Happy new year! π
We had a little couchsurfing party.
On the first, after a chinese breakfast, I went to see the temple of heaven…
in the afternoon I met Romesh, we got lunch somewhere and then walked around in the hutongs.
wikipedia says: “Hutongs (simplified Chinese: θ‘ε; traditional Chinese: θ‘θ‘; pinyin: hΓΊtΓ²ng) are a type of narrow streets or alleys, most commonly associated with Beijing, China. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.”
in the evening we looked for – and found – the night food market, selling all the strange food YOU think of when china is mentioned π
but.. trying it alone is boring.. so i didnt..
on january 1st in the evening, my couch changed a bit π
it suddenly had 3 stars more…
but the plan stayed: going to see the great wall the next day. we finally decided to go to mutianyu π
or however it is written.. and we found out what bus to take. it didnt go right to the great wall but to some village 15km before. my book says at what station to get off – and already before that, car/taxi drivers were standing outside the bus doors trying to make us get off and go with them. sure π
at the “right” station it was the same and after ignoring two of them, we went with the 3rd one.
along the street, there were many closed restaurants and shops (obviously it IS winter and there are not enough tourists), but once we got to the parking, we had enough souvenir shops.
we went up and walked around a bit.. and when we decided to go back down, most people had already left and we had the wall almost to ourselves π
