Summer Palace Beijing, Beijing, China
November 07, 2013
It’s been a good day today.
I was really tired after trekking the great wall so today was destined to be an easier one. At times its hard to get the balance right. You don’t want to miss out anything with the short time you have in these places but there is only so much trekking around the sights and tourist spots that you can take and if you keep doing it like that you never really get to settle in to how the place works or get to know the people and the culture and it turns into a non stop tourist hike. So I decided to slow it down today and just pop to the summer palace and spend the rest of the day ambling round Cafe’s and speaking with the locals and popping down little Hulong’s (alleys) to see what I stumbled across.
I started off easy and meandered my way through the Hulong’s near to the hostel to find somewhere small and local for lunch and found a cracking little place to grab some excellent lunch for 90p. You pick out the vegetables and meat that you want and what style of noodles you fancy and away they go and cook it up. The language barrier is quite evident at times in these places but it’s easy enough to get by using the standard hand signals and getting used to how the Chinese count with their hands. I wasted a good hour or so in there and then spent another hour watching the locals playing their version of chess and various card games on the side of the street. It’s a fun way to spend a bit of time watching how animated they get, how they laugh and joke with each other and how serious and thoughtful the games are at times.
From there I hopped on the subway to the outskirts of the city to visit the Summer Palace in time for sunset and it was well worth the trip. Yes it is fairly touristy particularly with the Chinese but the gardens there are so huge its easy enough to park up on a bench somewhere and find a nice quiet spot to relax and admire the plants around you, the birds and the temple buildings that are dotted about throughout the gardens. Sunset was beautiful and I headed down to the lakeside to watch it set over the mountain backdrop and to grab a few photos. Once the sun goes down here it gets dark pretty quick and there are no lights in the gardens so it took a good couple of hours to finally find the exit and get back to a subway station to head back to the hostel and get sorted for some tea.
Once back I headed out with George and Vasso that I met in Mongolia for another cheap meal and grabbed a few cans at the local shop to keep it cheap and sat about chatting until the small hours before finally turning in.
One thought on “Summer Palace and a lazy day”
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