We took the bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing, and thank god, because it only took 5 hours. Upon arrival in Beijing, we were all starving. A few of us stopped at the McDonald’s in the Beijing train station,. This was my first time eating at McDonald’s since June 2014 – but I let it happen because it’s Beijing. The lady at the cash register was ready for us tourists, giving us a picture menu to point to, and she quickly understood my plea for ‘no cheese’ on my Big Mac. Also, High School Musical started to play while we were in McDonald’s #flashback. We then took the Beijing subway/metro to our hotel. The system was definitely not as great as the Shanghai system – Beijing could really invest in some escalators – carrying your luggage up and down various flights of stairs is not a fun past time.
For dinner, we walked around a food market, and tried some very interesting things. If you’ve ever wondered what starfish taste like…just don’t. But if you really need to know – it tastes like what you would imagine fried ocean to taste like – but not like Hawaii ocean, like Gulf of Mexico Galveston ocean. Thankfully afterwards, we got real food – actually the best Peking Duck in Beijing.
On the way back to out hotel, we thought we had walked into a war zone. Or maybe just – fireworks? It turns out it was the Lantern Festival which marks the end of the Lunar New Year Celebration, and everyone was using up their fireworks. It was a great welcome to Beijing.
In the morning we headed to Tiananmen Square. Watching a woman try to commit suicide in front of Tiananmen Square and subsequently being taken away by 30 policemen all in less than a minute was the most surreal experience of this whole trip. While walking around, we were under the impression that no one knew what had happened on the square. However, later on we met with Jin Lu, who said that people do know what happened. However, they view the event much like we sometimes view the Civil War and the Civil Rights era, a part of our past, and just that – a part of the past. The Chinese people don’t find it as big a deal as Americans who hark back to it non-stop, or at least that was her impression. Afterwards we headed to the Forbidden City, which was crazy big and we did actually end up losing Brandon. Once again, people were always trying to take photos with us, or with their kids and us.
In China, I finally got cupped! Don’t ask – but it’s totally a thing! Beijing also oddly reminded me of Moscow – the Soviet grey style buildings, the pollution. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy.
On the last day, we visited the Great Wall (or in Chinese, the Long Wall). If you ever want to realize how utterly nonathletic you are, try climbing the wall. It was beautiful, quite stressful I’m pretty sure a few people were ready to throw my Taylor Swift loving ass off the wall, but it was a great way to end our stint in Beijing.
