Busy Beijing

We slept a lot during the flight, so the last 9 hours and 35 minutes. felt like a short distance. at 13 local time we landed in China. It was a quick procedure to get through immigration. However, it took a long time for our luggage to arrive. The next challenge was to find a taxi that would take us. The address on our hotel reservation was only written with our alphabet - so all the taxi drivers at the airport turned us down. In the end we found someone who could figure out how to translate the address. Strange that the address on our hotel voucher was not automatically written in both versions... A taxi from the airport costs approx. DKK 75 and takes 30 minutes. We had booked an overnight stay away from home in the central part of Beijing. We live in the old town with very narrow streets, which are called "hutong". Every once in a while a car tries to get through the streets, but it's quite a challenge. The highly loaded bicycles are pulled well to the side so that the car can squeeze past. The elderly sit in the shade and play cards, Majiang or dominoes. There are many restaurants and shops. Life in our hutong seems calm and peaceful. There is free Wi-Fi at our small, family-run hotel. Here we were reminded for the first time that China is still very much state-controlled. There is no free access to Facebook. You must first have downloaded a program so that you can bypass the blocking. There is also no access to the BBC and CNN. In addition, China also has strict control over Google, so there are certain pages that cannot be searched. Beijing is one of the world's most polluted cities - but you can't see it on land. The street sweepers are busy cleaning up all the time. There is a lot of traffic, so there is no doubt that they contribute a lot to the CO2 pollution. There is a constant haze of smog over the city, so we don't have to think so much for using sunscreen :)