Beijing, the city that never sleeps

We woke up that morning with a lot of excitement. Going to Beijing, the capital of China, is a big deal.  The Olympic games of 2008 were held there and the history of the city is rich and interesting.

 Walking through the streets we realized people are very proud of their city and country.

Beijing is the second largest city of China after Shanghai and is divided in 16 districts and 2 counties. A bit like you have in Paris, only bigger, much bigger.

Beijing is known for its distance between locations and its flatness and regular construction.

If we’d get tired it was because of all of the walking, not because we had to climb mountains and hills. 

That’s why we decided to rent bikes for the second day.

So the first day we walked through the heart of Beijing. The heart lies in the Xicheng, Dongcheng, Xuanwo and Chongwen district.

In the Xichang district we visited the Beijing zoo. It was incredible. As a child, the zoo of Antwerp seems big, but comparing to this one, it’s really tiny. The Beijing zoo is huge, it's like a national park but with hundreds of animals in cages.

In the Dongcheng district we walked around in the Forbidden city. The Xuanwo district was kind of boring, nothing really interesting to see there. But in the Chongwen district we found the Temple of Heaven. A great place to end the day with.

The second day we went out to search bicycles we could rent. We found Bicycle Kingdom Rentals & Tours. This is a company that also offered guides and tours. As we didn’t know the other district in the city and were a bit afraid to get lost, we decided to rent a guide as well. This guide took us to the other inner suburbs, on the map indicated with the colours orange, olive green, light brown and pinkish.

The Haidan district was the most interesting, at least for us. All the universities and the heart of technological industry and business clusters are centered there.

We also got the opportunity to visit a class of archeological studies and meet some of the students. All of them were very friendly and spoke good Enlgish. They told us the pressure to succeed was big and that it was not easy for them to get an education.

Feeling lucky again that we have the opportunity to study as much as we like and being able to make this journey, we ended the day with a walk in the parks of the Summer palace and headed back to the centre of Bicycle Kingdom Rentals & Tours.

Until the next blog!

Julie Hamerlinck

Source: Beijing travel guide