Last week was another holiday in China, the Dragon Boat Festival. Therefore we all had Monday to Wednesday off, meaning the perfect opportunity to organize an InternChina trip to Beijing.Monday morning at 6 o’clock we all arrived at Qingdao train station. Sadly, we didn’t think about the long lines that might be at the counter for picking up the train tickets, we tried everything but the lines were just way too long that we actually missed our train… oops! Little reminder for everybody who is travelling in China, be there at least one hour before and if you need to pick up your tickets… show up two hours in advance or go there one day before to pick them up!
Well, in the end we had to get new tickets, gladly we could refund the old ones and so we could finally go on our trip at 4 pm. We made the best out of the waiting time and had a great sight-seeing day in Qingdao, we had a delicious lunch and visited Old Town.

Christian Church in Qingdao

We finally arrived at 10:30 pm in our hostel, all very exhausted but glad to finally be in Beijing. For the next day we planned on going to the Great Wall of China. The part of the Great Wall we visited was located about 70km north of Beijing so it took us about 1.5 hours to get there. Our hostel organized the trip so a bus picked us up in front of the hostel and drove us to a very nice – gladly not so crowded – spot at the wall. We climbed out of the bus and found ourselves in a really beautiful place. Lots of little mountains with trees and on the top you could see, very tiny and quite far away, the Great Wall. A place which all of us have just seen on television, therefore it was really exciting to finally get to walk on it.

The Great Wall

Our tour guide explained to us that we could either walk or take the cable cars to get to the top. We split the group and some of us walked, which took about 15 minutes, the others went by cable cars, which took about 5 minutes.   Finally up on the wall it was really impressive to walk on a sight that was already built in the 7^th century BC. Of course the part we walked on was renovated for the tourists but we could get a look at the old part as well.

Finally we arrived at the top

We were walking for about three hours on the wall which was quite exhausting. But we were lucky, the sun was shining and it was a great day. After our hike, we had good Chinese food together at the bottom of the sight and then we went back to our hostel.

                                                                     Deserved lunch with some Tsingtao beers

When we arrived back at the hostel we were all pretty exhausted but there was no time to relax, we wanted to see as much as possible from Beijing. So we just refreshed ourselves real fast and went to the Temple of Heaven. It’s located in a huge park where many Chinese people come together in the evenings to play cards, sing and dance.

                                                                              Image source: globeimages.com

Tune in on Monday for Part 2 of our Beijing Trip!

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