The capital of China

Soderle, da bin ich wieder. :) I am sorry it has been ages that we have not written anything but we'll make up for it this week! You'll get bombarded with new stories and pictures. ;) First of all, we have to finish our tale about China because we just can't skip our two week exploration of its capital but I do send you a warm Hello from Mongolia already! .... There we are in Beijing now, after almost two months in China, we are now exploring its capital! First impression: many, many, many, many, many, many, many people! Seriously, for the first time, I really have the impression that there are much too many people living in this country. You can step out into the streets here at any time of the day and you'll have to fight you way through masses of people on the streets, in the buses, on the subway,... it's incredible and also a small hassle because as a result it takes forever to get from one place to another within this gigantic city! 1-2 hours of travel time are nothing here, even if you don't get lost all the time! ;) Of course, we chose exactly this place to run around from one embassy to the next, trying to get our visas for Mongolia and Russia, and when the second one didn't work out, we also ran from travel agency to travel agency trying to change our plans without going bankrupt. This was particularly pleasant as we had lots and lots of rain, turning the streets into swimming pools and eliminating our need of taking showers. Luckily, there were always some small surprises during our wanderings and one in particular we had to capture in a picture: you can see it on the right and I'd say, the person who runs this shop has understood everything that's important in life! ;)

We also were very lucky regarding our places to stay because we got around the normal 2x1 backpacker accommodation and dormitory pleasures thanks to the Hospitality Club and the Couchsurfer network. A great thanks to Steff for hosting us and introducing us to the community; Anaïs, we had a really wonderful time at your place, thank you so much, and hopefully we'll see you soon again in Vendôme; Phil, thanks to you as well and good luck with all your studies and your final Chinese test! Besides profiting from receiving great advice on where to go and what to do in Beijing, we also loved the fact to be back in some awesome private apartments where we could almost feel at home and relax from all the chaos happening around and with us. Anais' bandes desinees were especially welcome and one piece of good advice was a hot pot restaurant, where you eat a kind of fondu but the soup is really spicy and you put all different kind of things, meat, fish, vegetables, potatos...into it. Hmmmmmmm!

Of course we also did all the regular sight-seeing that you're supposed to be doing here in Beijing. We started out with Tiananmen square which we both found rather disappointingly small and not very exciting, except for all the fun tourist groups. I guess we spent about as much time visiting all the different sights as observing the flocks of mostly Chinese tourists. It's great how they all follow in a line like little ducks or try to squeeze 150 people into one group picture. Seriously, you can laugh your head off!

A very strange place to visit was a taoist temple called Dongyue in the heart of Beijing. We went there almost by coincidence because we are actually quite fed-up with temples but this one turned out to be so very different, so very well explained and so very interesting that we actually spent ages in it! Before this visit, I didn't know much about the taoist "religion" but the temple illustrated all the different departments (around 60) responsible for managing life on earth, in hell, in heaven, amongst the gods,... it's the craziest thing ever - those gods managing everything must have the greatest administration in all the universe, for example, there is a department for signatures and one for checking signatures and about five departments for checking fraud with signatures.... However, the more interesting departments were the ones dealing with punishment, rebirth as animals, hell,... life really must be a very threatening thing for taoist, I wouldn't like to make the slightest fault in my life if all those terrible things were waiting for me out there... but have a look yourself!



To be continued with all the famous sites still to come...