On one of those long subway rides to the center of Beijing, John noticed, that the Forbidden City is actually a tiny icon on the subway map. And it is the only icon – no other sights are indicated on that rather technical map that helps to ease the chaos of how to get from one unpronounceable station to another one. The Forbidden City is literally the center of Beijing, the heart of the city, probably the heart of the nation.
by living and working in a city, I find it quite hard to do things tourists would do when visiting Beijing.
October is a pleasant time in Beijing: Temperatures are cooling down, it is generally dry and as the heating season hasn’t started yet, we are lucky to get some days with a decent blue sky and quite some sun. As the last days had been really pretty with amazing air quality, two colleagues and I decided to venture out on a little trip and check out „Fragrant Hill“ (Xiang Shan 香山)。
Even though I planned on having a lazy weekend, I got itchy feet and went exploring. After an eternity of 1.5 hrs of a subway ride I arrived at „798 Art District“ in the north east of Beijing. The huge areal is a former industrial site and most of the buildings were built by the former GDR.
Beijing – my new hood! It’s time to send a first „Ni hao“ from the Chinese capital that I call my home for now. I lived in China before: over ten years ago I started my professional teaching career in Guangzhou, a huge city in the south, neighboring Hongkong and Macau.
Today I spontaneously decided to visit the inner city of Beijing as I was already close to a subway station because of some more paperwork I had to deal with. So I went to Tian’Anmen Square. To be frank, I was quite excited when I climbed the stairs from the subway and entered the surface.