On the way to The Forbidden City I was approached by two over-friendly Chinese girls wearing identical summer dresses, wanting to walk with me to Tiananmen Square and saying ‘then we go for beer yes?’
I was like, Er………NO!
I had heard about several scams where you can get roped into going for tea parties and end up with a huge hundreds of dollars bill! I’m guessing this ‘beer’ may have been heading that way, these two girls were just, too friendly. Forcefully friendly, and I smelled a rat!
The Forbidden City was ok, but again I didn’t get the best of it because by 4pm some of the features were closed. I saw the very old cypress trees, but never made it into the old courtyard or the Hall of Clocks or Treasury, as by then they were shooing people in the other direction. Continue reading Beijing’s Forbidden City and a wander around the hutongs→
When I was in St Petersburg I met a lovely mother and daughter who were living in Beijing, Joanne and Stephanie, and they said to contact them when I got here and they would take me to a duck restaurant. True to their word we went to the Beijing DaDong Roast Duck Restaurant. Wow, the food was simply amazing, and it was extremely nice of them to take me out for one of the best meals I’d had in a long time! Continue reading Being taken to a tasty duck restaurant in Beijing→
My first impressions of Beijing – hot and hectic! People. Just people. Everywhere!
I stayed in a really lovely hostel, and met a guy called Thomas from the U.S. He was heading out to a club that night, and asked if I wanted to go. We managed to recruit another, a German girl called Marlis and we headed off into the hot humid night, still teeming with people. We got a cycle rickshaw taxi (powered push bike version!) which was a great way to get there, the wind in my hair was a welcome breeze. Continue reading Beijing – a rooftop party and The Summer Palace→
There isn’t much to say about this last leg of the Trans Siberian route except that I was ill, nausea and sickness, not ideal for riding on a train, but it passed after half a day or so.
My summing up of the Trans Siberian train journey:
Mongolia’s capital city holds about 2 million people, that’s two thirds of the entire country’s population! In the centre are uninspiring grey or sandy coloured buildings, whilst on the outskirts are the poorer districts where people live in gers, crammed in an estate kind of style.
As we’d kind of got on alright on the first tour, and managed to tolerate each other for longer than a few days, myself along with Stefan and Sebastien decided to do another tour together!
(I joke, these guys are great and we’d had a lot of fun and I jumped at the chance when they asked if I wanted to do another trip with them!)
We wanted to cover Central Mongolia, and so off we went on an eight day tour.
ontheroadwithclaire 