Day 2: Beijing

After about 9 hours of flight time, we reached Beijing. During the flight somewhere between Warsaw and Moscow, we had our first Asian meal, rice with chicken. The flight was very smooth and we tried to sleep as much as possible to counteract the jet lag. Even during the descent, we were already overwhelmed by the size of the city. It looked like someone had arranged a thousand identical residential buildings or skyscrapers neatly in a row, as if in a computer game. We are excited...

After enduring a nearly 2-hour queue marathon, we finally obtained our 144-hour transit visa and were officially able to set foot on Asian soil for the first time. We took one of the official taxis and had an exciting taxi ride to our hostel. There were simply so many impressions and things that are just different from what we're used to...

But now, a quick nap and then off to the city! We just started walking and after about an hour, we reached the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. It was already dark and accordingly freezing cold when we arrived.

So we took the subway back to the hostel and looked for something small for dinner. As we strolled through the streets, we saw a small shop that was very crowded with locals. As far as we could tell, they served soup there. That was just right after the walk in the cold, we thought, so let's go in and see... Well, uh, how does this work now?!?! I think we looked so overwhelmed with ordering that a woman asked us if she could help us after a short time, and we told her in English that we wanted something without meat. She ordered for us in Chinese. Actually, we had no idea what exactly she ordered... we got a very delicious noodle soup with spring onions. The only problem was, how do you eat soup with chopsticks... We looked around and saw everyone slurping and bending their heads low over the bowl. Well, we can do that too, and it worked great...