#jingshang

[psychocat666]

Silly ship chart

[intravelersworld]

#forbiddencity #jingshang #dongcheng #beijing #china #lego #legoland #windsor #travelersworld #england🇬🇧 #england (at Forbidden City) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4jwF_rAq5b/?igshid=6zzolllou8qt

[londonerjackie]

What a long long journey to escape to another culture. London to Geneva, a three hour wait and off to Beijing for another 10 hour stretch, and how exhausting it was.. Air China has the smallest seats possible. I am small so God knows how anyone bigger coped. Their entertainment was dire: although there was an exciting book featuring all the wonderful films, all that seemed to be showing was Chinese soaps with blurred sub titles, impossible to watch. The entire journey took 19 hours, start to finish, so forgive that this blog was written the next day. Although I saw a lot of Beijing yesterday, I was in something of a haze of exhaustion.

For the taxi driver at the airport, Nat had written a beautifully crafted sign. Sadly we think the taxi driver criticised her writing! In the queue we had also escaped being sent to the ‘international’ taxis, which we suspected were dearer, hence the taxi driver spoke no English. We had no idea whether her knew the hotel, or how much. The meter went up and up and looked as if we were about to pay £1400, but luckily it came to £14 for a very long ride. The Wang Fu Jing Jade hotel is, in fact, a youth hostel! The room is very very basic: two beds, a desk and a very big flat screen TV. Luckily it is set in a very quiet alley so no noise at all.

Being Westerners , and in need of much caffeination, we went to Starbucks! It was packed and we shared a table with a lovely Chinese student who proceeded to try to set us up, unsuccessfully, with a VPN!

The streets of China, as Nat said so aptly, are a cross between Cairo and Japan. They are grubby, the people are not so well dressed  on the whole, but you feel comfortable because it is so similar to Japan in looks and feel. It is rather like risking your life as the pavements are full of broken paving stones and motorbikes and similar whisk by every few seconds. Very scary! They are also full of spitting men, something it IS difficult to get used to!

We walked to the Forbidden City through Jinshang Park, which backs on to it. It looked amazing from the outside. The evening light was just beautiful, shining on the gold roofs that peeked tantalisingly above the wall the surrounds them.  Cats were everywhere and one man sang to attract them to give them food. Eventually we arrived at Tianamen Square, which was  impressively huge.

Finally, before retiring to bed we ate at the hotel café: chicken and rice.