Beijing, China

Many sorts of monuments.

First thing’s first: how does the Internet work? Two different ways. If you’re on hotel WiFi, you’re getting the full “Great Firewall of China” experience. Google, Facebook, et al. do not work. If you’re using a roaming foreign SIM on 5G, there are no restrictions. I use Google Fi, but there are others.

That does leave one problem. Maps. Google Maps will work on a cellular connection, but it’s horrendously out-of-date and incorrect about things like business locations. What does work in English is Apple Maps! Its China coverage is good and it’s not blocked. There are other options like AMap and OsmAnd, but they tend to show more things in Chinese. OsmAnd is good about letting you download the map in advance, so you only need GPS to use it.

The National Museum of China, located on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square. I gather it’s best to make reservations.

At the entrance to the Forbidden City, it’s the Chairman himself.

On the left, it says “Long live the People’s Republic of China.” On the right, it says “Long live the great unity of the people of the world.”

The Forbidden City is really big. It’s 10,000 steps front to back. Next up is the Summer Palace.

You can take a boat through canals to get here, just as the emperors did. It sets off at the Beijing Zoo, near the second ring road. I drove.

It was a little gloomy when I visited, but I didn’t mind. It sort of looked like a Chinese watercolor.

Back in Beijing, I visited Dashilan street. If you keep walking, you get into a neighborhood of Hutong buildings. They are pretty similar to the ones I saw in South Korea.

But what does “Since the eighth year of the reign of Xianfeng in the Qing Dynasty” mean? 1858.

Next, we visit a theme park built by POP MART, of Labubu fame. These stores are ever-present, only rivaled by Sanrio and Miniso.

One of the hooks of this theme park is that they give you a “passport”, and they kind of hide the places where you can get it stamped. It makes you walk all over. I went through a 30 minute audio-visual Labubu experience in the basement of that mansion. It was acutally pretty cool, and it had good air-conditioning.

Now, back to some older monuments.

This is the Mutianyu Great Wall. It’s convenient, and the best one from Beijing. It has a gondola, so you can skip the hike up to the wall (steep, the wall is on the ridgeline). I’d seen it before, but it doesn’t get old.

The guide told us that she sometimes gets customers that don’t like Chinese food, so she has eaten at this Subway shop located at the base of the Great Wall.

Next, a monument to consumerism.

This is the Beijing Friendship Store. It’s a giant store full of luxury goods and electronics. You can’t take a bag in, those go in lockers at the front. From then on, it’s black walls with white cages full of purses and shoes.

There are two major temple sites in Beijing.

This is from the Yonghe Temple, a temple and monastery of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. You are allowed to take pictures everywhere in this one, which is not always the case with these. So, a three-or-four story Buddha is pictured here.

The Temple of Heaven is on the same subway line.

These are the Seven Star Stones. I don’t mind linking trip.com here, because that site makes it easy to book Chinese things with US credit cards. I’ll cover Alipay and WeChat later.

Back to the mall.

These are from Taikoo Li Sanlitun, a huge Beijing mall / shopping center (19 buildings) that has a lot of things. Many of them are expensive.

McDonalds is different here.

They have a fully Grimace-themed McDonalds. Say what you want about the CPC, but I don’t think we have this in the US.

This is the PEK departure hall, where I would board a domestic flight.