Tourist Days - 1

So Monday came around, Ewan returned to work and we gave Isabelle the day off from guiding us around as we ventured into Beijing to see some of the tourist sites – first stop was obviously Tiananmen Square which required a metro ride.  Obviously for a pair of transport geeks the trip was almost as exciting as the destination!  Once we’d managed to top up the Chinese equivalent of the oyster card (something which involved some hilarious gestures involving waving the card in one hand, a note in the other and physically bringing them together in a transport equivalent of matrimonial union) we descended into the bowels of the metro.  The Beijing metro was considerably easier to navigate than the Moscow metro because all of the signs were also in English.

Therefore we easily get to Tiananmen Square, unfortunately it was the labour holidays in China and the Square was heaving with people as you can see from the pictures.  It was also a relatively bad day for pollution which you can also see.

For balance as we included pictures of Lenin, here’s the outside of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, which we also weren’t able to go in because it was closed.

After a spot of lunch in a fantastic restaurant called Capital M, we proceeded to the next geeky thing – the Museum of Urban Planning which was amazing!!  Seriously, it was full of scale models of the Forbidden City and Beijing which meant that we could do cool things such as see where we were staying in relation to everything else . . . see the Olympic park without having to bother with trekking all that way out there . . . .

Look like giants . . .

And plan our way around the Forbidden City which was our next port of call.

So we left the museum and headed over the huge picture of Mao which hung at the entrance to the Forbidden City.  Again, the Forbidden City was bustling and it was impossible to get away from the crowds which made it difficult to soak up the history and any atmosphere of the City and even harder to imagine what it would have been like when it was only open to the Imperial court.  However we did manage to get some good photos of deserted courtyards and alleyways as it was closing.

This one’s just included because it’s just so beautiful.