Sightseeing in Beijing

While we did our best to stay up as late as our bodies would let us on Friday night (around 10 pm) so that we could adjust to China time, we were both up by 5:30 am Saturday morning and wide awake. So we decided to just get up and start our only day of pure sightseeing early. Our goal was to hit The Great Wall, The Summer Palace and Tiananmen Square. We negotiated a flat rate with a taxi driver to spend the day with us.

The Great Wall is about a 90 minute cab ride from our hotel, but on the way out there it turned into 2 1/2 hours due to some accidents on the road we took. But, the ride was more than worth the time, We went to a section of the Great Wall in Badaling, China that was up quite high in the mountains and it was more magnificent than either of us expected. It also provide us with plenty of exercise as we walked up and down several of the steep sections of the wall. It is hard to believe that these walls were built literally thousands of years ago!

After The Great Wall we went to The Summer Palace. This again, surpassed our expectations of beauty and magnificence. The Summer Palace is apparently the largest imperial garden in the world. It was originally built back in the 1700s and had amazing temples, gardens and a huge lake. We enjoyed our time there.

We spent the rest of the day at Tiananmen Square and doing some additional shopping. We were able to see the flag cermony in Tiananmen when the lowered the flag for the day. It was very formal, but a bit anti-climatic after waiting over an hour to see it.


The weather was good today, although very hot and humid. As expected it is also very smoggy. Overall though, a fun day in Beijing. Below are a few additional photos from the day.

Made it to Beijing!

We left our house about 6:00 am June 19th and almost 24 hours later finally made it to our hotel in Beijing! It was a long 24 hours but everything went well. We were tired because we hadn't slept much on the plane but wanted to stay up until about 10:00 pm China time. We had a few hours before we could sleep, so we decided to go to Silk Street to do some shopping. It was amazing, it put shopping on Canal Street in New York to shame! There were 4-6 levels of tons of little shops and everyone was very aggressive in trying to get us to come in and buy! They would grab our arms or hands and try to pull us in each shop. If you even paused a second to look at something they would put it in your hand and start bartering. There were tons of bags, belts, shoes, jeans, jackets, and suits just to name a few! We are heading to the Great Wall and Summer Palace today and then probably back to Silk Street tonight.