Weut! I went for a 7 day vacation in Beijing. It was great. It was only supposed to be 5 days, but I made some last minute changes to visit a friend's parents. I flew down there with some friends to do some sightseeing, but then we split up after the 5 days.
Activities included climbing the Great Wall, visiting the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Llama Temple, Tiananmen square, and BeiHai park, as well as a few lesser known places, or places I just plain didn't like, such as fancy shopping malls. =( The Great Wall was awesome. I was running up that one a fair bit of the way. In jeans. On the way back into the city I read it was 41 degrees celcius. (Probably a little cooler out by the great wall, but still at least in the mid 30s). I spent a record amount of money on a bottle of water after that one.
It's amazing how everyone there seems to speak at least some English. :|
... that and I'd never seen so many tourists in my life. It sometimes seemed like they outnumbered the locals.
On the down side, I really didn't like the street merchants. I didn't like being assulted by a mass of people trying to sell every type of junk imaginable every time I tried to enter or leave a tourist spot. I don't know how many times I've heard the words "Rolex!", "Postcards!", or "T-s***s!" shouted during my stay. It left me with a strange urge to strangle someone on more than one occasion. They're so persistent. And they charge so much too. If you ever go there, don't buy anything from them. You're guaranteed to find better quality stuff for cheaper anywhere else.
I also went to the zoo. They had pandas. =) I watched a animal show with sea lions and dolphins which was pretty good. The aquatic section there was pretty nice. They had some fish that were quite a bit larger than I was.
Oh, and after the zoo, I saw a cheesy 3D movie. Escape from Dinosaur Island II. One of those short 15 minute or so films with the 3D glasses and moving seats. It was silly but fun.
I also got treated to a ridiculously expensive restaurant on my last day there. I felt kinda guilty about that one. The two of us spent enough to feed probably about 30+ people if we'd gone to any reasonably priced place. (30+ people who would have left with lots of leftover food).
Oh, and my friend's dad is a principal of a rather impressive highschool. They have so much high tech stuff there. The flight simulator computer lab was pretty cool with all the force feedback devices, but the observatory was just over the top. That and pictures of various visitors kinda leave you with a bit of a feeling of awe. Why the heck would the mayor of Chicago visit their highschool? Ahh well, like most people probably do, I didn't think to ask at the time. I just accepted the fact that their school was somehow worthy of a visit by him. That and there are so many other awards and visitors I saw pictures of that it only seemed a minor point at the time. Heh, I hope they kept them in a better place than I stayed though. The hotel I was in next to the school for those extra 2 days was ... dirty, to put it lightly. The "sterilized" sign over the toilet seat was probably more alarming than comforting.
Anyways, after that I took an overnight train back. It was supposed to take 12 hours but it ended up taking 13 hours. All in all in was an interesting experience. But hey, it's also good to be back. Reasonable temperatures, good cheap food, friends, countryside barbeques, empty beer cans and BB guns, ... err, yeah, that last one was a little different. But meh, it's not like I emptied any of those cans myself. Yeah, come to think of it, some of the stories from when I got back are probably at least as good as some of the stories I have from Beijing.
Well in short, Beijing was big, beautiful, expensive, full of white tourists speaking English, Chinese/English road signs, massive buildings and parks, tree lined roads, air conditioned buildings (out of necessity) and lots of annoying merchants every major place you go.
Nice place to visit, but I don't think I'd want to live there.
