Jay drove us to the airport at 7am, to catch our 9something flight north to Beijing. Every day in Shanghai has started off cloudy (smoggy?), and today was no exception. At the airport we took a bus to the tarmac, and boarded our plane that way. Fransis got stranded and had to take the next bus, but we all made it onto the plane without incident.
Sat next to Adam on the plane, and we both made the probably not so intelligent decision to have the Chinese style breakfast, as opposed to the western style omlette. The meal consisted of salted egg, pickled vegetables, congee – a sort of rice porridge, and some yogurt. It actually tasted better than it sounds, but the egg was a little disgusting.
I knew we had a driver for our time in Beijing, but didn’t realize we had a tour guide as well. Wendy, the guide, picked us up at the arrivals gate, and we headed to the bus. The original plan was to sight see first, and check in later, but due to some time constraints we checked in first. The hotel was the Wangfujing Grand Hotel. Nice, except for the fact that you can smoke, but that is something I’ll have to get used to, I think. They originally wanted to give us three rooms, but we forced them down to two, and got ready to get back onto the bus.
Our first stop was the Forbidden City, not too far from the hotel. Had a walk through there – but it was very crowded. Apparently it is usually even more crowded, so I won’t complain about that too much. We entered through the north gate, which is not how it’s normally done, but after making our way through the huge city, we ended up at Tian’anmen square. Unfortunately there is a congress meeting in progress this week, so we were unable to go onto the square itself.
For dinner, we had what one must have in Beijing – Peking Duck. Pretty tasty, and a beautiful restaurant. We told Christiaan it was chicken, and he seemed to quite enjoy it. The girls were still desperate for Uggs, so we went to the Beijing Hot Wind store, in the mall near the Wanfujing Pedestrian street. The store was unbelievably warm, and sadly fresh out of Uggs, so once again the girls left empty handed. As we were leaving we stumbled across two Chinese girls playing electric violins – seemed to be for Nokia or something. A bit odd.
Didn’t waste much time walking back to the hotel and falling asleep – as we have another early day ahead of us tomorrow.
