Beijing Bliss

So, I have finally arrived back in the UK (post to follow over the next few days once jet lag has buggered off) and I'm trying to catch up on everything I've failed to blog about so here's a quick one about our stopover in Beijing. Beijing is a complex city, for one it's absolutely massive. The city and surrounding districts is roughly around the size of Belgium, absolutely mind boggling to someone whose once bustling country seems tiny compared to China's 1,331,000,000 (roughly) population which itself is growing at a rate of knots. The city is a constant building site, creating new homes and jobs for the masses and if you've never seen anything on this scale before it really is incredible to see. The subway is packed, if you think you've seen rush hour on the tube, the Beijing subway is about 10 times busier and no one queues, which can be great when you need to shove in at the front of an escalator. The residents of Beijing themselves are lovely people, very charming, inquisitive and shy, some stare at you in curiosity, some with pure fear and some just out of interest. You have to become pretty thick skinned when visiting the city especially if you aren't a fan of staring because people will stare. All the time, everywhere, for prolonged periods of time. You find yourself becoming completely oblivious to it but it does take a few days to adjust.


The city itself is a big hub of ancient history and modern consumerism, throw together in a weird but fantastic mix and there's always something to see and do., We kept ourselves busy with the usual, Tianamen Square, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall and Mao's embalmed body and tonnes of shopping, there's so many malls it actually makes me drool to think about it. Before we got to Beijing I didn't have a particularly good impression of it from what other people we'd met had said, so I was really pleased to find I loved it. Although we'd spent lots of time in busy Asian cities, full of cars, motorbikes, hagglers and the sellers and the like, Beijing is in a league of its own and everyday there was something new to amaze me. I'd recommend China to anyone and am definately going to go back and visit whenever I can scrape funds together to pay for a flight (or if Heathrow ever re-opens). There really is something very special about Beijing and here are a few of my choice photos to let you see what I've been lucky enough to see.