Beijing, Trans Mongolian done, China begun.

The Olympic Stadium Area

I am crossing desert, the population density is minimal, the land is featureless. This is leaving Mongolia by train out through the Gobi Desert. I fall asleep. I wake up. Still in the country side, but it is sparsely different. Welcome to China, the land of people. There seems to be no space that hasn't been cultivated, there are paved roads everywhere, and on those paved roads there are people, lots of people. We roll along with signs of a land long lived in, the Great Wall summons us into Beijing. Slowly the buildings get more compressed together and there height pushes the sky. For a city the size of Belgium it takes a good hour to travel into the train station. But as always the train arrives and we get off.

A not very fun three hour stop to change the bogeys on the train in the middle of the night

The great wall seen for the first time by my eyes

Right there, getting off, that was it. That was the completion of the Trans-Mongolian Rail. A journey that took us a quarter of the distance around the world. Along 7536 km of Europe and Asia through five time zones. We got off, and that was it. No 'welcome here' fireworks celebration, no handshake from the Chinese president. We just got off.

Welcome to Beijing...

Walking up out onto to the street we were suddenly lost in a sea of people. It seemed that everyone in town had gathered around the train station. Well this is what it felt like, the fact was there is just lots of people in town, everywhere. This was definitely a significant change from being a nomad wondering the empty steppe of Mongolia. A nice short ride on the flash new Beijing metro took us to our hostel. The Far East Hostel was located in brilliant little Hutong (a little Chinese alley way). But we reserved looking around for later in the day. First mission had to be the Olympics.

Hutong!

The team achieved Olympic glory

So another ride along even flasher sections of the Beijing Metro to the Olympic stadium was undertaken and Beijing then showed off all its grandeur right there. The stadium area is rather impressive to say the least. The new China seemed quite ahead of the world. Even after seeing the birds nest stadium and water cube on TV lots beforehand, it was still rather spectacular being there in person. It was obvious from the random night a few months after the big event on which we were there that the Olympics must have been amazing. We strolled for a while along the Olympic boulevard taking lots of photos until we reached another metro station and then went back for an old school taste of Beijing.

The water cube is beyond today

Looking fly by the birds nest...

This thing is cool, but probably didn't have any events run in it

The nest up close and personal

We had nearly reached our hostel stop, which took about 45 mins, when we had a bit of a disaster. Arnika, who had barely eaten all day was suddenly rather pale and complaining about not being able to stand up. So jumping out of a metro train onto the platform she had to sit down looking like she was about to pass out. Suffering from a case of low blood sugar we tried to make it out of the metro to find some coke or something for her to recover on. So helping her stand up, we made it about 5 metres before she turned to jelly in our arms and fainted. Being rather scared that this could turn out quite catastrophic, Tom ran off to get a coke while I took care of Arnika who had come back around, but had no idea of what was going on. Tom took a few minutes in which Arnika, who wouldn't remember it, was getting rather scared that she was going to get arrested. Thankfully some coke machine was near by and a few sips did some kind of magic and returned back our good old pal from the depths of her other dimension.

Even though Arnika fainting in a metro was quite intense, I still managed to document it

So relieved and contemplating what could have happened we returned to our Hutong to get a traditional dish of Peking duck to celebrate completing the rail. This started the next months eating marathon. Food being very cheap and very good in China was a joy. The joy was also found in the names of the food, 'road duck' being a quite accurate description of the dish which was just a whole duck that had been cut up and so looked like it had been just run over. A cheap $1 beer washed the dish down and feeling fantastic we made our way back to our sterile but very comfortable beds and dreamed of the new adventure that lay ahead, China.

Eating in a Hutong in Beijing is the best way to eat ever.

The diner was dominated