Beijing, China

Posted on November 21st, 2010 webmaster No comments          Print

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This is just to summarize my experiences from my recent trip to Beijing before I forget them .

We arrived at the Beijing International Airport on Thursday night, October 21.  First thing I noticed was the air quality as we were approaching the exit, you can smell the pollution.  Once outside, you’ll see taxis lined up and you just pick the one in front, we had to take two taxis because our luggage wouldn’t fit in one.  Minimum fare for the ride is 10 yuan (about $1.54).  We stayed at Xinhai Jinjiang Hotel which I think was about 20 minutes away from the airport and our fare ended up to be around 100 yuan per taxi which isn’t bad at all.

The hotel we stayed at was a 4-star hotel and the rooms and the hotel itself were really nice.  For $60 a night I’d say it was a very good deal!  The hotel staff were very friendly and helpful and they seem to all speak or understand English, though I’d recommend to at least know how to say “hello” and “thank you” in Mandarin.  They also provide currency exchange with no service charge (I believe they use Bank of China so the rate would be the same as the bank’s) which we found out a few days later, it could have saved us a trip to the bank earlier if we knew about it.  It’s also a good idea to have someone at the hotel write down the name of the places you wish to visit in Chinese so if you can show it to the taxi driver if you decide to take a taxi to get there.  You should have the name of your hotel written down in Chinese as well just in case you get lost .

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Great Wall of China

Posted on November 8th, 2010 webmaster 1 comment          Print

This is what I came to Beijing for! The sun finally came out on Monday with clear skies. Great day to visit the Great Wall!

We decided to visit the part of the Wall in Mutianyu as it’s supposed to be less crowded.  We just went to the bus station and took bus 936 from there instead of booking a tour to save money.  Bus fare was 17 yuan total one way (13 at the bus station and another 4 near Mutianyu after they switched bus drivers), which is roughly $2.60.  Bus ride was about 2.5 to 3 hours.

Once you’re there, you’ll need to pay 45 yuan ($7) to enter and if you want to take the cable car it’s an extra 65 yuan round-trip ($10).  I’d also recommend to bring foods and drinks with you as it can be pretty expensive to buy them there.

The view from the Wall is simply stunning! It gets better as you get further down and higher up.  Nice view of the surrounding mountains and from high up it looks like it was built in the middle of nowhere and really makes you think on how they were able to build this thousands of years ago.  It was also pretty cold that day so some spots were icy, we had to be careful when walking on the shaded areas.  We stopped about 2-3 miles down and walked back, but it looks like you can keep going much further.

Also make sure that you know the bus schedule if taking the public bus and estimate the time it will take you to get back to the parking lot.  In our case, bus 936 leaves at 2:00PM and 4:00PM so we had to make sure we didn’t miss it.

More pics below!

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Shopping in Beijing

Posted on October 28th, 2010 webmaster 2 comments          Print

On Saturday and Sunday we did mostly eating and shopping because of the weather.  There are a lot of places where you can go shopping here in Beijing and depending on where you go you can get things really cheap.

We like to buy things cheap so we pretty much avoided all the high end stores.  Two places here that seems  popular for buying items for low prices are Silk Street Market and Yashow Market.

Silk Street is bigger but also a lot more crowded.  We found that it was also a lot harder haggle here because they have plenty of customers.  We spent about an hour here and left to go back to Yashow which was the first one we visited.

When you haggle with the vendors just be prepared to walk away if you want to get a really good price.  Don’t get too attached to the item you want to buy, you’ll usually find another vendor selling the same exact item, and you can always come back if you can’t find it anywhere else.

We found that the initial price they’ll give you is ridiculously high and you can sometimes get it for a tenth of their initial offer or less.  Usually when you say no and tell them you’ll look around a bit more and leave their store, they’ll call you (or grab you and pull you back to their store) to negotiate another price.  They have calculators and they’ll ask you to enter the price you want.  If they counter it and offer a higher price but you still think it’s too high don’t hesitate to walk away again and there’s a good chance they’ll lower their price again (and if they don’t at least you’ll have a better idea how much you can get it for and use that as a base when negotiating with the other vendors for the same item).

It was a pretty interesting experience. Pretty much most of the vendors speak English and they can be very aggressive. It also seems that all the stores in this building get their items from the same place.  For example, if you want a particular color and they don’t have it at their store, they’ll make a phone call and five minutes later someone will stop by to deliver it.