Beijing China... Part Uno

Well hello friends, family and random readers! I’ve heard I have family and friends of my friends who read… which is very exciting news to me! I am happy to announce that George and I just returned from our first big vacation since we moved to Japan: Beijing, China! Yay! We really had a lovely trip!

This was our first experience taking on a foreign country (or a non-foreign) country with a tour guide. We were pretty hesitant about touring China with a tour guide but felt we would be in good hands based on the experiences of our friends here who have done the same trip. There were about 40 people who went on the trip from our base and about 50 from another base here in Japan! That’s a lot of Gaijin. (Which means foreigner in Japanese). We took on China with great force! Our group from here was separated into 2 groups, which put 19 people on our bus, and 20ish on the other. Our bus was mostly couples, all of us relatively young in age, and the other bus was mostly families with kids.

We had a wonderful tour guide. His name was Trevor and he would often say “eh- whatever” at the end of his speeches about China… to which we nicknamed him- (fittingly) Trevor Whatever. I still get a kick out of this. Ha! :)

The first day was spent traveling to the airport in Tokyo, the flight to China, the airport there, dinner, and checking into our hotel, which was really nice except for the most awful hard, spring-digging, crunchy, bad, horrible, (insert 100 more negative adjectives) mattress. Relatively boring, but hey- isn’t the first day of vacation usually boring… or at least bothersome?

Day two was Thursday; Thanksgiving Day and it was FAR more eventful. We had the hotel’s breakfast buffet, which was actually not bad—not great—but not bad! Then we joined our tour group (which Trevor Whatever referred to as “our family”) on the bus and we headed to Tian an men Square. We were dropped off at the center of the action, which consisted mostly of beautifully structured monuments, memorials and government buildings. Trevor gave us the history behind a lot of it; google it if you’re interested… I learned way too many facts to share in one blog. And I don’t always remember the correct facts; since I’d hate to share false information—I’ll just recommend you google it yourself. :)

Us at Tiananmen Square:


We headed to the Forbidden City next. This was something I had never really learned about. Basically, thousands (here comes a possibly inaccurate fact) of years ago, the Emperors in China had this giant palace they lived in that had somewhere between 9,000-10,000 ROOMS. THIS is not an exaggeration. Can you imagine having to clean 9-10,000 rooms? I guess if you’re the emperor of a powerful country you would have servants (slaves?) to do it for you- but that sounds WAY too overwhelming. You couldn’t even play hide-and-seek safely! He also had concubines. And thousands of them! I learned that the term “Dragon Lady” means the emperor’s wife. She would often get to choose which concubine would “service” the emperor, and wouldn’t always choose the most attractive one… or maybe Trevor was making a joke—who knows? :)



It took us 2-3 hours to walk through maybe a quarter of the “palace.” It was beautiful and truly amazing. The intricacy of the architecture was incredible—which is how I felt about almost everything we saw in China… well, at least the stuff that’s more than a couple 100 years old! (I’m talking mostly about the bathrooms there… one word to describe them… EW.)




We hiked up a giant hill to Jingjang park, where we could see the entire (well, what we could see through the smog) Forbidden City. It’s incredible to me that for hundreds (maybe thousands?) of years the people of China couldn’t enter or see into the “Forbidden City” I’m sure they created many stories about what went on in there. We made the hike back down the hill and headed to the Tea Shop.
I won’t comment a lot about the Chinese-government mandated shops (mandated because we were on a tour and they’re required to make us visit them) but I will say I did enjoy the tea shop. They did a ‘tea ceremony’ where we tried a few handfuls of Chinese tea. The woman explained what temperature to drink the tea at, how to drink it properly, how to hold the cups etc. It was neat to see that, but wasn’t crazy about the prices!

JinShang Park


After the tea shop we rode to Hutong, which is a much older district of Beijing. In my book “1,000 Places to See Before you Die” it recommends you go to Hutong and take a rickshaw ride. I was SO happy to learn this was on our tour itinerary! It’s a district that is being torn down and renovated. You can see the charm of it fading with each corner you turn, but it still had plenty for me to fall in love with it. The streets were so much quieter, a little less touristy, and overall one of my favorite things we experienced in China. The rickshaws were men of various sizes (we were lucky to have a larger ‘driver’) who could pedal us, and even tried ‘racing’ some of the others. He gave us a blanket to drape over ourselves and it was actually a really precious memory. It was so sweet (warning: getting sappy) holding George’s hand experiencing something so special. He says to me “I told you I would show you the world” and I couldn’t help but smile. I had to secretly pinch my own arm… what a lucky girl I am. I’m lucky to not only live in Japan, but get to travel Asia and visit other fantastic countries and cultures, all with George, which is the best part of it all.



After our lovely little ride, we attended an Acrobatic Show, which actually was really awesome! I’ve never had the opportunity to see a Cirque Du Soleil show but was told this show was pretty comparable. I can’t imagine the production value of this show even grazes Cirques but I was pleasantly surprised by the performers. It made me ill watching their bodies twist and turn, balance upon one another, do flips, turns, and jumps. The theater sold popcorn… which was popped in your very own bag in the microwave behind the counter. I also had a peach flavored coke (er—soda for all of you non-Southerners), which was delicious.

Dinner rolled around finally and we feasted on… I don’t remember… but all the food was good. They’d seat us at (usually) 2 tables of ten, which gave us the opportunity to mingle and interact with the other people on the tour. There’d be a giant ‘lazy Susan’ in the middle of the table and the food would just keep coming. There was always leftovers and we were always full at the end of the meal. Luckily we walked SO much on the trip there is no way I didn’t lose weight on that vacation… well… at least I didn’t gain any. 

We were so exhausted at the end of the night, we were so thankful to get back to our hotel room! And we were greeted by the floor of a bed. Ugh. As we were entering our room, a room service team showed up, and not speaking to us at all, (nor a smile) they came in, stripped the sheets from our bed, put a feather topper on the mattress and re-made the sheets. We didn’t ask for it, but were very pleased with it! At least then we didn’t feel the springs from the bed digging into our bones and muscles. The following morning we learned there were other people on our bus that had complained to the staff about how unbearable the beds were, and didn’t receive the mattress toppers they had asked for! Ooooops…. Guess we got it!  (FYI they all called back down and did get their mattress toppers!)

So that was day 1 and 2. I’ll update with pictures and the rest soon! I hope y’all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, filled with family, friends, adventures and love.

XOXO,
Chels