My first travel to Beijing-Tianjing, China.

Panoramic sights and excitement await visitors to China’s capital city, Beijing. The brash modernity of Beijing (北京) comes as a surprise to many visitors. Crisscrossed with tons of freeways, high rise buildings and super polluted in the city. For a thousand years, the drama of China’s imperial history was played out here, with the China's Emperor sitting on his highly throne but today Beijing is a very different yet remains spiritually and politically the heart of the country.

And the things not be be missed while you're in Beijing is of course The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven and Great Wall of China (Badaling). . It was 2009 and my mom booked our guided tour from Peanng to Beijing.
The 8 day trip was super cheap to me (costs me nearly AUD$1K) for full accomodation, flight and entrance fees.
This is excluding tips to the local guide and expenses in the city.

Our first stop was the Hutong trishaws and it costs nearly like RM5.00 to take a spin around the city. We chose one China bloke who looked pleasant and he was nice during our trishaw ride. We went to Prince Gong's palace and indeed we saw the Temple of Heaven! It was splendid. During those times, the Emperor will come here to pray to the Heaven God for good health, rain for the crops and blessings. The structure of Temple of Heaven is amazing-it's built without any nails on it! How cool is that!

The coming days were rushing here and there. We went to pay homage to the thousand of years enclosed city- The Forbidden City where the famous movie The Last Emperor was filmed. The place is huge and grand whereby you can get lost easily if you don't tag along well with the group. Some of our group members went missing and had to be contacted via mobile phone to meet them on the other side of the wall. We even visited the chamber where the 2 Empress Dowagers ruled behind the curtains (the 2 dragon ladies sit behind the young Emperor) It's a room whereby you can view through from the windows. The setting and furniture were antiques and looked very old & dusty too.

Next stop is the Bird Nest (Olympic Games main stadium) and it was massive. There was nothing much except the place is meant for the big event.

I was waiting for the day where we visited Badaling (The Great Wall of China). When my grandfather was still alive, he used to tell us those folk tales and there is a saying 'One is not a a hero until he reaches the Great Wall of China'.

The tour took us to the Empress Dowager Cixi's summer palace. OMG! The palace is beautiful and it stood majestically in the Winter season. There were showers and yet many tourists turned up to catch a glimpse of this building. Empress Dowager Cixi used the country's money to build a man made lake, jade sailing boat and even brought back the Qilin statue inside Summer Palace- a mystical animal believed to be powerful in the ancient times.

Our tour doesn't end if we didn't visit the Giant Pandas! Haha! They are so cute and fluffy. All they do is eat bamboos, play around and sleep for hours.
They are quite similiar to the Koalas in Australia - as these mammals sleep at least 13 hours a day. The Pandas only consume a certain type of bamboo from the forests making them a point of extinction. That's why China is trying hard to breed them and send them back to the wild.

We visited Tianjin via the bullet train from the Beijing station. It was great and overall we went to Beijing National Museum where we see paintings of China's fore fathers- from Chairman Mao, past and present leaders of China.

One tip from traveling to China- remember the water supplied in the country is a bit 'hard' and we were advised to use soap for the first time and remaining days of
shower should just be water. But I never listened and ended up with skin rashes on my thighs (some ladies in the group had the same problem too)
Bring your Hydrocortisone cream and flu medicine just in case whenever you visit this country. Cheers!