Taking the Capital

Beijing is a city that’s been invaded numerous times in it’s history, and now it was the turn of three inquisitive Irishmen. Emerging from the train station, our first impressions were that it looked very similar to Xian and Chengdu. I had heard that after a while big Chinese cities begin to look the same - we had encountered this on our third stop in China. Still, the long taxi journey showed up the difference in size - Beijing is enormous.

The hostel proved more difficult to find than size 10 shoes in Nepal (we had more trouble finding it than any other hostel in China in fact). Hidden deep within a clutch of hutong (traditional residential Chinese streets), we eventually located it with the help of a hastily drawn map from a local.



The first day was spent visiting sights in close proximity to the hostel - the Lama Temple, the Confucius temple and the old imperial college. All three were excellent, the outstanding highlight being the 18m tall Buddha statue in the Lama temple.



Thankfully only a ten minute walk from the hostel (which served awful food) was a street packed with restaurants. With such a huge selection, we had some of our best meals in China here, and really started to perfect our chopstick skills.