Beijing

Wow, where to begin? Well I suppose the beginning is usually a good place so let's take it from there. As I obnoxiously mentioned at the end of my last post, I booked tickets to Beijing some weeks back to head over with my friends Kieran, Dairin, Rick, Sophie and Cathy. As they all booked from the same travel agent I had to get an earlier separate flight but I had my trusted subway directions so all was good. Or so I thought. I had to make a connecting flight from Dalian which also seemed to be much more simple than it was. The initial flight was delayed which left me literally running to catch my connecting flight in Dalian but I made it in the nick of time. When I arrived in Beijing I got the subway to the first transfer station and spent the next 20 minutes staring blankly at the subway map until luckily the rest of my party showed up and we managed to find our way to the hotel. Success.

We met up with friends of Kieran and Dairin and went for a lovely Peking duck meal which we massacred until we were stuffed to the gills and also half cut. We rambled to a western bar to watch the rugby only to find it was empty and the only clientele were ladies of the night. We soon decided to forgo the rugby for a bit of craic and made our way to the hutongs to a really cool bar where we established ourselves for the night until the early hours (well early by normal standards, not Seoul standards) before somehow directing the taxis back to the hotel.

The next day after much confusion about a meeting place and taxis, me and the other lads went to see Mao's mausoleum and then somehow managed to find the girls in the vastness of the ugly communist landmark that is Tiananmen Square. Since the rest had been to Beijing before, myself and Cathy spent the afternoon exploring the Forbidden City before going to the Silk Markets to meet the others. After some haggling and the acquisition of some extremely cheap (and fake) clothes, we returned to the comfort of the hotel to relax. Before another night's excessive eating and drinking that is. That particular night was the last night of the spring festival so Beijing sounded literally like a war-zone with fireworks and fire-crackers going off each second every 50 meters or so for the entire night. Seriously, every parked car that had an alarm was ringing and on the street we couldn't hear each other. Crazy.

The following day myself and Cathy got up early to get on a bus and after taking us to some boring pottery factory and after listening to our guide spout endlessly about how Beijing is the greatest city in China (despite the fact that the only other "place in China" he compared it to was Tibet), we eventually arrived at the Great Wall of China. It had been snowing the previous day so despite the fact that it was pretty damn cold, it was breathtaking. I could have spent the whole day there but seeing as our time was limited, I guess the few hours would have to do. When we got back, we went out for another Peking Duck dinner before I dragged myself away from the group and retired for an early night. Why? Because I had to be up at 5am the following morning to get a flight back to Seoul....to go directly into work. Needless to say it wasn't a fun day but the whole Beijing experience made teaching with sleep deprivation completely worth it.