Post #22 - November 2, 2012 - Beijing, China - Summer Palace, Silk St

Patty here.

Just finished up dinner at our hostel again tonight. The food is too good, cheap, and convenient to pass up here. It was our third night eating here at the hostel. Dinner was under $10 again, which was a good thing after another pretty pricey day. 

We woke up at around 9 am and ate breakfast at the hostel. We had to decide which sight we wanted to go to that morning. We narrowed it down to choice between the Summer Palace or the Temple of Heaven. We ended up choosing the Summer Palace because according to our book, the Summer Palace is "virtually as mandatory a Beijing sight as the Great Wall or the Forbidden City [and] easily merits an entire day's exploration." .... pause.... unless we were in the totally wrong place, and the sign outside saying "Summer Palace" was a typo, this is simply false. But, even though the "Summer Palace" can be easily confused with the "Old Summer Palace" which is located in a totally different area of the city, we were definitely in the right place. We wandered through the Palace grounds in under 2 hours and were left pondering what the book was referring to. The only thing the Summer Palace had in common with the Great Wall or Forbidden City was the number of tourists. 

The Palace served as a holiday retreat spot for the Imperial Court back in the latter part of the 1700's. The grounds are made up of temples, gardens, pavilions, a large lake, and corridors which no doubt must have been really impressive in their prime. The view from the main hilltop structure was quite something and the various levels of steps that arrived at hilltops that led to the grander one created a very interesting landscape. However it took us a total of 2 hours by bus and subway to get to and from  it and we just felt that our time would have been better spent elsewhere.

We decided to head back to the hostel to drop off our camera and grab a quick bite before heading back to the Silk Market for another shopping day. We arrived at Silk Street at around 4pm and went right to it. Jeans were first. A great way to barter a better price is by buying in volume so that's what we did. As Jeff mentioned, yesterday our first purchase was a pair of Diesel pants for me at $30. This was the benchmark. So, when we got them down to about $25 on a pair of Dolce e Gabbana Jeans for Jeff, we said we would buy another pair if they lowered the price to $20. Then they through in another pair in and we got all 3 pairs for $58. We also got Jeff two Quick Silver T-shirts for $12, me two blouses for $27, and another pair of Armani pants for $13. So, we did a lot better today. But the bank is now closed and will remain so for the rest of our time in China! It's no wonder, the Chinese economy is growing at cheetah's pace. 

Tomorrow we're meeting Dale at 10 am to take the fast train over to an island nearby. Since we're skipping Shanghai and therefore the Maglev train, Dale suggested we take this train trip with him instead. It won't be the Maglev but it should be pretty cool. According to Dale this train can travel up to 350km/hr. The whole trip should take us all morning/afternoon. It's already our last night in Beijing. We're off to Ping Yao tomorrow night!

Patty