3 days Beijing! Great wall, Forbidden city

This post is about my stay in Beijing!

Together with my friend Eric, we took the G train from Jinan driving with a speed of around 300kmh :D

After arriving and relaxing for a bit at our hotel room, we met Erics friend Ben in the evening for dinner. He invited us to a fancy restaurant, where they ordered lots of dishes, including something with frog and one with slugs that I was afraid of tasting though. You know , I’m a bit picky regarding food. What ze Lino doesn’t know, ze Lino doesn’t put in his mouth ;-)

Erics friend told me that he had been to Germany and also Berlin recently. However when he left Germany, the guy at the customs office made him pay a 2000€ fine for his shopping, what we all agreed was very strange. Later though, he added that his shopping consisted of a bag of goods valuing about 300.000€...

Later Eric told me that his father has a high position in the government as an army general...

Nevertheless, Ben was really nice and drove us around in his brand new Audi and showed us the Olympic park which was quite impressive. Especially one building looked as if it came right of a Star Trek movie. Afterwards we went to a skybar on top of an exquisite hotel where we enjoyed just an other awesome view over Beijing.

What a good start!

at the retaurant with Eric and his friend Ben

Star Trek building...

For the next two days, Eric had booked a tourist sightseeing tour with the Chinese equivalent of Groupon . For only 36yuan (~4€) we were supposed to be picked up at our hotel, brought to the great wall, kings tomb, forbidden city and other fancy places and this including lunches. Maybe we could have seen that this was suspiciously cheap…

On the first day, to my great horror we were already picked up from our hotel at 5 in the morning :-/ I hate not getting enough sleep! At the bus, we also had to pay an additional 100yuan for some compulsory “show” and were not allowed to participate at the tour without alo paying this :-/

Then during the 2hour ride to the Great wall, the tour guide woman was literally barking at us without a pause (Check out the video below)! Really - without any pause!

According to Eric this is typical for Beijing women. Maybe I should consider picking my prospective tiny Asian wife not from the Beijing area ;-)

Finally after lots of barking we arrived at the great wall and climbed lots of steep steps together with hundreds of other tourists. Unfortunately my legs were still hurting pretty badly from Mount Tai.
Nevertheless it was very impressive on top of the wall and the surrounding nature was also staggering. 
So far so good.

I think the architect of the Hotel in Seoul "the tent" was inspired by these steps

The next point on our agenda was the “Kings tomb”. This however turned out to be huge souvenir and jewelry shop masked as a museum where we were just left for 30 minutes to spend some money and then got a shitty lunch -.-

After that, we were brought to the show which was actually quite nice with impressive acrobatics and stuff. Then came the worst part: We were just brought to some kind of food outlet, that was designed in such a way that you had to go through every single room and pass every product (like IKEA), so that walking right through took us about 15 minutes!

Actually I had slept during the ride there and when Eric asked the guide women to just leave us in the bus so that I could get some more sleep, she told him, this was not possible as she receives 20yuan from the outlet for every tourist she brings there. What a bitch! ;-)

When we were just about to depart, someone found that he had lost something in the store so that our bus had to wait there for quite a while. To make matters worse, the driver didn’t turn on the air conditioning because “oil is expensive” :D At some point, everyone in the bus was extremely pissed and the situation as a whole escalating somehow had an amusing aspect^^ You could call it "the dark side of capitalism".
After that, Eric actually asked me to write a formal complaint to the ministry of travel about this “for the future of China” (As a foreigner you are taken much more serious than Chinese people).

All in all it was nevertheless a very interesting day.

On the following day we decided to give the tourguides a second chance as we would visit local sights inside of the city and thought that we could just leave the group when they brought us to a shitty place.

Unfortunately we had to get up at 5am again and this time we were brought to the bus in a small van. When we were 12 people inside (6, including me sitting on wooden benches in the back) I thought the car was full. However, the driver seemed to have a different opinion and picked up more and more people from their hotels until we were 16 inside!
At the bus they did the same trick as before and wanted to get 120yuan for a “boat tour”. This time though we refused to accept that and as they didn’t want to let us into the bus then, we just left the group and made our own way to the forbidden city. Arriving there a bit after 7, we  found that the gates are only open after 8:30 so we had to wait for an hour -  I just imagined how I could have spent this time in my cosy hotel bed -.-

But finally the doors opened and what I saw that day was extremely impressive. Well, it’s called forbidden city, but I didn’t expect it to be really as big as a small city – just for the emperor! And when there were about 2 or 3 impressive buildings at a Japanese temple, there were literally hundreds of these in the forbidden city! Just for the king, his family and his many wives, as Eric told me. What a glorious waste…

Tiananmen square!

so many people! At the gates of the forbidden city

We found a present resident of the forbidden city!

After that we toured through a nearby park, but as we were both quite tired from the early getting up, soon we went back to our hotel to get some more sleep and I also had to organize my further travels. I had actually changed my plan as to spend more time at Huangshan Mountain and to fly from there to Xiamen (coastal city close to Taiwan) and to skip Shanghai – I had already seen to many big cities… 
Eric was a huge help by organizing everything and I promised him that, if he ever comes to Germany, I will organize everything for him!