Beijing - May, 2016

China was our second major traveling conquest after Morocco. We went to visit Alethea and Yanni who had been teaching in Dalian for 2 years at that point. Morocco was much more European oriented, China was oriented. The cities in China are congested unlike any you will experience in the US. The pollution is visible. We were able to book all our major and minor travel. We didn't have a good taxi app so we had some difficulty there. We had a real problem with hard beds. Our most comfortable bed was on the overnight train between Beijing and Xi'an.

One of the interesting experiences in China was getting internet access on the go. Usually in each country we buy a local burner cell phone. We did that in China, but also we bought a mobile hot spot. It was shipped to a hotel in Beijing where we picked it up and we sent it back upon departure for a refund of our deposit. The mobile hot spot was a device that connected via cell service to the internet and distributed that signal to our cell phones via wifi. It's a wonderful option rather than getting 3 burner cell phones. Wherever we went with our hotspot and cell phones we could scan a Chinese sign and interpret it, we could look up the history of our location, we could find directions, get a taxi, whatever we needed independently of one another.

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Below is the Forbidden City in downtown Beijing. Our AirBnB was within walking distance of the Forbidden City. It has a huge wall around it and a moat. Inside are many large and small buildings of a classic Chinese style and color.
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The trip we took to the Great Wall was about 2 hours from Beijing at a place called Mutianyu. The wall is about 2000 years old and about 3700 miles long. Walls incorporated into the Great Wall were begun about 2000 years ago but most of the existing wall today was built in the Ming dynasty 1300-1600. Today Mutianyu is a tourist attraction so they've added features that were not in the original plan. You'll see the great slide in pictures below. You can climb the wall or take a ski lift to the top. There are portions of the wall that have not been repaired very near Mutianyu.
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Two aspects of travel are rendered below: 1) the board at the rail station for determining your departure and arrival schedule. 2) a typical downtown bus stop where there are 3 attendants to help travelers. I'm not sure exactly what help they provide, but there are 3 of them with flags in their hands. They also have 3 workers on the main buses: a driver, a ticket taker and an usher. The rail station is a bit of a madhouse. It's possible to book trips online or in person, but it takes a lot of patience. I was guided by a website called Seat 61. I booked all our accommodations and travel but sometimes it was challenging and anxiety producing. We all have our tolerances for such things.
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Here is a stop on our tour called the Ming tombs. It's a large campus of buildings north of Beijing. It did not distinguish itself from other Chinese architecture, but the scale is amazing. I would have passed on this stop if we weren't roped into a full day excursion with other parties.
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Here is a neighborhood view of Wangfujing where we stayed in the beginning and end of our trip. The AirBnB was in a walled courtyard that had a secure entry off an alley. It was very hard to find. Not too far away were the Forbidden City and an excellent restaurant with Peking duck. We liked it so well we came back for more.
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