We left our lovely little KL hostel at 4pm and caught the amazing KLIA train straight to the airport. The trains in KL are awesome. This one even had WiFi! Off the train and into the airport. Easy done! Onto the plane. Yep, you guessed it, easy. Ahhh it was only a 6 hour flight and we had books to read, movies to watch and sleep to sleep. Too easy! We even had a not-too-bad vegie biryani to fill our guts.
Running on time we get to Beijing! Woo! Why aren't we landing yet? Captain tells us we have to fly around for 45 minutes before we land. OK, still not bad, we told our hotel we were getting in early morning, around 2am. Land. Wait at the bag terminal for aaages. They were putting ours out at a different bag spot. Lucky we are in jovial moods and are giggling!
Outside we power past the fake taxi dudes straight to the real taxi waiting line. Its massive. So there we wait for an hour and a half while one taxi comes every 5 minutes or so. Finally we get a taxi, nice young guy who doesn't speak a word of English but we came prepared with the address of our hostel written in characters. He puts it into his GPS and before you know it we are doing 130 km down the freeway listening to trashy pop. After a looong drive he finally found our little place tucked down an alley. What a legend!!
4am and time to rest....or is it? Well it must be...or must it not? No it is not. They gave our room away.
But we booked it! Yeh but you're late. We told you we would be late. I don't speak English. Classic.
It's true we picked a hostel where no one spoke much English woops!! We were exhausted. where were we going to sleep?
'Do you want to rest on our lounges and we can put your bags in storage until tomorrow?' Ahh sure.
Our heads hit the cushions at 5am as the sky was getting lighter and lighter. the best part of all this? We got a night free accommodation wwooooooo!!! Take that Beijing! You thought you got us and we got you moohahahahaaaa. It was our evil plan all along!!
After a few hours sleep we wandered around the neighbourhood and ate juicy dumplings for breakfast. The neighbourhood we stayed in was gorgeous!!! It was an old hutong area (a narrow lane or alleyway in a traditional residential area of a Chinese city, especially Beijing. Thank you intersmarts!) . Grey brick buildings with red characters for shop signs and huge trees with luscious green leaves and tiny little flowers that every now and then would gracefully fall to the ground. Oh and Starbucks was there too.
This was an awesome spot! The streets were lined with cute shops selling cute stuff and food stalls selling fried chicken, juices and ice cream! We were still really tired but it was so nice wandering the streets. For lunch we stopped at a steam boat restaurant and ate the spiciest meal I think we'd ever had. The pot was filled with tiny, whole, dried chillies and crushed Szechuan peppers (amongst other delicious things). We picked our skewers and started cooking them in the steaming broth. it was a slow burner this one. About half way we realised we were in too deep! The steam was enveloping my head so there was no escaping the demon broth! We still smashed it though. Didn't want to look weak in front of the locals!
We then wandered up a few blocks to eat at the popular snack street, real name starting with W but I can't remember it, before heading back to the hostel for some sweet, sweet sleeping!
And that my friends, is our first visit to Beijing! Short and spicy!
To be continued....
Crunch n Sip
- A thin crepe like thing filled with cabbage and other veg like a giant spring roll.
- dumplings filled with juicy meat!- a giant fried dumpling filled with green veg and heaps of garlic! Our breakfast spesh
- steamed buns filled with veg from our fav breakfast spot. Piping hot and covered in chilli sauce!!
- the best frozen yoghurt ever! From a shop possibly called Ei Mio. Our toppings were fresh mango and watermelon with a drizzle of peach jam! Oooooh sooooo goooood!!!!
-more dumplings that were folded flat and BBQ'd till crispy but tasted like crap. Go figure!