Beijing

We took a short flight over from Seoul to Beijing, and had a pretty smooth experience getting o our hostel. We arrived too late in the day to see any of the sights. Since we didn’t have any plans for places to eat either, we were pleased to see that one of the top-recommended restuarants by Eater in Beijing was a somewhat upmarket vegetarian restuarant. After a bizarre experience trying to find it (15 minutes wandering dark, mostly residential alleys) someone from the restaurant spotted our confusion and guided us in. It was unlike anywhere I’ve ever been: replace “somewhat upmarket” with “extremely upmarket”, with one-on-one service for the whole meal, and a seat on a throne for Kate. It was also extremely expensive, but we felt we’d stumbled on something one-of-a-time so we decided to go for it. The food was incredible, with a huge number of ingredients, many of which were completely new. But more than the food, it was about the presentation.

On our first full day we went to the Summer Palace. The palace itself was extravagant and also quite beautiful, but mostly I really liked the huge lake attached to it. Also there was a marble boat. Later in the day we went to the Temple of Heaven park.

On the second full day we went to the Forbidden City. This had some of the most iconic sights in Beijing, and was full of history. We spent several hours here. Later in the day we came back to the area and looked at Tiananmen Square on the opposite side of the road. We got to the square around sundown when it is closed off, so we couldn’t go to the square itself and didn’t see the flag-lowering ceremony we’d hoped to, but it was nice to have views of this area in the early evening anyway.

We continued knocking off the big tourist attractions the next day, going out for a full day trip on The Great Wall. We joined a hiking group for this and I think we lucked out on the route. We went to a section further out of Beijing than most tourists do, to a part where it was possible to walk both un-reconstructed and reconstructed sections of the wall. These were some of the most amazing views we saw in our whole trip. I took dozens of photos, but nothing really caught the atmosphere of the rolling hills and neverending wall stretching along into the distance.