Asian Adventure: Cathay Pacific B777-300ER Business Class San Francisco to Hong Kong
Asian Adventure: Cathay Pacific Lounge Review: The Cabin at HKG
Asian Adventure: Cathay Dragon A330-300 Business Class Hong Kong to Beijing
Asian Adventure: Regent Beijing Hotel
Asian Adventure: Beijing - Dongcheng District
Asian Adventure: Beijing - The Great Wall
Asian Adventure: Beijing - Run-ze Jade Garden
Asian Adventure: Beijing - The Sacred Way of the Ming Tombs
Asian Adventure: Beijing - The Legend of Kung Fu
Asian Adventure: Beijing - Tiananmen Square
Asian Adventure: Beijing - The Forbidden City
Asian Adventure: Beijing - Hutong Tour via Rickshaw, Tea Tasting, Flying to Xi’an
Asian Adventure: Hotel Shangri-La Xi’an
Asian Adventure: Xi’an - Qing Dynasty Terra Cotta Warriors
Asian Adventure: Xi’an - Tang Dynasty Dinner and Show
Asian Adventure: Xi’an Wrap-Up, Flying to Lhasa, Lhasa Home Visit
Asian Adventure: Shangri-La Hotel Lhasa
Asian Adventure: Lhasa - Jokhang Temple and Barkhor Market
Asian Adventure: Lhasa - Canggu Nunnery and Sera Monastery
Asian Adventure: Lhasa - Potala Palace
Asian Adventure: Leaving Lhasa and Flying to Chongqing
Asian Adventure: Viking Emerald
Asian Adventure: Shibaozhai Temple
Asian Adventure: Cruising the Three Gorges
Asian Adventure: Three Gorges Dam
Asian Adventure: Jingzhou City Walls Tour
Asian Adventure: Wuhan - Hubei Bells Performance and Provincial Museum
Asian Adventure: Shanghai - Shanghai Museum
Asian Adventure: Fairmont Peace Hotel, Shanghai
Asian Adventure: Shanghai - Old Shanghai and Yuyan Gardens
Asian Adventure: The New Otani Tokyo Hotel
Asian Adventure: Tokyo - City Tour
Asian Adventure: Mt. Fuji and Hakone Tour Returning by Shinkansen
Asian Adventure: ANA Suites Lounge Review, Tokyo Narita
Asian Adventure: All Nippon Airways B777-300ER First Class Tokyo Narita to Houston
This one will be fairly short but for those of us who arrived a day before the official start of the tour, we had a day to kill. Knowing what we know now we might have been a little more adventurous but we enjoyed a day with nothing on the agenda.
The Regent Beijing is in the Dongcheng District, which is pretty much the geographical center of Beijing. It's 16.16 square miles and encompasses The Forbidden City (aka The Palace Museum), Tienanmen Square and Mao's Tomb, Jinshan Park, The National Museum of China and the Lama Temple. As of 2010 over 900K people lived in this district.
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| The Dongcheng District is outlined in red |
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| Dongcheng District Close-up You can see how close the hotel is to the Palace Museum |
About mid-morning the 6 of us who arrived a day early set out to see the sites within walking distance. A couple of banks were near the hotel, which made it easy to get cash. Just beyond that were some pedestrian-only areas and we spotted some familiar stores.
We came upon Xindon'an Square, which was a multi-story mall and decided to see if Chinese malls were different from American malls. The answer: not really. There were certainly local stores whose names we couldn't interpret but we also saw Apple, Omega, McDonald's, Starbucks and Rolex. Walking through the floors where food was served was interesting too, even though we weren't really hungry.
Walking back we passed a number of smaller shops and stopped in wherever something looked interesting.
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| The Culture House |
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| A local restaurant |
I don't know that I ever saw a supermarket but we saw several smaller food stores that sold other goods as well - they were just below street level and thus didn't have the above-ground footprint of their American cousins.
After walking a little while we wandered back to the hotel. The morning had been gray and misty but the rains came in the afternoon so it was a perfect time for a nap to help us get over our jet lag.
The rest of our group of 12 arrived by 5 PM. They were fortunate because some of the others in our Viking group had flight delays and didn't arrive until the wee hours of Monday morning, just before we took our first tour. That made me extra glad we'd arrived a day early. But the gang was all here and it was time to play tourist.
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