Heading for the capital

It would be an understatement to say that I wasn’t looking forward to taking the sleeper train from Xi’an to Beijing!  On the bright side, this time it was only 11-12 hours rather than 15, so if we were to suffer, at least it would be a shorter sentence.

It turned out to be no problem.  This is such a well worn route that there are numerous trains to Beijing every hour and most of the soft sleepers are taken up by foreigners who obey the non-smoking signs.  What a relief..

So far we have been in Beijing for 3 days and have already knocked off Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City as well as the Olympic stadiums.  We’ve been packed onto a peak hour subway train as well as a bus and walked our poor little feet off!  So today is a school/rest day.  One of the beauties of doing a trip like this is that you don’t have to push yourself every day if you don’t want to and with 4 kids, we rarely, if ever, do.

Tienanmen Sq and the Forbidden City were interesting – even if after about an hour in the FC, everyone was beginning to get a bit bored.  Typical of every palace museum we’ve been to throughout Asia – if you want to see anything of any merit, you either have to pay extra or it’s not on public show.

The most interesting thing we’ve seen so far is the security.  The only way to access Tienanmen Sq is through designated entry points where you must put your bags through xray machines and be body searched if selected.  The square itself is full of police, both uniformed and not, as well as quite a few soliders as well.  There are also at least 5 surveillance cameras on every light post.

The same entrance security is at the Forbidden City, the Olympic Games precint, as well as at every subway station. 

The subway, on a side note, is immaculate, brand new and everything is written and said in English as well as Chinese.  Top marks for the ticket machines which must be the easist to use machines I have ever seen.  No doubt a side affect of the the Olympics.

It wasn’t the first time we’ve been jammed into a train, but there was certainly not a lot of space, especially for the 2 little kids who were particularly squashed.  When the carriage is full, we watched people, who obviously had a lot of practise, get on backwards with their hands on the top of the door and then use their butts to push people back until the doors would shut. 

Check out the photos of us squashed into the train on Flickr.