Off To Beijing

April 24, 2008
My first trip to Beijing. With the Olympics coming up, I thought this would be a good opportunity to see Beijing before many tourists overwhelm the city.

Part 1- Great Wall at Badaling


About an hour or so drive from Beijing, the Great Wall at Badaling is the common spot for tourists to see the Great Wall. The drive up is interesting as you can see different parts of the wall from the highway. When you arrive, it’s an onslaught of tourists, buses and vendors hawking all kinds of products, $5US for that bottled water, sure, no problem.

Getting to the actual wall is actually very different then I expected. With such ancient surroundings I was surprised when you have to take a roller-coaster type ride to the wall See Photo

When you arrive at the top, there are different paths to take along the top of the wall. It’s actually quite stunning to see and to appreciate the engineering effort to build it. Walking along it is fun, it bends with steep inclines making it a workout to traverse certain areas.

Part 2-Tianamen Square/Forbidden City

This part of the trip was a little surreal for me to see. I’ve seen numerous video and news reports about the area but to actually see it was amazing. The square is much bigger than what it seems on tv. There are museums, government buildings, statues and a new subway station around the square. Many tourists were in the area taking pictures and I even had a few Chinese people come up to take pictures with me.

Part 3- Olympic Park

This was my favorite part of the trip, getting to see some of the Olympic venues. The Olympic Park itself is a giant area with all new developments for the games including the Bird’s Nest stadium and Water Cube. The area was under construction still while I was there but I was close enough to see the stadiums and the water cube, which has an incredible design to it.

Beijing Flickr Set