Yesterday night landed in Beijing and somehow managed to find a hotel by 1AM. An HI Hostel that we were looking for wasn't there so we ended up in a local business hotel. We were completely unprepared in terms of hotel bookings, maps, GPS coordinates, basic knowledge of local language, etc. This morning changed the hotel for a youth hostel (which is also a bit cheaper).
First observations:
First observations:
- Beijing is BIG. We have a map with no scale marked onto it, so it's hard to estimate how big it actually is, but walking doesn't get you anywhere.
- There is a major language barrier: we only know "ni hao" (hello) and "xie xie" (thank you), that's how far I got when I was learning Mandarin a year ago, and locals know "sorry" and "no" in English. It is possible to order food in McDonald's and get basic directions in the metro though. The local people are quite helpful.
- The metro costs only 2 CNY (= 0.3 USD) for any distance (?) and functions well. Only yesterday Line 2 was partly down (or closed for the night?) and we had to travel part of the distance by taxi.
- The taxi driver didn't speak a word of English (in many other countries they are usually the only ones that do) and needed some pushing to return 10 CNY change from the 40 CNY that he was given.
- The climate is hot but much more pleasant than Hong Kong, or the rest of Southeast and South Asia where we have been travelling until now.
- Internet is partly blocked, e.g. we haven't been able to access Dropbox (that hosts our website), Blogger (our blog), Picasaweb (our photos), YouTube (our videos), and Facebook. GMail works though and this blog post is made via email which should function I guess.
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