I went with my two friends, Katie and Briana, for a three day trip to Beijing (北京) during a long weekend for the Children's Day holiday in Korea.  It turned out to be a major travel period, because China, too, had a national holiday called Workers' Day, which lasted May 1-3.

Friday night, after work, the three of us met at Katie's house with our luggage, and gushed about what we would do on our trip the next day.  We slept for about 2 or 3 hours before waking up early to catch a shuttle bus to the airport.

The shuttle was probably as long as the flight to China.  I was exhausted, good old insomnia prevented me from getting more than an hour of sleep so far.

We made it to the Beijing International Terminal, which is absolutely huge and really beautifully designed, around 11am (China time).  After a little monorail shuttle ride to the exit area, we found a cab and showed him the address to our hotel.  The landscaping along the highway is a bit one-note, with the same trees planted in a very redundant grid pattern, but it was landscaped the whole way (which is not the case on the way to the Incheon Airport just outside of Seoul).

It seemed our cab driver could not specifically locate our hotel, even after he called them, so he dropped us off and gave us some helpful advice (in Mandarin) and drove away.  The three of us wandered up on street and then back down and around, until we went into a different hotel and asked the clerk where ours could be.  Oh so eventually, we were in our moldy room, changing our clothes and sprawling out, exhausted, on the beds.  I asked the clerks where we were on the map, but mostly we communicated using pointing and gestures, as the gap between Korean and Mandarin was sizeable.  Our hotel was on Hepingli Xijie (和平里西街"Hepingli West Street"), so from there finding our way around made sense.

We decided to walk south, since the map said that's where everything was.  We came upon a lovely public park, and strolled through it.  This was the Park of the Altar of Earth, and it had a large entrance to a market that we considered but didn't enter.  Around the bend was a HUGE restaurant with big gaudy red lanterns and elaborate wooden carvings.  Since we were starving, we went in and figured out the extensive menu.  I took photos of all our plates, which included spicy smoky duck soup, Sichuan noodles, stuffed eggplant, steamed dumplings, but some of the dishes were less than tasty for our Western palates.  We simply ordered more, because the food was SO cheap!  That was fun.

Then we investigated the strange building across the street, which turned out to be the Yonghe Lamasery.  It was about to close, so we exlpored nearby the preserved hutongs (alleyways), and down Guozijian Jie (国子监街/國子監街 "Imperial College Street").  We drank Red Bulls while sitting on a stoop and watching the world a bit, marveling at how different China and Korea seemed to be.  We decided to go to Beihai Gonguan (北海公园 "Park of the Northern Sea") from there.

This place was truly magnificent, with a lake, or the "Northern Sea" (Bei Hai), surrounding the Tuan Cheng (Round City) and the Qiong Dao (Jade Islet) where sits the Bai Ta (White Dagoba), and we walked all over and took hundreds of pictures.  It was really peaceful, and as the sun was setting, bats and swallows swooped all over the water's surface.  The pollution, sadly, was so thick that the colors of sunset were really vibrant and lovely.

We walked around the northern gate of the Imperial Palace, also known as the Forbidden City, and enjoyed people with their night kite-flying.  These kites were affixed with LEDs of many colors and suspended hundreds of feet above us, much to the delight of the three of us and several tourist children.

From there we took a cab to the infamous Donghuamen Night Market, with a long row of carts and lanterns, and hundreds of patrons clamoring to taste the squid and fish balls and candied fruit on skewers.  I got the latter, which looked positively delectable, but had trouble eating it because the noxious smells wafting and often pouring from some other ghastly menu options.  Truly, the odor was too nauseating to enjoy or even taste my sweet fruit, so we high-tailed it from the market and wandered down Wanfujin Dajie, a popular Western-style shopping area, crammed full of boring American franchise eateries like Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut.  We ended up at Pizza Hut, unfortunately, and while Briana's kebab came out in reasonable time, Katie and I had to cancel our pizza because it simply took too long and we were exhausted.

After walking well out of the range of tourists, we finally found an empty cab, and took it home.

That was our FIRST DAY.