So 30.7 we left Ulan Bator saying bye to Mongolia. Next day we arrived to the border of Mongolia and China where the carriages where lifted up and the wheels where change. Chines railways are different width from the Mongolian ones.
While waiting on the border about 5 hours Walter was practising his Chinese writing drawing on a paper phrases like can we buy tickets from
Jining to Beijing. We only had tickets to
Jining but wanted to continue directly to Beijing...When arriving to
Jining we found some persons to help us and finally after a lot of hassle and a big crowd stirring at us we got standing tickets to a train that would leave in a half hour. Standing tickets meant that we got to sit on our backpacks in the corridor of a crowded train for 9 hours arriving 4:20 in the morning to Beijing...very exhausting, but we got there.
So finally in Beijing we where "Turbo tourist" visiting the Forbidden City and Tienanmen square.
It was crazy how crowded the Forbidden City was...it was almost more of an attraction the amount of people than the actual site.
Taking the must photos :) We also visited the Garden to Temple of Heaven. On our way walking trough the streets of Beijing we saw that a lot of "hutongs", small allays and peoples homes are destroyed because of the image lift of the town of the Olympics :(
In Beijing we also met Walter's and Nanna's friend Klas who has been studying in Beijing for a month. He was a lot of help both in ordering food on nice restaurants and in shopping electronics. For all my sushi loving friends I can tell you that we ate for under 8 euros as much sushi and drank as much beer we wanted on a restaurant...loved it!:D
We also meet other students and spent time at the Summer palace.
Then one day we woke up at 5:30 to visit the Great wall. We went for an 10 km hike on the wall and ended up in the part of the wall that was called Simatai. It was beautiful. It was not the most touristic place and we had 4 hours time to do the hike. It was quite hard going up and down but definitely worth all the work. On the wall we met Meiju and her father from Finland and spent a nice day with them. And guess what, it's a small world...Meiju is studying in the Media Lab at Taik where i am going to start studying in end of august. So I got a lot of inside information that day ;)
Of course Beijing duck was a must. It was quite good, but we where much more fascinated of a type of pepper in a fish soup we ate that made our tongues numb.
The last night in Beijing and with Nanna we celebrated going out and of course singing Karaoke Asian style in our own room. Soooo much fun!
Walter got exited singing Ramstine and moshing to other heavy songs...can you believe they had Sonata Arctica's Full Moon on the list!
We continued to a disco and partied whole night. Nanna left the next morning! Hope your flight went well and you are safely back home. Me and Walter did some more shopping. We had spent all ready a whole day at the Silk Market but this time we got crazy in Electronic hell or heaven...depends who you ask :)
In the evening we took the train to Shanghai. The train was modern and nice, we had seats so we didn't get too much sleep when we tried to find a good position to sleep in the whole night.
Today we arrived here...a bit lost in Shanghai trying to find a Net cafe...
... we never found one so we returned to the hostel using the Internet here. We are fixing practicals today like washing clothes, booking tickets etc. Taking it easy after all the "turbo turisting" in Beijing.
China has been a lot of fun and a lot to see! Thanx to Klas for all the help and to all the students for all the fun!
-Linda-