Beijing -Day 1

Beijing Day 1

We started our day bright and early to head to Shanghai Hongqiao Airport for our flight to Beijing. Our. Flight from Shanghai was 2hrs and 20m.

Ty and I got a kick out of our China Eastern Air flights the next few days.  There "snack" onboard consisted of full meals. Our snack this morning was a rice and bok choy porridge, a chicken burger with pickle, water, noodles with pickled egg, and cantaloupe. I ate the cantaloupe and burger which was very tasty while Ty finished the remaining breakfast for us both.  He ate it all and said it was good.

As soon as we arrived in Beijing, our guide greeted us and took us directly to lunch (we just ate!?) we had a great lunch at a local restaurant.  We were served family style with all of the food placed on a lazy susan in the middle of the table. Local beer is considered like soda so we got to try many throughout our stay.

 

 Lunch was good and we were set to start our tour. Our first stop was The Forbidden City. This place was truly huge, a real Imperial city of its own. We walked the city from the front to the back enjoying the architecture, stonework and mass of this historic place.

 

 

Next was Tiananmen Square. The first I ever remember anything regarding Tiananmen Square was when I was17 in June of 1989. I remember the news of students demonstrating in the square the the government trying to squelch their protests which turned into all out chaos.

Our guide Dennis is 31.  His grandmother lived a few blocks from the square and he recalls seeing soldiers running down the street towards the square. They were made to say in there apartments for a week,  No school, no work. Later they received brochures written in cartoon which explained how the students were rioting against the police and a policeman was killed. They captured the student and peace was shortly restored thereafter. That is was he was told. There is no information in their history books regarding June, 4, 1989, as if nothing happened. He said he has been told by tourists police were beating students with batons, he honestly doesn't know whether to believe or deny. He has no way to know.

We then checked into our hotel the Marriott Beijing City Wall.  This hotel was very modern.  It reminded me of the MGM at Foxwoods.

For dinner tonight we enjoyed a classic Peking Duck dinner, again served family style with the lazy susan.  There must have been 15 different dishes served to us, chicken, fish, beef, noodles, vegetables, rice, on and on and of course duck. Every thing was very good and only a little bit Americanized. We enjoyed this dinner very much.  Everyone was now stuffed and tired from a long day of travel and touring.  We headed back to the hotel for a good but short nights sleep.