Something interesting happened at the end of October in 2008: I got married. Something interesting happened right after that at the beginning of November in 2008 too: my wife and I went on honeymoon, it being the first foreign trip we’d taken together and the first holiday of greater than a few days we’d had at all in the twelve years we’d been together at that point.
We wanted to do something special – getting married being one of those things considered worthy enough to warrant something special, after all – and so we had a travel agent arrange for us to fly out to China in order to undertake a cruise on the Diamond Princess. We knew people who’d got married and spent a fortnight on a beach somewhere tropical but beaches bore us senseless. We knew we wanted to go abroad, we knew we wanted to experience the history and culture there when we did, and when we saw this cruise itinerary we knew that the chance to visit and get a taste for a lot of countries in one go was absolutely perfect. Princess Cruises had an option to spend three days before the cruise in Beijing with a number of excursions included and we eagerly took up the offer.
To give you some idea about how excited we were to be visiting a foreign country after all this time together the first photo I took was from the coach ride from the airport to the hotel and it’s of a parked car near a road toll gate. Other thrilling photos from the ride to the hotel include construction work and busy roads so make sure you’re seated before viewing them below.
The hotel that we stayed at was the Great Wall Sheraton.
We were handed our keycard and checked in.
You can see the view from our room in the video below (edit: no you can’t, as I’ve removed it for now). You’ll also be able to see some of Beijing’s famous smog against the buildings in the distance. We could tell that there was smog in Beijing but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as we’d been led to believe, although that may partly be because our visit was just a few months after the 2008 Olympics had taken place when there’d been a concerted effort to reduce pollution in the Chinese capital.
After seeing the prices for food in the hotel restaurant we decided to eat elsewhere in the evenings during our stay and you can read about that in a separate post on Beijing Restaurants.
We only did a little bit of exploring in the area around the Great Wall Sheraton; the novelty of a foreign trip, our generally cautious nature, and the extremely different culture in the country we were visiting being contributing factors in our lack of bravery there. We’ve got a lot better since this first spot of overseas travelling. We even found an Irish pub in Beijing not far from our hotel and never went in! To be fair, it would have felt wrong to travel to China and do so at the time but, again, that’s very unlike how we are these days where the thought of visiting a place like that in a location like that appeals to us.
Not far from the hotel was a river with a bridge over it. This are made for some pleasant evening walks, especially so when the bats would come out and fly around.
We also had an encounter with a local Chinese man in this spot. His English was flawless and he asked a lot of questions about where we came from which we were happy to share and talk about. It was when he asked if we wanted to follow him to a little art shop down a small alley that we started making some excuses about finishing our walk first. There was probably nothing nefarious in his suggestion at all – we certainly came away from China with the impression that it was a very safe place for foreigners to visit – and it was likely exactly what it now seems like: an attempt to sell some art at inflated prices to rich, foreign travellers. If only we’d actually been rich and less timid we might have come back with an interesting souvenir of our time in Beijing.
We enjoyed our stay in the Great Wall Sheraton, Beijing, and our only regret is that we didn’t make more notes and take more photos at the time. We’d have no hesitation in returning and we’d probably be more likely to try the food in the restaurant as well as explore more of the nearby area should that ever happen.