Spring Festival

The Spring Festival is the most important traditional holiday in China. Outside of Asia it's known by many as the Chinese New Year and happens once a year (doh!) either in late January or early February. Unlike the Western new year, it's not a single event but stretches out for a couple of weeks. Most people have one week off from work and many escape the big cities to visit their families in the country side. Out of the 20 million or so Beijingers, roughly half hop on a train, catch a bus or just fly out.

Birds Nest

Temple of Confucius

The ones who decide to leave spend a lot of the week outside seeing the local sights. All the temples and parks are even more crowded than usual while the business districts a bit further away from the city center are totally lifeless and you could easily spend an hour trying to find a nice restaurant that's even open. It's the same with the subway as some lines are so empty that you can easily find a place to sit down while others are just jam-packed.

I thought a bit about going to e.g. Shanghai for a few days but decided to stay here instead for the whole week. With less traffic and buildings that needed heating, the air was pretty clear for most of the time. Before long I didn't even set any destination but just got off from the subway at some random station and then continued walking until I saw something interesting. A week is plenty of time to see not just the more famous buildings but also some hidden gems.

Temple of Heaven

Eerie

CCTV Headquarters, or like the locals call it, big underpants

According to news reports, to help with the air quality issues, people had been advised not to use as many fireworks as before. Even with the estimated 30% reduction, the noise in the streets was deafening and the light show all around you pretty spectacular. The purpose of the noise is to ward off evil spirits and if that didn't scare them off, I'm not sure what will. It's also worth noting that this lasts for days and days and is not all just concentrated to one evening.

Beijing Ancient Observatory

CCTV Tower

Dish of the day: hot pot. You get a pot of water that sits on a heater which keeps it boiling hot. Then just add veggies, meat and whatever else there until you feel they are ripe enough. Omnomnom.

Summer Palace

For most of the week, the air quality was very poor again but luckily it cleared for Saturday. I decided to head off to the Summer Palace which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the northwestern Beijing. With the expanded subway system, I could get really close to the eastern gate although it was so far away that it still took an hour by subway.

There are several bridges in the area. The 17-Arch Bridge connects the Nanhu Island with the eastern shore

I thought all the sign posts said that you are not allowed to step on the ice

Whee!

The Summer Palace is a large garden area with a lot of fancy buildings for the emperors to chill in. It's dominated by the Kumning Lake which covers about three quarters of the area. On the northern shore there's Longevity Hill which has most of the important buildings. The lake was all frozen up so my experience was probably quite different than in the summer when it's packed with boats and both local and foreign tourists.

A small bit of the Long Corridor which is 728m long and has more than 14,000 paintings

One of the many Buddha statues found in the buildings in the Longevity Hill

I'm not sure what's more amazing - the old buildings at the front or the fact that you can see the skyscrapers in the distance. On all but a couple days during my stay here, it would just be a wall of grey.

The Summer Palace area is pretty massive so I'm glad I had some good walking shoes. After checking out the main spots (which already included a LOT of walking), I decided to continue around the whole lake while enjoying the relatively clean air and the lack of crowds. It was a really good exercise but my feet were absolutely killing me when I eventually got back to the hotel. The way back was maybe the worst since it was another hour or more in the subway and naturally you had to stand since they are all packed with people even during the weekends.

The famous Marble Boat falls in the category of "good from afar, far from good". I was shocked at how poor a state it was in. It must look better in the summer when it's probably cleaned up quite a bit. This is most flattering pic I managed to take and it looked worse from the other side.

After crossing quite a few bridges, I finally made it to the last one and could head back towards the gate nearest to the subway station.

On Sunday it snowed again and not only did that hurt with the visibility, it also made walking in the streets a bit difficult. I knew I had to go somewhere indoors and after browsing my travel books a bit, I decided to head off to the military museum which looked really interesting. Unfortunately the museum has been under renovation for quite a while now and only the courtyard is open to public. Admittance was free after showing your passport.

The courtyard was not that huge but the amount of items they had managed to squeeze on it it was astonishing. Dozens of tanks, planes (e.g. old MIGs), artillery etc, even boats and pretty big missiles from way back when to the modern-day. It included a lot of famous pieces from the US, Soviet, Japanese and Chinese forces and even though it's not for everybody, every history buff should see this collection.

The wreckage of a U-2 spy plane

I'm really bummed I didn't get to see the indoors. It's always fascinating to see how history is perceived from different points of view.

Two of the famous Soviet T-34 tanks

My search for an indoor place continued when I headed off to the Beijing aquarium which had received high praise in the tourist books I had. It turned out that it was inside the Beijing zoo area so I ended up spending even more time outside seeing some of the animals there. Like in many zoos around the world, you kind of ended up feeling sad seeing the animals cooped up in their small cages. I did get to see some giant pandas though but even their living area left much to be desired even though they probably have it the best there.

 

 

The aquarium itself was quite nice but I didn't get any nice pics. I got to see a show with dolphins, sea lions and even beluga whales. I have never been to these type of shows before and it was impressive how flawlessly the creatures performed their long routine based on the simple commands that the instructors gave.

Dish of the day. Cheap, delish and fills up your belly for a long time.

Great Wall and the Forbidden City

After two pretty much ruined weekends in a row, it was finally time to get out and be a good tourist. On Saturday the smog situation was luckily quite good as the Air Quality Index on the US Embassy page "only" said very unhealthy instead of hazardous like it did on Sunday.

I had heard that it can be a bit colder at the wall than in the city so I put on some extra clothes. When arriving at the parking lot, it seemed that this was not enough as I was freezing at first. Luckily it got warmer once we got to the wall itself and the sun started warming us up.

Since the wall is so, well, great, there are a lot of different sections to go to. Badaling is most popular one and swarming with tourists in the peak holiday times. We went to the Mutianyu section instead which is a bit further away but it's apparently easier to park there. We left so early that when we got there, the parking lot was almost empty. On the way to the entrance you are bombarded by dozens of people selling souveniers, warm clothes etc from their booths. There were not many tourists to choose from so we got the attention of them all.

We used the same cable car as Big Willy

We opted to use the cable car for going up and then walking back down. This was a good choice since this section of the wall is high up in the hills. Even coming back down seemed to take forever.

The wall was pretty much as seen from the TV. What suprised me though was that it was basically just climbing stairs either up or down all the way. Very rarely was it flat. Even this short section that we walked was a good workout. There were very few others there this early and I think the most number of people we ever saw at any one time was around 20 which is not what I was expecting.

My poor legs

After leaving Mutianiy, we went back to Beijing to see the Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I knew that both were pretty large areas but after already walking quite a bit at the wall, seeing the actual scale of the Forbidden City was pretty daunting.

Thomas the Tank Engine?

At the Forbidden City we saw very few Westerners. This is not exactly the peak tourist season and the recent widely reported news of the bad air quality have probably made some people reconsider their travel plans.

There are three main halls in the outer court of the Forbidden Palace. They all have imperial thrones like this one in the Hall of Preserving Harmony

Smoggysmog

For the first two weekends, I unfortunately could not go out much since the first one was ruined by the poor air quality outside and the second by me having a cold.

I of course knew about the poor air quality in Beijing before coming here but during the first weekend it was so bad that it broke all previous records. The scale used for measuring the number of small particles in the air did not even go high enough to measure the real level. This was a widely reported news not just all around the world but also here in Beijing where authorities advised people to stay indoors. Looking out the window, you didn't need any scale to realize how bad it was.

The scale used by the US Beijing Embassy. The max value of 500 was not high enough. Just a note: in 2006 when smoke of the large scale Russian forest fires blew towards Finland, the amount measured in Helsinki was 165. 150 is the level of being unhealthy and since the smoke could be seen and smelt in the air, it was a big local news story. In the three weeks I've now been in Beijing, it has rarely dropped below 200.

Past 24 hours

Even so, I have done quite a bit of walking in the Chaoyang District. The main streets are packed with shops and restaurants (and cars) but when you go into the side streets, you can see how the locals live.

The yard of a local school

This is what the coal plant that I can see from my hotel window looks like up-close. There must be hundreds of these things in the city.

Fancy some cheap Nokias or iPhones?

Old buildings get torn down. This site will most likely have a skyscraper by the end of the summer.

I have seen several places where you can rent bikes. Shouldn't be too difficult even though it's not in English

The bikes are not exactly hip though

I hear it snows maybe 3-4 times a winter.

Some yummy veggie dish, or what's left of it anyway

Peking duck. You take the duck (top right), dip it in the black sauce, put it in the tortilla/pancake looking flour thingies on the left, add some veggie sticks and then fold it a few times. After that, it's easy to eat by hand.

Who doesn't like some unexploded small owls?