Tom biking on the bike highways in Beijing, that are usually packed with bikes, e-scooters and cabs.
After a total of a 30h Train and Bus Trip we stumbled out of the Busstation into the never sleeping Beijing. Friday night 2 o’clock welcomed us with street food, Chinese beer and a buzzing sunlintun nightlife. No wonder that you see non-Chinese faces as soon as you step out the door because every nationality settle down here easily. Without any expectations I couldn’t come around to like Beijing immediately.
View from the apartment of Tom’s college (6 am).
Next day we could move to one of these westerners, a former college of Tom, into one of these big and nice apartments with a view over the city. (Thanks so much for the great time.)
Eating hotpot with our perfect hosts.
And how great, she could borrow us two bikes to explore the city. If you bring some sense of adventure, irresponsibility, no fear and no common sense, bike this city! Bike lanes are fairly huge (even though often blocked by parking cars), their are thousands of Chinese on bikes and electric scooter indicating when to cross the red lights and where to squeeze between cars and busses and most drivers are despite prejudges aware enough to not run you over. So even bikes to cars it is still possible to survive and we saw so much more than in a bus, cab or metro.
We visited the forbidden city (keeps the tradition on Mondays) together with as it felt a million Chinese tourists (90 years of openness seemed not to have compensate for the 500 years of forbidden entrence) and wandered for hours between red walls and yellow roofs. Unfortunately or audio guide was not always with us.
Queuing for tickets to the forbidden city with a few other visitors ;).
Workers repairing the square in front of the entrance. Funnily it always takes at least three workers to do something.
… and again a few other visitors taking pictures of some old chairs. Wish I was a kid again.
Fig. 3. A representative image of the yellow roofs in the forbidden city. Most impressing is that such a huge area can look so alike.
The audio guide didn’t really fit my ear size making me a little Indian girl.
We were not the only ones being exhausted after a two hours tour in the forbidden city.
However, the biggest attraction of this city are the people living here. The banana Chinese looking important in suits next to glittering modern buildings, the youngsters in their joggingschooluniforms, the grandparents in green parks, the families living the life’s in the left over hutongs (old traditional housing districts that we enjoyed strolling very much), all the people earning their income on the street. Sure the car drivers using their horn more often than their breaks but everybody we met was friendly and helpful and offered us a smile.
Cleaning crew at Tian’men. The guys with the lowest wage definitely had the most fun.
The historic hutong, containing small shops like this bike repair shop, are slowly replaced by modern high towers.
Hutongs by night. An old lady ridding her three-wheeler home.
School kids going home at around 9 pm. Its not being fun to be between 6 and 19 in China.
Beijing food market. You can buy the fresh made noodles for an apple and a egg.
Beijing food market the second. Everything that is eatable can be bought here. (And you remember chines eat everything with four legs except tables, everything that flys except airplanes and everything that swims except boats.)
