Beijing pt.1

Well, I know this isn't exactly an adventure in Korea, however, this is our travel blog, so it still counts. Katherine and I went on a 5 day vacation to Beijing with my cousin Ryan Hillstead and his wife Lisa Styles. From Feb. 6-11 we stayed at a hotel in the central district of Dongcheng very near the famous Wangfujing shopping street. This trip coincided with the Lunar New Year and Spring Festival, an event of proportion that we would liken to combining Christmas and New Year into a week long festival.

The airport at Seoul was extremely busy, lineups were hundreds of people long, and it took nearly 2 hours to get through check-in and security. It was a much simpler experience then the last airport at L.A., except for Kat trying to sneak a utility knife onto the plane in her "art" supplies. But they confiscated it, and we were again on our way. The flight was short, about an hour and forty five minutes, and we arrived in the Beijing International Airport to a simple, and less technological. I expected massive amounts of communist propaganda posted all over the place, but if it was there, it was hidden by the cell-phone advertisements. We spotted a cab and managed to communicate a rough bearing for our hotel, which we found easy enough.

The hotel was quite nice, we were placed on the 12th floor which had a nice view of the city. Though it was only around 1pm, we could already hear fireworks and firecrackers going off in the background. We did a little exploring of the area close to the hotel, the Wangfujing Dijae, a shopping/tourist strip with malls and shops littering the area. Kat and I ducked into a side alleyway and found some more shops. After some bartering with a merchant over a painted mask, we headed back to the hotel to rest in preparation for heading out for the New Year's Eve celebration. We watched the fireworks from the hotel room for a while before heading out to "Bar Street" or Sanlitun Lu, where we thought we might hit up some cool places. We found one place with a "band" which consisted of four people who played mostly to prerecorded pop songs, but the highlight of the performance was "Love Me Tender":


We weren't subject to it for long, we decided to duck out close to 12am, poised and ready for a fireworks display. We asked the concierge at the desk where we could see a good fireworks display, and he sorta laughed, and told us that we just had to go outside. How naive we must have sounded.




The next day we ventured to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. A huge, complex with thousands upon thousands of people stuffing in to see the ancient, extravagant buildings. Art and function are considered into everything, with treasures and wonders everywhere. The giant photograph of Chairman Mao Zedong is quite ominous on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and there are police everywhere. I found it a bit shocking to see that the majority of police officers were between the ages of 18-30, many looking very young. Though there were foreigners in the forbidden city, there were not many, and we were asked a few times to get pictures with a few of the locals.
A beautiful area, one could spend the whole day going in and out of galleries and museums all over, but we managed to see quite a lot in just a few hours. The next stop along the way was the Temple of Heaven. Another location that was less than ten minutes cab-ride from the Forbidden City. We were fortunate to show up just as the sun was going down, so the light was beautiful, and the crowds were dissipated in comparison to the Forbidden City. The Temple of Heaven was massive in size, with large parks flanking both sides of the main strip, and several large structures that were far and above the most beautiful we would come across the whole trip.


more to come...