10 November 2011
Random walk
Having already been out and about twice today, I didnt plant to do anything specific in the evening. Hence I headed East to see where that gets me.
First it got me to some fancy western hotels like novotel etc. which wasnt very exciting, but there was also fancy car dealerships, including Koeniggsegg (I will spare you the photos).
I did however wander through a couple of Hutongs, which are old neighbourhoods, I dont think these ones were particularly old though, just small, dusty, and lots of people sitting in restaurants with only 2 tables glaring at me.
I guess they feel I am only wandering through what is effectively their communal garden to gawk at them, and they are right.
My new tactic with the 'hello, do you speak English? where are you from? are you here for holiday or work? Will you have tea with me?' nonsense is to say I am here for work, as a police man.
This is very effective, one girl actually ran off.
Rather than add more ramblings here, I will do that on the pics below of random stuff.
Blue light street had many car dealerships, including not just the car makers but the European tuners like AC Schnitzer and Ruf. There were also some really cool Toyota Tundra all black modded 4wd's that look a bit like the ones top gear drove to the North Pole, only bigger.
OK, thanks sign, now I know exactly where I am going.
Random intersection to highlight that the buildings here are not high, but they are enormous. Not just the street frontage, but the depth of some of them must be between 50 and 100 metres. No natural light in there then.
Street overpasses generally have makeshift markets. You know you have wandered away from the tourist areas once the vendors dont acknowledge you at all.
This is the rather chaotic Beijing central railway station. This is not where the new high speed trains arrive, but the older slow trains. You can get a train from here to Tibet (which has oxygen tubes attached to every seat) and North Korea. There were no westerners at this station that I could see.
Ths shops around the station are interesting, also theres a bunch of guys hanging about with sack trolleys, and when people come out of the station with bags they race to be their first and put your bags on the trolley, forcefully, and then make you pay for them to push it to the taxi / bus station.
Theres a few such giant sports centres about town.
My dinner. They had beef noodle soup and some nice looking dumplings on the menu, but I decided I should have something different, this is fish ball and something and something else in something, with noodles. It was not particularly nice but I ate it. I also had a milk tea with grass jelly and red beans, which was deliciously sickly sweet.