Beijing Day 3

June 24, 2024

Today was pretty chill! I started off the day a bit late since yesterday was a little much. Called some family and all that and the lady who runs this hostel showed me around the market area. She also bought me ice cream! 🙂

After the little walk I went back to the hostel and read outside for a little while. It was very nice. I don’t really get to be outside very much at home, but being here relaxing like that was soo peaceful.

After my lazy start to the day, I then hailed a taxi to Gubei Watertown. It’s a pretty touristy area, with a lot of Chinese people coming to visit. It was really neat. It had a very traditional vibe with ancient-esque buildings and infrastructure. There were even people rowing boats along the canal and stuff. It makes sense why it’s called water town, as it seems to be built over a river. Anyways it was very nice but the charm was kind of ruined because beforehand I had read about it and learned it was actually built in 2014. This town is also how you get to Simatai, a part of the great wall that they put lights on. That’s where I was headed.

After I walked around a bit, I found this restaurant by the water looking unto a small bridge. It was so peaceful I had to stop by and I wasn’t even that hungry.

Afterwards, I walked around some more, treated myself to TWO (2) ice creams, just because I can (that’s what independence is really about), and then headed to the cable cars that brought me up to Simatai.

I got there as soon as it opened for the evening which was 6pm, and stayed until closing which was 9pm. It was amazing. What it was was a short hike on a path overlooking the side of the mountain, which led to a more central part that had the great wall. You could either go to the bottom to see the rest of the wall leading into the horizon where the sun was setting, or you could go up to see the wall leading into a watchtower. I first went down as far as they allowed and then I climbed up to watch the sunset.

It was so gorgeous, no amounts of words/pictures could do it justice.

As it got dark the wall then illuminated itself with the lights along the stair cases, which was also a cool thing.

Afterwards, I headed back down on the cable car and was a little worried about how to get back home. In a larger city there would be no issues as taxis are not hard to come by, but here it’s more of a gamble, especially later in the night. Luckily, after I exited the small pedestrian town, there was a taxi right in front of the gate! How convenient. He also offered to take me to Beijing tomorrow but I’m going to take the train as it is way cheaper. 12 RMB compared to 400.

Anyways that was most of my day and it was pretty nice. Goodnight!