What a crazy past couple of days it has been. Yesterday, we were sitting on a plane for 12 hours, with nothing to entertain us except Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Today, we walked for 9.5 hours around a city we had never seen before, dodging cars and conquering bus systems. Talk about contrast!
Even though it’s only been 26 hours, I’ve learned and seen so much already!
Lesson #1: Beijing is pretty incredible. Seriously, I LOVE this city. There’s history around every conner, the people are all super friendly, and I feel really safe! Most of the signs are in Chinese and English which is really nice, especially since we’re walking to most of the places here and it would be pretty stressful to find our way around if we couldn’t read the street names.
Lesson #2: Stop lights in Beijing are optional. Even though they have pretty cool signs telling you when to cross the street and when not to, nobody is paying attention to the traffic laws so you still have to dodge cars and pray for the best! We’ve started a new game called “Pick a Local.” It’s pretty self explanatory, but basically the goal is to find someone who looks confident in their street crossing capabilities, but not so confident that they’re jumping in front of cars no matter how fast they’re going. The best candidates are slightly older mothers with their small children. Once the local has been picked, the goal is to stay as close to them as possible and do exactly what they do, without giving off any kind of stalker vibes.
Lesson #3: China is old. Ok I admit I already knew that, but being here realizing that I was standing in buildings that had been built 800 years ago gives the word “old” a totally different meaning. Today we toured the Drum and Bell Tours, as well as the Temple of Heaven. The Drum tower was my favorite, it and it’s buddy the Bell Tower were used back in the day to announce the time to the city. I just loved standing in this ancient tower that overlooks all the hutongs, imagining the city as it would have looked in 1240 when the tower was built. The drum demonstration they gave was pretty cool too :).
Lesson #4: Public Transportation Rules! Today we saw a LOT of the city. The first portion of the day was spent walking for miles and miles (we calculated it was a total of 9.5 hours of walking), and we would have walked even further if the kind people of China had let us. But when our hostel and some over ambitious rickshaw drivers told us that it would take us 3 hours to walk all the way to the Temple of Heaven, we decided to get over our fear and figure out the bus and subway system. Turns out they were great! Only a matter of cents for each ride, and they were super clean and easy to figure out. I really loved it!
Lesson #5: Possibly the most important lesson: taking breaks is okay. After we had seen the Temple of Heaven, we were really tired. Our feet were both in serious pain, and our minds weren’t capable of taking in too much more information. I was zoning out so bad I missed an entire group of soldiers pass us by! But we had seen everything we needed to for the day so we had to get back to the hostel. Our plan was to just power through the pain, but then we saw the gelato stand. And then we heard “Free sample! Free sample!” Next thing we know, we each had a cup of gelato and were sitting on a bench. Beautiful. Our feet were happy, our stomachs were happy, and it was just so nice to be sitting on a bench and watching the people. We stayed there for quite a while before we finally got the strength to go again.
Not bad for a first day eh? Now we’re just chilling at the hostel, waiting for 10 o’clock or even 9:30 to come so we can peacefully go to bed and not worry about enforcing our jetlag even more. It’s pretty painful still being awake though, especially after such a full day!!
Here’s hoping the excitement never stops but the foot pain does :).
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