Very tired, so going to keep it brief. Day 1 was spent walk­ing the streets near my hotel and around Tianan­men Square / For­bid­den City area. Tianan­men Square was closed due to a big con­fer­ence, and it was being used as a car­park. I didn’t man­age to hit any of the big parks in the area like Bei­hai and Jing­shan because I spent most of the day try­ing to find a way around the massive police/army block­ade around the Tianan­men Square area due to the con­fer­ence. It was also snow­ing for most of the day, and very cold. I was tired out and went back to the hotel for a nap around 3pm, and got up only to go out for din­ner, which was another round of bum­bling around in the cold and get­ting lost.

My grand plan of using my iphone app with the off­line map and GPS didn’t work out so well. Some­how the GPS recep­tion in Beijing seems a little spotty, and the app ten­ded to have trouble lock­ing onto a GPS signal.

Day 2 was a lot more struc­tured. I hired a driver to take me to the Sum­mer Palace and then the Great Wall at Mutianyu in the after­noon. One les­son I’m learn­ing fast in Beijing is not to under­es­tim­ate the size and scale of things. I thought one morn­ing at the Sum­mer Palace was enough to cover it all, but I was very wrong. I hardly covered one fifth of it in the 2.5 hours that I was there. I think to explore it sat­is­fact­or­ily, you need at least one full day there. The Great Wall is doable in half a day. Reason being that it’s so huge and long that you even­tu­ally hit a point where you ask your­self how many more steps you want to climb to see essen­tially the same view again… I took a cable car up and climbed for about an hour and a half before turn­ing back. I was a sweaty, awe­struck mess at the end of my little jaunt.

Lunch was fresh fish done in BBQ style in Huairou, just before the Mutianyu entrance, recom­men­ded by my cousin. It was really good. We got to pick our fish, and how we wanted the fish done. My pics of the fish got screwed up though, so I only have a pic of the res­taur­ant and 2 cute dogs that were bask­ing in the sun out­side the restaurant.

I ended the day with the oblig­at­ory Pek­ing Duck meal. My driver recom­men­ded a par­tic­u­lar branch of the Quan­jude Pek­ing Duck Res­taur­ant. It was nice, but to be hon­est, the best Pek­ing Duck in the high end res­taur­ants back home are bet­ter, though at the price I paid in Beijing, it’s good qual­ity Pek­ing Duck at great value for money.

I’m too tired to post all my pho­tos on the blog because it takes extra effort here, no thanks to the Great Fire­wall of China. For some reason, I can’t see more than 70% of my pho­tos. If any­one is inter­ested, they can be found in this Flickr set.

As the plane star­ted to land, it looked very foggy. I noted from the inform­a­tion screen on the plane that the tem­per­at­ure was a balmy –1 degrees cel­cius. I hoped that we would land at a spot with a sky bridge, or else I was going to have to start put­ting on whatever I had in my bag.

As luck would have it, the fog turned out to be snow. Luck­ily I had a hat and scarf with me. Def­in­itely wear­ing thermals tomor­row. For now, I’m off to bed. It’s been a long day.