All in all a successful trip to the capital of The People’s Republic. We finished our visit today with a continuous 6 hour walk through the city streets, touring a number of neighborhoods including the CBD ( downtown) and Sanlitun, a hip diverse neighborhood. Amazingly did not encounter a single rundown area, leading us only to believe, overall Beijing is quite well off as far as cities of 18 million go…
We had a wonderful dinner with our friend Ray again tonight and tried to really get a feel from his perspective. After all, being a US citizen who comes home often, yet has lived here for 13 years, gives him a fantastic perspective of everyday life and living trends. I’ll wait till after Shanghai to make any tourist generalizations that we tourists like to do, but for now, let me say Beijing is worth the visit for many reasons.
Our pictures from today will just reflect my observations downtown which we hit right at lunch time. Like I said before, Beijing is not the ultra vertical city like we will see tomorrow in Shanghai. But the architecture still was interesting and inventive. Additionally I see signs that they are beginning their vertical move. Sanlitun was our type of neighborhood; meaning it was vibrant, alive and quite diverse. If we return to Beijing, this is definitely where we would stay. We ate at Mosto tonight; surprise, a highly regarded Latin American restaurant. Right next door was a Spanish restaurant, on the block was Italian, Mediterranean, Iranian, French.. So there’s a whole diverse gastric scene which makes Beijing quite attractive.
Thats it for now. Pics to follow… Bullet Train tomorrow. Ready to see even more Chinese technology at work!
