Beijing Day 1

So it's about time I sat down and wrote about our trip to Beijing, so here it goes. It's a really long entry, so there will be an individual entry for each day.

Zach and I set out for Beijing on the 1:30 train, arriving in Beijing around 6:30. We made the unfortunate mistake of not making hotel/hostel reservations before we got there. We wound up wandering around Beijing for 2 hours with our heavy backpacks looking for a place to stay. Realizing we weren't going to find anything cheap the later we went, we decidied to drop our bags at a hotel that had an opening and go on from there. We were both really tired, and about a hairsbreath away from saying screw it, we're going back to Chengde. We stayed at some 3 Star hotel that was 600 qui per night (100USD). Once we dropped our bags, we decided to explore a bit and maybe get a bite to eat. We found a Dairy Queen and got ice cream, then randomly stumbled across Tian'an Men square! Yay for random finds! We had trouble finding the actual square because it was roped off and hidden behind Mao's Mausoleum (we didn't know that was what it was until a few days later). So we wandered around, losing ourselves in the underpasses for a while, explaring places we later discovered were Gate Tower and Arrow Tower, some of the last remnents of the Beijing Wall. We also discovered Five Archways street (we discovered the name when we went on a tour of the guard tower). It's this awesome little collection of empty shops that are eventually going to be a replica of the old Five Archways Street, a street of master-craftsman workers during the Ming Dynasty. there is a side street that we found later that is full of replicated shops, but we'll talk about that later.

Once we'd had our fill of Tian'an Men and Five archways, we headed back. Along the way we discovered a small hotel with quaint rooms for 300 qui a night, and we promised to return the next day to book. We stopped at a McDonalds on the way home to kick off our week of Western Only food. Sleep came easily that night.