Beijing, China

I was in China 2 weeks ago.  It's my 5th time in the country but first time in Beijing. The first 4 times were for work in Shanghai, while this is all for leisure.=)  Em is close to finishing her graduate studies in China so Papang and Mommy took this opportunity to visit her.  I was the willing chaperone.


I will post separately on the places we visited but here's a rundown of our itinerary.  The first 2.5 days were supposed to be the compulsory tours but our guide was able to compress everything to 2 days.  The rest of our all-Filipino tour group wanted to go to the zoo on Day 3 but we had this planned for a later date so we opted out.

Day 1
Arrived 1AM of Day 1, tour started 9AM
Tiananmen Square
Forbidden City/Palace Museum
Lunch
Temple of Heaven
Tea House
Wangfujing Street
Acrobatics Show
Dinner

Day 2
Jade Factory 1
Great Wall at Joyungguan
Jade Factory 2 + Lunch
Chinese Herbal Center
Silk Factory
Olympic Park
Dinner - Shabu shabu

Day 3
Transferred to another hotel
Botanical Garden
Dinner at Bao Yuan

Day 4
Beijing Zoo
Shopping
Dinner at Em's friends house

 Day 5
798 Arts District

I booked our tickets during one of Cebu Pacific's seat sale and it cost ~P8k per person round trip.  Tour and visa were arranged through Our Restless Feet, which cost P11k for 2.5 days of tour.  I highly recommend them.

Quick review of Beijing on this tour:
Positive: Lots of trees, efficient and cheap transpo (train at 2 yuan only, bus even less), cheap shopping, inexpensive and healthy food, the attractions, Mary our tour guide =)
Negative: Coooold, lots of walking, language barrier (need more English translation), unpredictable public toilets, stinky tofu, pollen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filipino Friday 3: Reading Habits and Book Formats

Image
Reading Habits and Book Formats . Where and how do you read? Can you read anywhere and everywhere, or do you need a certain place/mood/state of mind to get reading? Do you read more in the morning or at night or any minute that you can? Where and how do you usually read? Are you exclusively for print, or do you go for ebooks more than print? Have you ever tried audiobooks? I am old school.  Even as most books now have digital versions, I still prefer the physical, ink-on-paper variety.  I like holding a real book, flipping the pages and being able to see my progress based on the thickness of read/unread pages.  Somehow, I feel more engaged and focused reading a physical book vs. from a gadget. I very rarely reread books so most of my collection just sit on the shelf after I'm done with them.  I feel it's a waste of precious trees if they are not shared with others.  So I started a Google doc at work where the team can list down their collections and anybody interested in
Read more

Trivia and Reading

Image
I am currently reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and I am inspired.  It’s about the author’s year-long quest to be happier.  It’s purposeful and practical and has lot of tips that I can apply or have started doing. Rubin focused on different areas every month and for May, it was Be Serious About Play.  The author was trying to go back to activities she enjoyed as a child. This led me to also think about a favorite childhood pastime, which was collecting trivia.  The Philippine Daily Inquirer used to run a trivia section by Bong Barrameda and I would religiously cut and paste them onto scratch papers, which I would then collate and read again and again.  Nerd zone! Not only that, I also kept a trivia notebook where I researched and wrote down interesting information like areas of study, capital cities, historical figures, scientists and discoveries, everything!  That was fun for me.  I was about to say they were useless info, but not really.  Because of this intere
Read more

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Image
There is something to be said for collective recommendations like bestsellers list.  I found this title on such list at Fully Booked, read a few pages and decided to buy it.  I was intrigued by the theme of the book which is memory, specifically, how the author started as a journalist covering the US Memory Championships and ended up as a contender in the finals of the same competition one year later. It claims that with proper training, one's memory can be improved to be at par with the top mental athletes of the world.  Memory training has become an esoteric discipline because we practically do not need to remember a lot these days.  Information is very easy to retrieve from electronic devices and what not.  You just need basic search terms and the Google provides the information you need and more. Photo from Rainy Day Books I have to admit I rely on external memory a lot.  I can recall birthdays of my very close family members but outside of that small circle, I have to
Read more