Sleeper Train Beijing to Xi'an

I'm going to make a video about this with a lot more detail, but I wanted to post here with some pictures too.

We took a sleeper train from Beijing to Xi'an. The trip took about 11 hours. We left at a little before 9pm and arrived in Xi'an around 8am this morning.

Beijing West was a confusing madhouse. There were so many people sitting around in what we thought was our waiting room. Announcements were made in Chinese, it seemed like platforms were being switched, and we started just looking for other tourists to follow. But nobody really knew what was going on. In the end, we were in the right place all along, and we came down the stairs to our waiting train.

We boarded the train and found our room. We booked a z-class train soft sleeper. Z-class trains are direct, with no stops in between. This is nice because there are no interruptions or announcements that wake you up in the middle of the night.

A soft sleeper room has four beds and a lockable door. It's semi private, perfect for a group traveling together. We shared our room with two nice ladies that gave us some fruit to try. It was yummy once I knew you're supposed to take the skin off it before you eat it.

The train car has a long hallway down one side and the rooms line up down the other side.

The room is decent sized. Isa and I paid a little more for the bottom bunks, but when we got to the room, we switched with the ladies because we're younger and could get up top easier, and we liked the top bunks better anyways. There's enough room to sit up, and there's a platform over the door for your bags.

There's a lady that went around with a cart full of food Hogwarts Express style but mostly packaged foods with no pictures on them so we had no clue what they were. Most people brought ramen or fruit for dinner. There's a faucet with boiling hot water which I'm pretty sure is specifically for ramen because I didn't see anybody use it for drinks or anything else. We just ate Pringles and other snacks we picked up at 7-11 earlier tonight.

The beds are comfy and they give you pillows and a nice thick blanket that kept us nice and toasty. The ride was fine. Mostly smooth with very few noises or bumps. Isa slept well, but I didn't. I'm a little paranoid about overnight trains after some people in our Europe group had some bad experiences. But the trip was completely uneventful and there were no issues at all.

I woke up around sunrise and watched the foggy countryside blur by the window.

Around 7:15/7:30 everyone started waking up and getting their stuff together, brushing teeth and whatnot. We rolled into Xi'an early a little after 8am and walked to our hotel, which is a story in itself.

Temple of Heaven

This was our last day in Beijing. We're actually on a sleeper train on our way to Xi'an right now, but we'll get to that later.

For our last day, we went to see something that is on almost every Beijing tourism poster or pamphlet we've seen. Probably more often than the Forbidden City.

The Temple of Heaven.

Funny enough, there is technically no actual Temple of Heaven. The picture above is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Here's the inside:

The whole park is called the Temple of Heaven park, but no structure within it shares that name. The park is vast, with the Hall above as the main focal point, and walkways going in each of the cardinal directions from it. Beyond those main walkways are paths through gardens and trees and open spaces.

It's really pretty and nice to enjoy a relaxing walk. Here are some pictures from around the grounds.

In an attempt to make up for yesterday, we only bought the entrance ticket this time, not the through pass. This was a huge mistake, as you can't get anywhere near the main Hall without the extra fee. Luckily, just outside the Hall are more ticket booths, and the additional fee is the same price as the through ticket minus what we already paid, and it gives you access to everything else too.

This pass also gets you into the Circular Mound Altar, which was kinda cool but packed with people and really difficult to find a decent angle to photograph it unless you have a helicopter or something.

But on our way to the Circular Mound Altar, we passed through some "street performers" in traditional costume having a grand ol' time.

They looked for people to join in but we chickened out and continued down to the altar.

We walked out through the south and caught the subway over to the CTV Building, which is one incredible piece of architecture.

We're not sure how that thing stays standing.

Then it was time to go back and grab our stuff, eat a quick dinner from 7-11, and go to the train station to catch our sleeper train to Xi'an.

Beihai Park and Olympic Park

Today is Sunday, so we try to not spend money at all. We bought food last night for snacks and meals and we usually plan things that don't charge admission. We succeeded with Olympic Park; failed with Beihai Park.

Beihai Park is a lake just west of the Forbidden City. There is an island in the lake and a few sites and landscaped areas surrounding it. We found out last night that there was an admission fee, but the island and several sites were additional. I thought it'd be worth it to spend the extra money to get the through ticket. I was dead wrong. So if you go to Beihai Park, just pay the regular admission.

You can access almost everything without paying extra. The island...

the village...

the parks and walkway...

and the pagodas and everything else.

The one thing you can't enter is the round city at the southern side, but that's closed now and they didn't tell us that. The white pagoda at the top if the island is solid, so you can't go in it, and the temple below it is nothing special. Trees block the view from the top, so you can't really even see the Forbidden City.

Anyway, I'm done with my rant. I'm more just upset at myself for spending the money when I knew we were trying not to, and then feeling ripped off made it worse.

But here are some other pictures from the park...

Olympic Park was cool though, and huge and surprisingly busy. We got off the subway at the south end and walked straight up through the middle. To the right is the Nest...

and to the left is the Water Cube.

There were lots of vendors selling kites and other souvenirs. The kites were unique and cool. It was one large kite at the end, but along the string were a few dozen smaller ones. You can see two in this picture.

Ghost Street and more Hutongs

Because of how much we loved visiting hutongs yesterday, we decided to check out some different ones today. We love hutongs. Nice people, cheap food. So after we left the Forbidden City, we wandered through some other hutongs close to Jingshan Park before it got too dark. We tried something new and it was amazing! It's like a Chinese crepe. Take the crepe, cook egg into it, smear brown sauce on it, wrap it around a crunchy wafer, add some greens, and yum! (I just looked it up and it's called Jianbing.) It was huge and delicious and less than a dollar. [I'll embed the video I took here once I edit and upload it.]

Then we hopped on the subway and went home (we're staying at an amazingly convenient, albeit ghetto and at times powerless, location by Dongzhimen Station) and dropped off our bags and then walked over to Ghost Street.

Ghost Street is a fun collection of restaurants and street food. You'll know you're there when you see all the red lanterns.

We went down to a restaurant called Little Sheep, known for its hot pot. They didn't speak any English, but they were nice and smiley and gave us a menu and we pointed at random things and here's what we ended up with:

It was very yummy.

Forbidden City Guide

I have been wanting to come here for years. Ever since I heard about it over a decade ago. I was beyond excited to go in, and honestly very disappointed once we got in. :(

The complex is massive. Like ridiculously big. We looked up plans and maps and self-guided walking tours through the complex, so we had a plan. But very soon after entering, we realized that our plan was worthless.

Before entering, you just file in with all the other people. You have to enter from the south, above Tiananmen Square. This is what you'll see, with a warm welcome from a giant portrait of Chairman Mao.

You pass through two giant courtyards (each capable of holding more than 10,000 people) before you even get into the actual palace that requires your ticket. Once inside, you see five magnificent marble bridges over a stream.

This is where you can cut left or right in an attempt to avoid all the groups and tourists. We followed the stream to the left first (you can see all the crowds going straight down the middle).

Going left seemed to be a good idea since we walked into this serene park with very few people in it.

But then we ran into do not enter signs everywhere.

So after looking through a not-worth-it little museum, we crossed the courtyard with the bridges and went right, hoping to circumvent the tourists that way, but we ran into the same thing (with another not-so-worth-it museum with ceramics).

It turns out that there is only one way through the palace complex, and they force everyone to take it. So you can't escape the crowds (until later, we found).

We went straight in through the main central axis. Each building has a crowd of people in front of it, all pushing and shoving trying to get up front to take a picture. Isa checked out the first, and then decided it wasn't worth it to see the others because of the people, so she waited to the side while I went in. I tried to be patient and courteous, but that isn't very effective. The problem is that once you fight your way to the front and get your picture, nobody will move to let you out. It's almost as much of a struggle to get out as it is to get in.

Once you get up close, they all pretty much look the same. Like this:

You keep heading straight back along the same central axis passing through gates and around buildings and around sacred staircases...

...until you hit the garden in the back. The garden is not as pretty as I had hoped. I was going for a tea garden on a Versailles scale. But it's rather small and square (not natural looking) and not very picturesque.

At this point, we found an alleyway that went off to the right. With no tourists. So we took it. We walked along a long corridor, peering through closed doorways to see what was hidden inside.

This led to another area that was open to the public, but since it was off the central axis, it was much less visited. There were a few exhibits (of fans, ceramics, and traditions) and cool buildings, and it was finally nice to be somewhere that 1000 other people were not.

Looking at our map of the complex, we really wanted to get to an area just east of these buildings. So we walked down some long corridors and eventually found an entrance, but it cost 10 yuan to get in (that's a little less than $2). Generally this is just a ploy to get more money out of tourists, but we went for it. And it was worth every penny.

This was what we had hoped the rest of the complex would be like. It was all open to explore, you could go wherever you wanted, and it was far less crowded.

One of the highlights of this area is the 9 dragon screen. Apparently there are only three like this in all of China.

We wandered some more through this area and then exited through the north. We found out that everyone has to enter from the south, and we realized that the reason they block everything off is to create a flow of traffic. With hundreds of thousands of people going through every day, they're doing the best they can to control it.

On the north side of the Forbidden City is a park set on a hill called Jingshan Park. We paid the 50 cents to get in and hiked to the top for cool views of the palace. Through the haze of Beijing's crazy smog, it made for some eery and cool pictures.

The park itself is kinda cool with some rockeries and cool buildings, but mainly you go up for the view. And sunset.