04/17/25

Enroute to Beijing – partly cloudy 23-27°C

I slept with headphones in but it’s rather quiet minus coughing here & there. The train is rather smooth. I got decent sleep on the train. The lights turn back on at 7AM on the train.

There is a small toilet area & a hot water dispenser. We brought snacks but we should’ve bought cup Noodle. There is a cart that comes around where you can buy food. Carriage 11 is where you can buy food and you can sit & eat (this has pricier options). My mom found the cart lady and we got rice box lunch for ¥25 pp ($4.98CAD).

We had to pass the 4 person sleepers which I had debated booking but decided against since there were 5 of us & my father said to go with 6. It has carpeted hallways, a pedestal toilet & squat toilet. It has only 4 bunks in a room w a sliding door that can lock – the rooms are more spacious.

There are foldable chairs in the hallways but many just stayed in their bed the entire ride. There is a metal tray under the table which doubles as mini garbage bins.

Many had friends so they took a hard luggage to make a table and play cards.

We finally got off the train in Beijing at 355PM. Passport check at the manual gate on the far left. We took the 2 north exit out. Grabbed our Didi on platform 5/6 to our hotel. The hotel was about an hour away and like many cities, rush hour traffic.

The hotel we stayed at was the Wyndham Beijing North Hotel 北京龙城温德姆酒店 which was chosen by the tour company we had booked. Free laundry at the Ramada 3 min walk from our hotel. Once we arrived to our hotel, we finally met with my brother Kevin, Tammy & my cousin Jessica who were joining for the China tour.

We walked over & around a highway to get dinner. We ate at Xinjiang cuisine – Muslim Lanzhou Lao Ma Restaurant (Beinong Road Store). An array of dishes my mom ordered – whole fried fish, minced meat soup, chicken, fish, tofu dish, beef with peppers, mixed veggies, chicken & lamb skewers ¥398 ($79.33CAD) to feed 8 people.

Some tidbits on Beijing & China.

-Beijing has rules for buildings and cannot build super high. Shanghai has different rules and looks like Hong Kong.

-90 million ppl with 10 million bicycles. To help with the congestion each day (between Mon-Fri) they have policies for who can drive on certain days. Blue license plates can drive everyday. Alternating with License plates ending with 0&5, 1&6, and 2&7. There are cameras that can catch you if it isn’t your day to drive, you will get notified & have 4 hours to go home. You will get fined ¥200 & lose points. They have 12 points.

-EV, tour buses and taxis can drive any day. Weekends & special holidays everyone can drive.

-Many work in Beijing but live in Hubei. Lots of travelling each day just to work.

-After the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has had a drastic change. 6 to 27 subway lines & high speed trains (320-350KM/H) were built. The fastest is in Shanghai (430KM/H).

-Beijing is quite dry. 20°C feels good but only in the sun, it’s much chillier in the shade.

Jackie Chan – you can make a hero certification at the great Wall museum. Confucious book with a hand carved poem & a photo of chairman map photo. Takes about 20-30 mins.

-Confucious built the first private school in China to include both boys & girls in education.

-China is known for Paper making, print making and gun powder.

-Before paper making, they would carve on a turtles back. They would also carve onto bamboo & roll it like a spring roll.

-Birthrate in China is low. 60-65% of China are seniors. As of Mar 1st 2025, retired age for ladies is 53 & 60.

-There is a 14 day visa free for almost all foreigners so that they can come and buy jade and whatnot to support the school teachers and whatnot because the economics were so low due to covid.

-Covid-19 made China stay closed for 2.5 years because the manufacturers were friends with the government and they became millionaires from PPE and tests. The government had to end the lockdown due to economic issues.

-Lung cancer is the largest disease due to smoking & pollution.

-Leukemia is the biggest disease for the young people.

-Phoenix for charm & beauty

-Dragon for power & protection

-Beijing & Xi’an have all the china history but Shanghai has no history but developed.

-Although China manufactures majority of the world’s products, they pay high tax for export so majority of those goods aren’t sold in China. If they are they are more expensive than buying outside China. Knockoff market in Shanghai

04/18/25

Beijing – 12-18°C with rain

7AM breakfast buffet. 830AM call time.

With the whole family together, the actual tour begun. I could finally sit back and relax. We booked a tour with TripOppo. Our tour guide for this leg was Judy. We had 13 people on this tour (8 from my family). Nelson & Wei Chao from Montreal, Eugene and his parents Leo & Susan from Toronto – a whole lot of English, Cantonese & French being spoken.

The first official tour day also landed on my cousin Jessica’s birthday.

The day before was sunny & 30°C but this day was 12-16°C & it was pouring rain. Our tour was to be outdoors all day. We had gotten use to crowds from the last few days in Zhangjiajie but in the city in Beijing, it was something different. The rain didn’t help make it any easier. We started off with 40 mins in traffic.

Got off the bus to join a line to get our bags & passport checked. Lighters are taken away as majority of the Forbidden city is made out of wood. Went down stairs & across the street into Tiananmen Square – the second largest public square in the world.

Our guide Judy said growing up, she didn’t know the history of what happened at the square due to media blockades. She later on learned about the event by asking her parents and more when she became a tour guide as the history was blocked for her generation to know.

Judy is pint size but incredibly patient. A quiet funny humour. Her husband is also a tour guide but for the locals. She has a daughter and travelled 2 hours each way to get to us. As she is working, she lives in a basement apartment with a roommate where they share a kitchen & bathroom. She is originally from Hubei.

We entered the Forbidden City – UNESCO World Heritage Site. 10M city wall & a moat for double protection. To protect against the attackers who mastered kungfu. It is known as the Forbidden City because it use to be the emperor’s home. There are no trees within the city minus a small garden as it was known that assassins could easily hide in the tree to attack. During the cultural revolution, the city wall was destroyed/damaged by the red guards.

To get through the first gate, we had to join another line & do a bag and passport check again. The rain made people more pushy. Some people even opened the stanchions to bud the line opening the flood gates of others pushing through. The square itself can hold 1 million people. We were completely soaked and cold so we all made the decision to cut our visit short. Tried to hop on a bus to make it to the end to get picked up by our tour bus but traffic was bad we took it 1 stop then got off & walked.

For lunch, we went to Beiping Shengshi Fangzhuang & had a Peking Roast Duck & Sichuan-style family style meal with our new friends. An assortment of food but most importantly inside where it was warm.

Beijing traffic is no joke. After lunch finished at 430PM, we hopped on our coach bus and it was so long that majority of us fell asleep thinking we got really far but had only gone a few blocks in an hour span. We finally got back to the hotel at 715PM. Some got massages when we got back. (masseuses were booked by Judy for in-room service)  Simple cup noodles for dinner in our warm rooms. There is a little convenience store in the hotel.

04/19/25

Beijing – 11-20°C

Our guide Judy told us to load up at breakfast as lunch would not be delicious as we will be eating in the suburbs.

It was incredibly busy this week because of the sand storm’s that happened the previous week where the government closed all attractions. Normally, the weekends don’t have as much traffic as it has during the weekday. Many tour groups go super early but the locals also take their kids on tours too.

We stopped by the Jade workshop – Run-Ze Jade Garden – the biggest distributor in the world for jade & the largest in China. Much cheaper in Beijing than Shanghai. Majority of people got jade items at a decent price & a free gift if you spend over $100USD (an imperfect round jade pendant).

Some tidbits on Jade

-Jade needs water. It’s a living stone so if you wear it, your body oil makes it more translucent. ¥100 to ¥10000. Sometimes the fake quality is jade powder. You wear jade on the left hand side as its closest to the heart. For foreign trade, they would trade silk but for 2008 & 2022 they embedded the Olympic medals with one side of jade.

-Yellow gold ¥350/G during covid to ¥980/G to now market ¥1000/G.

-When they cut the big stone by the great wall, they found the Jade stone but only made jade jewelry for the emperor & their family. Kowtow to those who carry a piece of Jade as it was a status symbol. The imperial stamp is made with Jade.

-The Chinese character for Jade is just a dot added the to character for emperor. The Jade was hung by his kidney to heal him.

-To tell if jade is fake – put it up to light. If there are bubbles or too clean it’s fake. Jade has roots and veins.

From the Jade workshop, it was about 1.5hrs to the Great Wall. We entered from the Juyongguan Great Wall. It is an area flanked by mountains with brooks flowing all year round.

We started at number 7 fortress. Majority made it to fortress 9. I made it to 11 and turned back. Fortress 13 is the last one before being blocked off for this section.

Beacon and watch towers would use wolf dung to create smoke signals.

It is steep and the stairs are different heights and widths along the way. I was double stepping up but hindsight not the best method. There are convenience stores & toilets aka happy rooms along the way as well. The crowd is thick up the first fortress and thins out as you continue up.

I prefer going downhill so it was much faster to get back down.

We ate at a local restaurant which Judy says the flavours are so so and she doesn’t like eating. The food was ok.

We were going to go to old Beijing however with there being a marathon the following day, our plans got altered to avoid another headache of traffic jams.

We drove about an hour back into town for the Summer Palace. It was the resort home for the Empress Dowager. It is 200 years older than the Forbidden City. 290 hectares. 1903 at the residence building inside the palace, electricity was provided by the Germans. The only electricity at that time. The walk towards the long corridor was the slowest shuffling due to the amount of people.

35 min drive back to the hotel. Got back and walked a different direction and ended up at a Noodle place – Shanxi Food for dinner. A bunch of fried noodles with tomato & eggs, braised pork noodles, Chinese hamburgers, steamed chicken w rice & malatang noodles ¥163 ($32.49CAD).

04/20/25

Beijing – 12-23°C

Andrew & Gayaanan got sick from the rainy day so they stayed back for the day to rest.

Our first stop was at the Traditional Chinese Medical Institute.

It takes 8 years to become a Traditional Eastern Medicine Doctor.

We all got herbal foot baths when we were presented an introduction to Eastern medicine.

We got foot massages (¥30 tip) while a group of doctors came in & assessed those who wanted to be assessed.

I do believe in Eastern medicine practices as much as Western but at the same time, this was definitely one of those stops where it’s a sales pitch & they get you.

The doctor picked up a few things without me telling him anything that were spot on. He did say overall my health was good but some blockage. Apparently I have spleen blockages & circulation issues.

I think all of us purchased some prescribed medicines (pills). I got a month trial (¥2004). We were told not to start the medicine until 3 days after we get home. Post trip, I did take these pills. I don’t know if it essentially did change anything but it did help with keeping me regular.

Our next stop was part of the optional tours – Temple of Heaven & Hutong Life tour with meal (US$89/person). 28 wooden pillars hold up the structure. 37.5M high. Very crowded. The emperor would only visit 3 times a year.

Since it was a weekend, the park outside of the Temple of Heaven was filled with parents/grandparents armed with paper profiles of their children or grandchildren (height, weight, salary etc) to help with match making. I walked a few steps towards the area and already got prospected. When we were taking photos of this, many were saying no photos because they felt embarrassed to be there and don’t want others to know. The ages I saw ranged from 1975 up to 1999. There were professional matchmaker agencies there that had profiles laminated and color coordinated and even ordered by year they were born.

Unmarried women in their 20s+ are referred to as “leftover women” aka Sheng nu. Since China had a one child policy which favoured men, there are an abundance of males also looking to find a wife. The balance is off quilter. The child rate has gone down significantly in the past decade where the elderly make up a large portion of the population.

For lunch, we had more roasted duck & old Beijing style cuisine at Da Wan Ju near the knockoff market.

From lunch, we were taken over to Old Beijing area for our Hutong Life tour. This included a 15-20 min rickshaw ride. The old houses in this space only had public toilets outside their homes.

When we hopped on the bus, we drove past the 2008 Olympic stadium, the Bird’s Nest & Water Cube. Before the Olympics, the land was farm land. The government bought the land and the farmers who were poor became millionaires overnight.

Now the area is well developed.