Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Today Jacob and I rented bicycles to tour around Beijing, and tour around we did. I’m fairly certain we covered almost the entire city today by bike. We started at our hostel in the Yong he Gong district and traveled west across the city to Houhai. Houhai is the old district full of old alleyways of rundown houses. It’s full of character and was really interesting. I really felt a strong pull to this area, like I was seeing real life for the first time. There was something incredible about watching these people just go about their everyday lives, I enjoyed every second of it, even if it did smell kind of funky.

We finished off the morning cycling around the lake in the area. We took a quick detour into Soong Ching Ling’s former residence. Having no idea who she was we wandered aimlessly around her gardens. Luckily there was a really great exhibit of her life and it turns out she’s quite an interesting lady. She was instrumental in the beginning stages of communism in China and went on to be a leader before she died in the early 80s.

We then biked South to visit the Temple of Heaven. We didn’t actually get into the temple because it was quite expensive and truthfully I’m getting a little bored of temples – after a while they all look the same. We wandered around the amazing park though and appreciated the fresh air.

After dropping our bikes back at our hostel we set out to the Beijing West Railway Station to try and book our onward tickets for Saturday night. After traveling about an hour, waiting another hour in the busiest most hectic place I’ve ever seen, we found out that our train was fully booked. Leaving with no tickets in hand we headed back to the hostel to see if we could figure something else out. Thankfully though, the trip wasn’t a total waste as we did find a DQ and Jacob was able to have his long awaited Blizzard. After a little bit more research we think we’ve found a bit of a work around and we’ll be leaving Beijing Saturday afternoon now.