Beijing, The Summer Place

When the Emperors were tired of being in the Forbidden City they just went to their Summer Place! And it is quite as huge and majestic as the Forbidden City :) they knew how to live well!

The gardens are just beautiful,

Definitely a must see in Beijing.

Beijing Food and some interesting menu translations :)

We were introduced for the first time in Beijing to one of the most interesting ways of sharing a meal, the hotpot! It's quite popular in Asia and every country has its own version.

It consists of a heated hot pot with a broth, which can be normal or spicy! as this was our first time we decided better to have half normal and half spicy, just in case the spicy was realllllyy spicy.. which it was :P

A big thank you to Shawn for taking us out for this treat! We meet Shawn using our Vlerick Alumni network! and it was a true pleasure to get to know him!

The fun part of the Hotpot is to order all the side dishes to put in the pot :) so we had a yummy selection:

yummy

One of our favourite snacks in Beijing was the dim sum!!!

more yummy Beijing food,

Fish with some caramelized sauce,

The amazing Peking Duck,

In this restaurant they had an interesting translation of some dishes to English... we couldn´t resist to share it :)

Who said Chinese food was only fried stuff ?

Chinese food is quite diverse! and very different from province to province! It is a true pity that in Portugal we only get the super fried stuff and really greasy... which by the way we never had in China! it simply didn´t exist in any of the provinces we visited!

They also have some really nice teas! with cool bottle designs,

Another Beijing classic, you roll the meat and the vegetable in the tofu sheet,

In this dinner Antonio had his first bad choice :P he wanted Duck but some how ended up with cold Duck :P ehehhehe good we ordered some extra dumplings to make up for it :)

The GREAT WALL

We were really looking forward for the Great Wall! since kids we always saw it in the documentaries about China! our expectations where high and we were not disappointed in anyway! A big thank you to Beth our Cisco colleague that took us to one of the nicest part of the Great Wall! :)

As a bonus! it was a beautiful sunny day,

We had to jump!!!! on the Great Wall :))

During our walk we met this group of ladies that used to work in the army and now are retired and travel all over China singing :)

In this section of the Great Wall there is several parts that are in ruin,

Our jumping sessions, 

Just amazing!

The surroundings are just beautiful as well! we were there in October so the leaves where changing color :) 

We leave you with the lady's singing! Disclaimer: We don´t know what are they singing about :P

Impressive Beijing and the Forbidden City

As soon as we landed in Beijing we were blown away! we had no idea how developed China was. Every thing is huge and majestic! Without knowing we booked a place near one of the many shopping districts in Beijing and we could not believe our eyes when we saw their malls. They are humongous! with every single brand you can image! some of which don´t even have shops in Europe... but they do have them here.... guess why... the Chinese middle and higher class have an impressive purchasing power! 

We never saw so many Apple shops as in Beijing and Shanghai! 

The place we were staying the first night in Beijing was quite hidden! Good we had the address in Chinese :P but it was quite nice, is what they call a Hutong,

The Forbidden City, what can we saw... is HUGE! and impressive,

There was an impressive queue of people to enter but it was mainly Chinese tourists. We didn´t see any western. So October is quite a good month to visit this area :) the weather was pretty ok! right now is freaking cold in Beijing :P

There is so many beautiful details in each one of the buildings :P good I have 8gb of memory in this camera!