China

Beijing

Author Ram
Date visited: Jul 04

General: A fantastic place, we started with Tiananmen Square on your first day, its huge, and u get to realise what happened many years ago, the amount of people it would take to fill the square up.
Make sure you watch the closing ceremony, where the soldiers march and the main red flag is lowered. Really impressive.

We visited the Forbidden City this will take a couple of hours the history and style is fantastic, watch out for the tourist touts who will try to encourage you to visit a free art gallery. We did this and it was a total con..

Beijing has a cool tube system and is really easy to use - all station maps have an English translation, currently are only two tube lines, I think they are building more! Cost is so cheap 3 Yuan per single trip (£1 = 15Yuan). Beats London!

Great place to visit is Yonghegong Lama Temple (took tube) visit all the buildings in the courtyard, must go to the one with the large wooden statue of Buddha.

The view over the Forbidden City from Janshing Park is superb. Walk south of Tiananmen along Qianmen Road to Tiantan Park which holds the Temple of Heaven - simple architecture based on the nos. 3, 4, and 12 I think these are lucky nbrs in China?

Anyway well worth it so much more to see will definitely be going back.

--------------------------------------------

Author Sheila
Date Visited: Oct 04

Sightseeing: Went to the Great Wall on a day trip to Simatai - 3hrs drive from Beijing into the mountains, The wall is huge and depending on which tower you are at you can see for miles.. The tour guide was brilliant and they tell you some of the gory history of the wall…

--------------------------------------------

Author: Faz
Date Visited: Oct 04

Places to Visit: A Traditional tea house called DR TEA u can have a tasting session of the 5 types of tea (black, white, green, jasmine, herbal), took a cab our hotel told us about it.

Hotels: Stayed with the big chains as didn’t think the locals ones would be any good.

Shopping: Wangfujing road on the east side of the Forbidden City is full of shopping malls. I was surprised at how much western choice of items they had.
It seems they are having an economic boom, as everyone seemed to have the latest clothes styles on and a mobile phone, freaky though as when you head out of the city, you see hundreds (loads) of people on push bikes!

Also a local shopping centre is called Xidan.. Not to my taste.