Beautiful Beijing

I went on holiday to Beijing about 18 months ago - and anyone who's over there for the Olympics will be in for a real treat. China is a fantastic holiday destination.

Beijing is a beautiful city, and although everyone seems to be banging on about the smog, I'm sure it wasn't as bad as everyone's making out when I was there. Certainly none of the tourists we saw were strolling round with face masks on.

We hired bikes to tour round the main sights...and I reckon they must have been the only ones out of the 9 million bicycles in Beijing that didn't have working brakes.
 
Cycling over there is absolutely crazy, bikes just take over everything - at traffic lights they're all lining up like the start of the Tour de France ready to go. And I remember we had extreme difficulty in turning left because you had to cut across about 12 lanes of oncoming traffic. They even had police officers on the street corners to tell you when to go.
 
We saw Tiananmen Square - where there's a massive picture of Chairman Mao. And had a look round a beautiful palace and it's huge complex of musuems and historic buildings called the Forbidden City. It's Beijing's top tourist attraction and the Chinese were clearly trying to scrub up everything before the Olympics started because quite a few of the sights were covered up for a refurb. I remember walking round this huge palace with beautiful ancient buildings, dragons carved into rooftops, the histories of the Emperors who'd fought and lived there. Then right in the middle of it all, a Starbucks. (I think it's now closed down and a local cafe's there instead.) Anyway, we decided to copy the locals and buy from one of the many street vendors selling food. I got something that looked like a sausage on a stick. Lets just say I don't think it was sausage...
 
Overall the food was pretty good - although you may struggle if you don't fancy a Chinese. One restaurant we went to we ordered Beijing Duck (the new name for Peking Duck). They wheeled over this huge trolley and started carving up whole duck right in front of us. Not for the faint-hearted. And breakfasts were interesting too - the hotel we stayed at did have English-style bacon and eggs, but right next to it were bowls of noodles and rice, then next to that dishes full of curry, and next to that fresh fruit and croissants. Amazingly some people we saw actually had a bit of everything on one plate!
 
Drinking booze over there was a whole new experience as well. I reckon you'd be OK if you liked beer. But I don't. So I thought I'd try the spirits, only they don't really sell them. No Strongbow either, so I was stuck with wine. Which you might think isn't a bad option, until you actually try Chinese wine. I'd like to recommend a vintage for you, but really, there's a reason it's not made it to the British market. All of it seems to have been made at the Great Wall of China (which is strange because when we visited the Great Wall of China I didn't see one single vineyard.... not so much as a grape) and most of the stuff I tried tasted like it was corked. Even the expensive stuff.
 
The Chinese seem to have no sense of queueing either. Doesn't matter if you're in a shop, hotel, airport, or anywhere. It's an absolute scrum. At the airport we almost missed our flight because we were blocked in at the check-in desk by about 50 Chinese people, all with 8 bags and boxes each, all pushing to get the next spot.
 
The one overriding image I'll have of China though, is of this small child wearing a very special pair of trousers. They were a bit like pyjama bottoms, but had a slit cut into them around the bottom area. I don't want to put you off your food, but if you can picture it, every time the child needed the toilet, he just squatted down (in the street) and the trousers magically opened. Don't reckon that trend will catch on in London somehow...
 
China is definitely one experience I'll never forget, and if you ARE over there for the Olympics...I'm extremely jealous.