After a freezing sleepover at Hong Kong airport, we finally flew of to Beijing. We really had no idea what to expect. Will it be crowdy, will it be noisy or will the people be rude? Well when we got there we found out that it was non of the above well except for the crowdy one ofcourse. Getting out of Beijing Airport and in to the subway, we were realy suprised of how much Beijing looks like Holland. Except for the heat ofcourse. But like Holland Beijing is flat. After checking in in our hostel we set out to roam the city and to get a feel for the city. And after walking around for a few minutes i realized that i missed something. At first i couldnt put my finger on it but then after a while i figured it out. Beijing is so quiet and organized! Well, at least compared to the last four countries that we’ve traveled through so far. But nobody is honking there horn for no reason, cars are staying in there lane in stead of driving in the middle of the road. And what definitly felt good was that there was structure. Everything was explained very obviously. For example, the subway system is so very easy to understand that even though its a big network we understood how everything worked within minutes, and we dont even understand Chinese.
But back to roaming the streets of Beijing, it is really interesting to walk around here. Because you see big modern buildings on one side but on the other side you see small houses that are part of a Hutong. A Hutong is a neighbourhood, but these neighbourhoods are occupied by the poor layer society of beijing. Most of the houses in Hutongs dont have their own sanitary. So every 50 meters or so we saw buildings that were public restrooms and they sometimes even had showers. Our Hostel that is also in a hutong did have theire own sanitary…….Pheeww THANK GOD for that!!
After the hutongs we ended up on Tianaman square, this is the square what we know from tv where you see the Chinese army marching or saluting there president. Sadly enough we couldnt walk on the square itself because the army was doing their daily flag ceremony. And this includes very synchronized movements and 8 canons that fired of 20 something shots in the air. This was realy impressive and loud to see and hear.

The next day we got up early because we had a lot to do and to see, 4 places to be exact. We started temple of heaven. We thought it was just going to be one temple, but its actually a park with a lot of different tempels in it. After seeing so many temples in the previous countries i wasnt sure if i was going to like it. But it was actually pretty nice to see. It looks different then what we have seen before, its much bigger (they have to on account of the billion people they have living in China), and realy nicely decorated.
We continued by foot to the Tianaman square and this time to walk over the square. And man i heard stories that it was big, but REALY this is a big square. I realy felt small when we stood in the middle of the square. Across from the square was the Forbidden city, this was the chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty and for almost 500 years it served as the home emperors and their households. It was cool to see and walk around and like the previous to places we saw that day, it was amazingly big. The only thing i didnt understand was, if the Chinese are so small then why would they build doors that are so large it could fit a giant. But thats just me i guess ;).

Last but not least we went to the Olympic park, during the day this is an amazing big place but at nigt when all the buildings light up, its just an awesome thing to wittness. And as a former springboard diver, i ofcourse had to check the Olympic pool out. Funny thing about it, the building itself is huge but the pool and stands where the athletes performed and the crowd cheered didnt look so big to me. It looked bigger on television during the 2008 olympics. But still realy cool to see.
After this we went back to our hostel, because we and especially our feet couldnt handle one more step. Our feet were so sore that putting on socks was more sensitive then ever. But thats not that strange, we had walked a total of 17 kilometers that day.

On our third day we woke up early again but this time to see a wonder that can even be seen from the moon. Yes you’ve guessed right, The Great Wall of China! We decided that we didnt want to go with a tour but figure it out ourselfs and go by public transportation. And like i said before the public transportation is realy selfexplanitory. From the hostel we took the subway to the busstation and from the we took the express bus 916, this ride took an hour. And from there we took a minivan to the wall that we wanted to see. And many people think or thought that the Chinese wall was one whole wall, but its actually several long pieces of wall and because of the high mountains it wasnt necessary to make one whole wall. The mountains also served as a wall to fend of the Mongolians in the north in the past.
Finally after 2 houres and 45 minutes we saw the wall for the first time, and its realy impressive to see it and think that people (small chinese people) have build this freakishly large wall with their bare hands. We were very lucky, besides that we chose a piece of the wall that wasnt touristy, we also had luck that it was raining in the city of Beijing. That stopped people from taking the trip out to the north to see the wall. This meant that when we walked on the wall itself there were 7 or 8 other people besides us. We even walked a part of the wall where Sanne and I were the only ones, this was on a top of a hill/mountainrange (522 mtr). The view up there was amazing. We saw the wall apearing on one side of the country and on the other side dissapearing again. And there it really hit us how great the wall is.