Four Days in Beijing - Let your palate be your guide

August 2018

We wanted to make the most of our Chinese visas before the expired, so we were excited when an awesome flight deal for Beijing popped up! We jumped at the opportunity to see the amazing city over Labor Day weekend.

100 Hours Left…

We landed into Beijing early on a Thursday and checked into the Ritz-Carlton. We were greeted by some lovely fresh fruit and macarons upon arrival to our room. We dropped our stuff and made a dash to Aroma, the hotel restaurant, for breakfast. We devoured plates of dim-sum, pork congee, and fresh baked goods while washing it down with some tea and fresh juices. The restaurant had a fresh hand-pulled noodle bar where you could select the type of noodles and your various toppings which they would then cook and steam for you.

After breakfast, we hopped on the train toward Tiananmen Square and explored the Forbidden City. Most people walk straight through the center of the complex, which is super crowded; but we would recommend walking along the edges and exploring the far corners. You’ll be pleased with unobstructed views that make for a great photo op.

Just beyond Tiananmen Square is Jingshan Park where we ascended up the many stairs to get an aerial, panoramic view of the Forbidden City.

After Jingshan Park, we walked through Beihai Park, a thousand year-old former imperial park. From here we enjoyed watching the small boats crossing the river and took a few minutes to rest our feet.

All this walking in the heat had us feeling rather peckish and I’m sure you can guess what was on our mind…dumplings, of course! We made our way through the narrow streets of Baochao Alley and ended up at Mr. Shi’s Dumplings for lunch. We sat outside and feasted on a beef noodle soup and a plate full of pork dumplings.

We headed over to Wangfujing snack street to roam the little shops up and down the street.

After a full day of roaming it was time to hit the hotel pool and burn off all the calories. We ended up swimming a bit too much and got hungry again so we had some wonton soup delivered to the room before calling it a night.

76 Hours Left…

Rise and shine and lace up those Nike’s! We were out of the hotel pretty early and made our way over to Ditan Park – a small 16th-century temple dedicated to the God of the Earth.

After wandering the temple grounds we stopped in for a meal and some beers at Jin Ding Xuan, a massive dimsum house (that has a few locations in the city). We ordered shrimp dumplings, braised beef noodle soup, Sichuan pork dumplings, soup dumplings, and spicy peanut noodles with dried shrimp. We absolutely loved the food here!

After that amazing meal we made our way over to Lama Temple – also known as the Yonghe Temple. Lama Temple is very colourful and gave us an opportunity to take some cool shots!

One of our favourite things to do when we travel is to roam around local hangout spots. We also really wanted to check out a hutong, so we walked over to Wudaoying Hutong, where we popped in and out of the variety of shops offering everything from tea to cool cartoon memorabilia.

We headed over to 29 Xingfucun Middle Road, a local noodle joint serving up heaping bowls of flat, spicy noodles. The portions were huge so we split a massive bowl of spicy pork noodles and washed it down with some sweet milk drink.

After a hearty meal like that we needed to walk a bit so we wandered through the streets until we found a nice patio to people watch from. Pretty random for an outdoor beer garden in Beijing. But hey, the weather was nice, we were working up a sweat, and beer sounded pretty good!

One of our favorite things about going on trips for VUS is the way we stagger smaller meals and snacks throughout the day to allow ourselves to enjoy more than just the standard three meals a day. Walking over 8 miles a day helps too 🙂

Beijing is known for its Peking Duck, and we were definitely in the mood to try a few highly recommended places for it. Up first was Biyanyifang (which has multiple locations in the city). We arrived just as they were closing, but the lovely staff said they were more than happy to accommodate us. We made their lives simpler by ordering even before sitting down. The great thing about ordering duck is that it is traditional for it to be carved table-side. So we had dinner and a show as the chef carefully and skillfully prepared our meal in front of us. The way your teeth slide through the thin wrapper and sauce to get a bite of juicy duck with the crunch from the cucumber. Ah, it was heavenly!

For tonight’s evening entertainment we decided to check out the hot ticket in town – Yin on 12, a rooftop bar with an indoor and outdoor dance floor and live DJ. After a few drinks and some dancing we took in one last view from the top and made our way back for the evening as we had an early morning to see a Wonder of the World.

52 Hours Left…

Most people who visit the Great Wall of China from Beijing go to Mutianyu since it is only about an hour from the city center. After some thorough research, we decided against that. Instead, we set our sights on Jinshanling, which is a little over two hours from the city (without traffic). It was definitely worth the extra journey. The grounds at Jinshanling were mostly empty and allowed us to up to roam along the Great Wall for miles without another person in sight. It was stunning to look into the distance and see the wall tightly hugging the mountain with no end in sight. After leaving Jinshanling, our driver convinced us to go to Mutianyu for the cable car ride, which was pretty cool. All in all, it was a great way to spend the day exploring this historic landmark.

Even though we didn’t walk the 13,000 miles of the wall we sure felt like we did. With its hilly terrain and steps it’s enough for anyone to work up a sweat. Dinner couldn’t come quick enough! Haidilao Hot Pot was calling out to us and this place was awesome! It’s a hot pot restaurant where you order on iPads. If someone had looked over at us they would think we were playing Fruit Ninja! But no, we were just quickly adding as many items from the menu as we could to our order 🙂 A couple varieties of pork and beef, a few shrimp and to top it off, a table-side show called
“dancing noodles.”

Maybe it was something in the hot pot or the electric performance of our noodle chef, but we suddenly found ourselves in the mood to dance! So we scurried over to Sanlitun to check out the night scene and checked out a couple of bars.

28 Hours Left…

Our last full day in Beijing and we were surely starting it right. We were up early and ready to get going. Of course we first needed to fuel up on some delicious food.

We sat down at 100 dumplings for breakfast. The name is no lie. The menu of this place is literally like a novel that you could flip through the pages of for hours. And there are legitimately 100 types of dumplings on the menu. We ended up ordering a variety and a bird nest looking thing?