Peking with its National Museum of China
The train from Datong to Beijing takes about 7 hours with a fast train, currently there are no fast speed trains, and as always, we bought our tickets online and we printed them out at the station by showing our passport. We arrived at night time at the Beijing railway station, from there, we had to go to our hotel King's Joy (81 meishi street - metro L2 qianmen, exit C). The hotel is OK although the room we got, there is a small space that, we don’t know why, is not cleaned since many days. The hotel is at few minutes to the tiananmen square and just near to the popular commercial street called qianmen. |
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The qianmen street (前门大街景区) is an old street dating from the Ming period and although it has been renovated and reopened in 2008, we can still find some buildings with architectures dating from the Qing period.
The National Museum of China (中国国家博物馆, 16 east changan avenue) is near the tiananmen square and the building is quite huge. There are 2 ticket offices, one for local (left side) and one for foreigners (right side), so we went there to take our free entrance by showing our passport. Inside, a lot of things to see, particularly we learnt about the arts and history of China.
The tiananmen square was in preparation for the World War II 70th Anniversary 1945-2015, a commemoration to celebrate the victory against Japan so the security around this area has been reinforced.
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We also went to the wangfujing street (王府井大街 – metro L1 wangfujing, exit B)during night time to look for the famous snack market where people can eat a kebab of scorpion, worm, spider, etc. Contrary to qianmen, wangfujing owns a modern architecture with big malls. We walked on the main pedestrian street and quickly we found a first snack market on our left, in a narrow street but it is not the one that we saw on internet, so keeping our stroll few meters more, we arrived to the end of the street, and just there, at the left side, here is the market and I was tempted for a worm kebab (15rmb). By crunching the worm, a kind of semi gelatin texture went through my mouth and the only taste was the pepper/ salt that the cooker put it; in fact, the worm itself has no taste now the shell was a little difficult to chew.
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For our last night at Beijing, we booked a room near to the airport because our flight back to Barcelona was taking off very early. The Kaisheng Xingfeng Int'l Hotel (2 tianzhu east road) offers for free a shuttle bus between the hotel and the airport. During our booking, we asked the hotel to look for us so we fixed a meeting point at the arrival floor of the airport.
Once there, we didn’t see the driver so we called the hotel, the good point is that in the airport, there are some phone boxes with 3 minutes free, just near to the passenger exit. The hotel told us that the driver is waiting for us at the parking entrance, in front of the door 11, outside, with a sign with our names and there he was. The hotel is really nice and of course, the next morning, the shuttle bus brought us back to the airport, but this time to go home.