The trip didn't start out as smoothly as hoped for, well for me at least. Leaving the day Chuseok started in Korea meant pretty much everyone and their uncles dog was at the airport that morning. The rest of the family left from Gimpo, another airport in Seoul, so they had didn't have as much trouble leaving Korea. To cut a long story short, the delay meant I missed the connection in Shenyang in China and got on the next available flight to Beijing, which ended up being 9 hours later than expected :| Not ideal..
Even though we missed a day of exploring we still managed to visit a bunch of different sites. We started with Tienanmen square and the Forbidden City. It was great to see so much cultural history in one place. Mao's mausoleum unfortunately wasn't open for viewing in the square that day so no creepy old dictator dead body viewing for us but it was still a really interesting place to be at. The size of the Forbidden City was insane and the stories behind what happened there are never ending too. Its great to be able to be in a place and learn its history at the same time so I tried my best to understand the history of the different dynasty's throughout Beijing but jeepers the amount of information that goes with them proved to be a little more than my brain could handle in a day.
Starfish, taratulas, snakes, and cockroaches at Wangfujing night market |
Some other things we did included visiting the Yonghe, or Lama Temple as its known today, which was once home to a large number of Tibetan Buddhist monks. We got lost for a couple of hours at The Temple of Heaven and fitted in a whole day of shopping at the silk street market, because what would a trip to Beijing be without having shouting matches with shop attendants to get the best deal on sweet sweet cheap as chips knockoffs! Brother went home with about 5 pairs of shoes, no lies.
Throwing coins for luck at Lama Temple |
Some videos I made using Roadmovies:
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