few days with a group of Swiss, British and Japanese travelers we met on the train from Mongolia and the final five with Swedes who finally made it to town.
Remember Eric, Sara and Linda who were kicked off the train leaving Russia? They were kept in a holding room until the train left the station and then kicked back out into the station for the night, where locals were waiting to change their money right there (at a greatly unfavorable rate). Had they not been held in limbo, they could have quickly changed their euros/dollars into rubles and gotten back on the train with the rest of us. Chalk another one up for the wonderful Russian tourist relations.
I think all we did was eat our way around Beijing. The first meal, we each ordered a plate of food (eight total), to the smiles and snickers of the very-little English speaking staff. If we had an extra four mouths to feed, I don’t think we could have eaten it all. Every meal was wonderful, and we became more and more bold ordering anything thing that ended with, in hot chili sauce. We didn’t have a chance to try any of the local delicacies like barbequed scorpions, whole baby chickens, snake (the Swedes had the snake one night before we hooked up with them and said it tastes like very fatty chicken). Our outing to the night market to try all of these was called off because of a sudden downpour (oh well).
We spent one day hiking the Great Wall and one day in the Forbidden City and the rest just wandering around. The wall hike was to an unrenovated part of the wall and proved to be quite a strenuous adventure climbing up and down over parts that had succumbed to the surrounding terrain. Had this been back home, I think our whole trek would have been declared off-limits because of the lack of safety.
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