All in all it was a wonderful experience. Amazing sights to see, a lot of culture to experience (both ancient and contemporary), incredible all-nighters at different bars and clubs, great shopping, weather ranging from blazing sunshine to smog and rain, events and music and interesting people, and much more. My first four weeks were covered fairly well but for the second part of my journey I thought I’d sum things up more quickly. You’re getting one month’s worth of awesomeness covered in a single few lines. And pictures.

Beijing Zoo is a terrible place. Miserable pandas in plexiglass cages, mangy animals looking half dead and tourists gawking at them all day long. It’s awful that I contributed to the animals’ position since I paid my entry fee to see them – but how would I have seen the situation they’re in otherwise?

Let’s just say that I won’t recommend people to go there. The only happy animals seem to be the stuffed ones in the souvenir shops.

There are some nice bar streets in Beijing. I’ve tried quite a few areas: Sanlitun, Workers Stadium in general, Houhai, The Place, Ritan Park, Solana, around Chaoyang Park and some other places as well. The variety is good, ranging from common tourist traps to cozy Western pubs to seedy back alleys to Russian dance clubs – and much more. And the people you meet can be just as varied as well! All in all, I must say that the bar hopping was incredibly fun and a very positive thing about my trip.

It’s hard to pick a favorite place to visit but I think Sanlitun and the area around Workers Stadium wins. If I had to select only one bar area to visit in Beijing it’d be there: within a few blocks you can find everything from great clubs to bars to always-open pubs. Some of the tourist traps try to scam you, but as long as you don’t agree to anything or order anything without looking at the menu first you’ll be fine. Another way to be safe is to avoid all places with bright neon signs and bouncers, of course. Sanlitun and Workers Stadium has many “normal” bars as well.

In the picture above you can see a rare sight: me with a light stubble. I don’t have a trimmer, so it’s only when I shave off my beard completely that I have that four-day stubble thing going on. And that doesn’t happen very often…

The Chinese cuisine is also something I’m very happy to have experienced. Varied and interesting, some great and some…not exactly to my taste. But always interesting.

The hotel was also very good. It could have been a hell to spend six weeks in a hotel room, but the people were very helpful and everything worked excellently. Except for the water bottles. Come on! When will you get the hint that I’m not using your complimentary water?! 14 bottles plus three in the fridge. Man!

I’ve been focusing a lot on Beijing, but I actually got to see a little of Shanghai and Suzhou as well. It was expensive as diamond-studded crap, but I had to go up the Shanhai World Financial Center. Not as high as Taipei 101, but it really was a magnificent sight.

Another exciting thing that happened during my trip was the mixed martial arts competition Rising Force 13 – The Art of War. I was in China – I had to see some martial arts, after all! They had a heap of fighters and some very interesting fights (and some uneventful ones too), but the funniest part was that a Swede won the main event. I felt like a complete arse, sitting there shouting “Yeah! Go Sweeeeden!” after he won against the Chinese bloke. Thousands of Chinese supporters muttered harsh words and shook their heads, while we chuckled and hoped that we wouldn’t get assaulted.

Well, I think it’s time to wrap up things for now. This summer was great, and I hope to visit Beijing again soon. When? Who can tell… Maybe I should ask this frigging huge crystal ball found in Yashow Market!

Sounds awfully dull. And I guess it was; but it was exactly what all three of us needed by now.

We frequented restaurants and bars around the Sanlitun / Gongti (Workers Stadium) area most of the time. There we could find English-speaking personnel and Western-style food; in retrospect I guess we might have had a slight case of homesickness, and we clung to the few Western things we could find. Sanlitun is a strange mix of outright tourist trap bars, expensive imported goods shopping malls (The Village), and cozy back alleys with pleasant restaurants, bars and small shops. It’s just a matter of finding the right places to visit.

This is not one of those, even though the statues are pretty cute:

Speaking of food, Chinese food ranges from extraordinarily good and cheap to…very strange. It’s a small wonder that we felt inclined toward familiar dishes after sights like this:

Looks just like a tiny baby hand, doesn’t it? It’s things like that that made us order pizza from The Kro’s Nest on Wednesday instead of going out to eat. That place has excellent pizzas but unfortunately for us we didn’t realize that a medium pizza is not really a medium pizza. It’s a gargantuan pizza that could feed a soccer team for two weeks! We cheekily ordered three medium pizzas (“Yeah, I’m pretty hungry. Let’s go for a medium each”) and ended up with pizza-stinking rooms for two days until we convinced the housecleaners that indeed, we were quite finished with the pizzas and we were not going to eat a single bite more of them, and they were very welcome to dispose of them.

Thursday we went to a soccer game. Beijing against…some blue team. I had never been to a soccer match before, and it was a thrilling experience to be present when 25 000 screaming hooligans shouted their joy as Beijing scored 1-0. But no matter how exciting it was, it wasn’t exiting enough to make me stay for the entire game. Me and a colleague went to The Den instead to have a beer and some dinner.

Ironically enough, they had the game running in The Den so we could follow the second half while sipping an ice-cold Corona. On the way home we had trouble getting a taxi so my colleague decided to call it quits and took the subway home. Let’s just say that taxi always wins, even if one has to wait for a while to catch a cab.

In the hotel I noticed that my ever-growing collection of complimentary water bottles on the toilet had come to a stop. It ended up at ten bottles – from an original two. The bottles are still there, and I really don’t know what the hotel personnel are thinking… Oughtn’t they have noticed that I prefer to buy tastier water in larger bottles?

Friday was a great day. I guess our brief bout of homesickness had left us, because we found our way to a large sports bar called Goose & Duck (since the owner is Canadian, he explained while we emptied our bladders next to each other, and his wife is Chinese). There we had a good meal, good beer and got treated to a free comedy magic show with magician Arthur Trace. Quite funny, and quite a good show! I think I’m going to watch it again one of these days.

But the fun didn’t stop there. We had some more beers and got to see cheerleaders and a Phillipino live rock band, and we ended up staying at G&D until the band had finished playing and most of the crowd staggered home in a drunken stupor. Go Friday!

Saturday we were all envigorated after such an excellent beginning of the weekend, so we went to the Happy Valley amusement park. It’s a very big place, very well-made and was full of Chinese people gawking at us whiteys. Four times we were stopped so that people could have pictures taken with us. Hm… Maybe we could arrange a deal with the park owners, and act as an attraction?

The rides were awesome. At lest two of them. The rollercoasters weren’t plentiful, but what they had sure worked well! Heard from one colleague: “why did you let me convince you to go on this one?!”

Sunday was quite slow after all that excitement, and I really didn’t want to go anywhere. “Come on,” they chided, “you have to join us for dinner at least! Let’s take a walk to Gongti!” I knew I should have trusted my intuition, because ten minutes out the door, the heavens opened up for us. And not in a good way. We were soaking wet by the time we got to Danger Doyle’s, ending a half-dull week in a very fitting manner.

This marks half of my time in Beijing. Four weeks to go and lots more to experience…

I got distinctive flashbacks to my high school years; the place was small and crowded, and the audio was decent but not brilliant. The bands were also decent and quite worth watching, even though I guess I won’t be telling my grandchildren about them in years to come. There were also lots of Germans present at the club. Apparently this was part of a Chinese-German cultural exchange thing.

I don’t recall the band names, but they were a pop band with a female singer, a pop-punk band with some young guys, and some celtic death metal to top it all off. Very interesting mix.

On Wednesday we decided to explore the Sanlitun bar area, starting with a visit to The Tree, a quite hidden and secretive little Belgian pub. They have an excellent athmosphere, cozy interior, good selection of beer and quite possibly one of the best stone-oven baked pizzas that I’ve ever tasted. And some quite expensive beer…

We moved on to the appropriately nicknamed Gauntlet – the tourist trap street of Sanlitun – where we got ripped off and ended up paying 80 RMB for a Heineken at one of the places. 80 RMB equals about 8 Euros. That’s one-a expensive-a beer-a! After that we learned to always look at the menu first. Another interesting thing that happened was that we got lured into a place that offered pole dancing. Unfortunately for us we forgot to check what gender…

Eventually a girl did go up on the stage as well, but by that time we were howling with laughter, thinking that we just had gotten screwed for the second time that night. Still, that pole dancing guy really was impressive!

A lot more restaurants and pubs followed that week, and we explored the Sanlitun area quite well. The 80′s night at Alfa is particularly worth mentioning! That place rocks. I also hadn’t had enough of live music so I watched a phenomenal reggae band at the MAO Live House, close to Houhai. Quite impressive – and well worth the 60 RMB entrance fee.

Afterwards I went on to Houhai, a bar district next to the lake from which it receives its name, and ended up chatting with a Danish troubadour.

“So, I guess you’re singing to earn a little extra at the side?”
“Oh.. Nah… I just get free booze.”

For some reason I decided to walk around the lake and ended up meeting a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) harassing a couple of guards.

I spent a couple of hours walking along with the banana, his wife and a friend of theirs, experiencing bad Vietnamese coffee and strange youths fishing for clams or something in the lake.

After a while I bade them a drunken farewell and made my way home.

The week ended with a trip to the Forbidden City. It’s a very impressive place…but somehow not as impressive as I expected. It’s a gigantic area covered with statues and elaborately painted houses; it’s strange to think that all of it belonged to the Emperor in days of yore, but it wasn’t varied enough to keep up my interest very long. Well worth a visit, but nothing compared to the Great Wall. I have high hopes that the Summer Palace will be more interesting, whenever I end up going there.

Some more shopping also ensued. 70 RMB for an 128 GB USB memory? Too good to be true?

Indeed, it was too good to be true. After filling it with 32 GB of data it crashed. I wonder what’s inside…

Hmm, looks like a USB controller chip of some sort. What does the flash chip say?

D’oh! The sneaky bastards! They removed all useful information from the flash chip!

Stay tuned for more Beijing stories in the following weeks.

Upon landing in Beijing everyone gets their temperature taken even before getting off the plane. The fear of swine flu is rampant and no sick foreigners are wanted inside China. Unfortunately for me I traveled to China one day after I got back from a five-day hard rock festival, and I had a massive cold. I ended up examined by two doctors; they wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that I’ve been boozing and sleeping on the ground for five days, so of course I have a cold! But eventually I got to enter China if I promised to report to the nearest hospital as soon as I felt worse.

Yeah, I really planned on doing that.

The first night was spent at a vegetarian restaurant called Pure Lotus, owned by Buddhist monks. Very impressive presentation, but the food was nothing special. Still, that’s the first time I’ve seen something made out of mushrooms look like steak.

The following days were filled with bright sunshine, an unholy temperature, meetings and my first Peking duck. When Chinese people eat duck they don’t mess around – everything of the duck is eaten! Duck liver, duck feet, duck tongues…

I still feel ill when I think about it.

The hotel is located in the Central Business District of Beijing, in an area populated by foreigners and prosperous Chinese. The area is pretty enough, with a lovely view from my room at the ninth floor.

We did some brief sightseeing the first days, but a deep sense of desorientation is always present – Beijing is big with more inhabitants than the entire country of Sweden. Me and a colleague intended to go to the bar street in Sanlitun – but we somehow got completely lost and ended up walking around aimlessly for hours until we magically found ourselves back at the hotel again. We sure learned our lesson then: take a taxi when you want to go to a new place in Beijing!

On Saturday we were brought to the Great Wall by people from the company; a lovely experience that would have been infinitely more troublesome without their aid.

The Great Wall is impressive. There’s just no getting around it. Everything about it is impressive – the sheer size, the location, the surroundings, the history, the view, the crowds of hawkers trying to make you buy more-or-less useless trinkets. It’s also impressively hard work to climb the wall and its steep stairs. We were probably half dead after climbing to the top at the Mutianyu section.

But the view was worth it; excellent for posing and making an epic picture.

After all that hard work we still weren’t satisfied, so we visited Silk Market as well – a notorious tourist trap. You need clothes? Electronics? Trinkets? A locomotive? You can probably get everything there. We did some awful bargaining and stocked up on bare necessities like underwear and socks, leaving the major shopping for the following weeks. Then we decided to call it a week, and spent the rest of the time having relaxing stays at bars and restaurants.

A slow start on our Beijing trip, but stay tuned for exciting things – there’s a lot more to come!