First things first:
If you plan to go to China, visit ctrip.com.
- Hotels are way cheaper and way more there (careful, some are only for chinese, so maybe you will get cancellations. But they will call you and find you another hotel)
- Flights for inside China are way cheaper.
- It is the only way (I think) to book trains
Try the Chinese version with google translate for cheaper prices!
Ok let’s start my trip description!
This was my 4th time in Beijing, so you won’t see many touristic attractions here. For that, you can check my older posts here and here.
On Wednesday 11/05/2016 I arrived at about 15:00 in Beijing after a long flight. I would stay until May 13th there before we went on our first weekend trip. I had booked a hotel close to the university my friend was studying (Beijing Institute of Technology, close to National Library, metro stop Weigongcun).
It was this one. No need to click on the link, it was a cheap and kind of bad. Plus I made the big mistake of choosing a room without windows because it was cheaper. NEVER do that.
But it had the plus that it was on a real, non-touristic area… (not that there are many touristic areas)
…with awesome street-food market at nights.
And a zoo cafe 🙂 With teddy bears and familiar (but expensive) western desserts.
There were foreigners also in the area: the students. But the university was mainly for chinese students, the foreigners were a great minority. Here are some scenes from the university:
This is where you pick up your packages 🙂
Interesting way of drying your clothes… outside, in the middle of the university.
My friend’s dorm room. She lived with polish girls that brought their furs.
The first day I arrived, my friend took me for malatang. You choose your ingredients 
and they make it into a nice spicy soup with thick sesame sauce. And some other stuff. I just said yes to everything.
my friend 🙂
Second day, I went for lunch at her favorite place inside the university: a tiny korean restaurant. And we had vegetarian bibimbap, which I am trying to eat wherever I can find since then:
And then we left for the famous Wangfujing, the shopping street of Beijing. Don’t go there for shopping. Go to one of the huge malls. Wangfujing is only for touristic stuff. I don’t think I will visit it again, I have been there 3-4 times already. You can check my older post here.
But there is a huge bookstore there:
I should have bought this one…
After Wangfujing we went to an actual mall:
IKEA in the mall…
We ate hotpot in a fast food chain in the mall. You choose your base (what kind of taste you want your boiling water to be) and what you will boil. Then you get your raw meat and vegetables and you boil them on your pot, fish them out when they are done, dip them in a sauce and eat them.
Third day: first I visited the National library. I even got a membership card as a souvenir 🙂
After my friends class finished, we went to Sanlitun. I have described it in a previous post. It is the embassy area, very western and rich.
This is the Sanlitun dog. Every time I go there, I see some dogs of this brand.
First we went to Max Brenner’s for super expensive (for China) chocolate desserts. You may think why did I do that? Go for western stuff on my 3rd day in China. The answer is that my friend lived there for months and she really wanted some amazing chocolate for a change!
Then we went to the Cat Cafe. It is a cafe where cats are walking around, sitting wherever they want.
We went to an awesome “hipster” bookstore:
We found a mall with a temporary Simpsons theme (SUPER expensive Simpson-clothes, like 200 euros or so):
After that we just walked around.
We took the bus to go to the university again and went for AMAZING Beijing duck! My friend is a vegetarian, but she had scouted beijing-duck places with her colleagues so that she could take her guests. So nice! 🙂
The place was fancy and of course not touristic at all. It is close to the university and everything on the menu was in chinese.
After that amazing dinner, we went to the train station Beijing West to take the night train to Datong.
Zizeloni van Kat 