China and the Year of the Rooster

Oh hello there! And welcome to this universally agreed upon post of 2017.

Western New Year - check.

Lunar New Year - check.

Everyone's happy (:

But mainly, I am happy because I got to cross many a thing off my bucket list in the first few days of 2017 (The Best Year Ever!)

I am following my 'travel more' goal, while still being frugal - another goal -

and I saw one of the Seven Modern Wonders of the World! My second, and the one I always used to think would be the most difficult for me to get to, before I knew about my Asia-expat-plans.

As is Laura & my tradition of our quickie-trips. We left late Friday night (23:30) & hopped from Incheon to Beijing in a whopping <2hr flight.

Once officially in China, we waited, & waited, & waited for a cab >< it was a cold wait, a sleepy wait, a 'wow-this-is-really-more-polluted-than-we-were-expecting' wait, but it was worth it & we got to our cheapo airport hotel without toooo much trouble.

Now mind you, Laura & I did exxxxtensssivve research, and planning, & studying in order to ensure that this trip went without a hitch. In fact we over-planned sooo much so that we spoke a full 4 words of Chinese when we touched down (yes, no, thank you, hello). Which is actually more than we knew of Japanese when we went to Tokyo last year (we still don't know how you say 'no'). I know, I know, we are boarderline obsessive when it comes to travel preparations ><

However, even with our sliightly less-than-fluent language prowess, we managed our entire trip just fine (& with manners).

After our short sleep in our air-hotel, we took a shuttle back to the airport to hop on the now-running subway into central Beijing! And here is where my wordiness ends (mildly) & my picture-blog begins!

 

 

The airport's subway terminal. Pretty sweet, huh?

 

This was our first steps out of the subway, into central Beijing & our hotel, just a hop, skip & a jump from Tiananmen Square. And just about the only photo you'll see without our faces covered by masks. Also, first thing we're greeted by (besides smog?) military/police. Bright side is that it's a super safe city!

Our (historic) hotel!

 

And here's how two tired girls look after finally arriving at their hotel & getting their VPN to work! And finding the hotel with nothing but some sub-par directions on a crumpled piece of paper! (We're basically explorers)

 

We fine, we know.

And then we dropped our stuff & explored!

Tiananmen Square -- Mao's Mausoleum --Forbidden City

 

 

 

Now let me tell you exactly two things about these three photos. First, it is about 4pm, second, those are not clouds....

Hence the masks you'll see from here on out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all that walking (we didn't brave taxi's until day two), we were famished! So we went to the first Peking Duck place we saw! And then went to the nicer one down the street >< Peking Duck is something of the specialty of Beijing & all my students told me I had to have it. So we did, as our first meal in the city!

 

Then we ordered some more stuff because the price was so low it seemed like I wouldn't be enough. We were wrong. In allll of our research (HAH) we forgot to lookup price of living. And even though it's the Capitol, Beijing is cheeaapp! So we ended up with much more food than even we could eat.

 

Afterwards we returned to our hotel to recharge a bit...then set out to see what would be going on at midnight on this NYE! Unfortunately it is a much more family-oriented holiday than the new year in the US/UK, so there weren't many people around. Which was fine, as we wandered like we do, & found some cool things regardless!

 

 

 

As we walked back from our midnight Tiananmen Square tour, we saw some lanterns, and lights & movement down an alley...so we unabashedly followed like the cautious women that we are & found....the famed STREET FOOD STREET! And the Wangfujing shopping street (:

 

 

 

After this we went 'home' and collapsed into bed, to sleep like babes till morn...
More about 'Day Two' tomorrow :D

All of my love,
Tea