Day 28 - Tai'an - Beijing

Tai'an - Beijing,

Finally Beijing, our last stop in China!
We woke up and crawled out of bed at 10.30am, packed our bags & checked out at 12pm. We then caught a taxi to the railway station, a different one to our arrival station.
We collected our tickets & went through security.
Immediately the security officers started yelling and pointing at the screen and stopped the conveyor belt with our luggage. They then started calling over police officers and gesturing at Tom's bag. For some reason this time going through security they had seen Tom's camping utility knife. We removed it from the bag and handed it over immediately, they then asked for Tom's passport and ticket. Tom translated a message explaining it was for camping & that they could have it. They weren't really talking to us, but continued to pass the knife and passport around, talking to each other animatedly & calling over more security. After about 15 minutes a police officer arrived who could speak english, he explained that we couldn't take the knife & seemed surprised that we happily agreed. We just wanted Tom's passport back & to board our train! It was very unusual that it was noticed this time, it has always been in the same pocket & we've been through countless security checks on planes, bus's, the metro, fast & slow trains.

We had a very big lunch of noodles before getting on the bullet train, we left Tai'an at 2.09pm & arrived at Beijing at 4.16pm. We were thankfully seated together this time and had very comfortable seats.  The train ride was pretty uneventful, the landscape passed by and became less green, the dirt is now a dusty brown. Closer to Beijing there are a lot of small dilapidated townships.

Once we arrived in Beijing, the train station was very large & quite hard to find the correct exit. We caught our most expensive taxi yet,  90Yuan to get to our accommodation in central Beijing. A great Hostel down a side street, surrounded by food, shopping & in walking distance to a lot of the big attractions. Beijing is looking like an expensive city, even our hostel was the most expensive accommodation yet, $22 AUD, per bunk bed, per night in a mixed, shared dorm with 2 other people.

We printed off our Mongolia Visa paperwork at a printing shop that was located 100 metres away, a total of 50 pages, only 2 pages is the actual application form & brought cold beers in the hostel common room. It was here that we met 2 other travellers, Luisa & Augusto who are here from France for 2 weeks.  We had a few more beers & spent a few hours talking in the common room, where our english attracted another person called Remi, before deciding to all head out together to explore Beijing. We initially set out to explore a night market, but after arriving in its location we realised it shut at 10pm, this seemed quite strange as all the night markets we had seen in other places all over China stayed open till midnight. Despite this, it was a great excuse to use the metro, buy a few more beers & walk around in the city.

We returned to our hostel just before midnight, crawled into our bunk beds & fell asleep.

- Alli