A Mid-Westerner in Mid-Wales

Wow, real time blogging from my vacation, er, holiday.  We are currently in Taipei in the middle of our Christmas holiday.  We began our trip with a train trip from Aber to London to fly out of Heathrow.  Despite it being two days before Christmas and London recovering from its massive snow storm, all of our travel (Arriva, Virgin, the Tube) to the airport went without a hitch.  Even at the airport our check-in process was painless, almost too painless.  As our checked luggage was tagged and about to be sent to the underworld of airport conveyor belts, we were asked if we checked any crackers (the Christmas staple, not the edible kind).  We said yes and were asked to pop them before checking our luggage.  It makes the surprise a little less exciting now.

Our first air leg of our journey took us from Heathrow to Beijing with Air China, a flight of about 10 hours.  The flight was smooth, no problems.  We landed in Beijing just before noon.  Unfortunately, the approach into Beijing was obscured by f(sm)og so we couldn’t see much.  We arrived into the new terminal that was built for the Olympics.  The terminal is massive and open, it gave the impression it was designed to give.  As reported earlier, we were only able to get a double entry visa, one entry for both legs of our trip.  We got through customs and immigration without difficulty and checked in with the airline who was coordinating our hotel and transportation.   The hotel was about a 10 minute ride from the terminal and was a very standard 1950s block architecture building in the relative middle of nowhere.

After dropping our things in our room, we hopped aboard a shuttle returning to the airport and grabbed the light rail into the heart of the city.  A quick subway ride brought us to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.  We just missed the closing time for the Forbidden City but we managed to walk around the outside for a bit and get some good photos

IAC and Mao

We also explored Tienamen Square.  It was quite interesting to have to pass your bags through an x-ray machine just to go to the Square.  While we didn’t see any tanks, we did see lots of police in uniform and, presumably, lots of police not in uniform.  It was quite cold in Beijing in December so we didn’t stay too long.  We next took the subway to Guijie (Ghost) Street for dinner.  It was a street filled with all sorts of Chinese restaurants, lanterns, and flashing lights.  We found a Sichuanese place that satisfied IAC’s requirement for good Chinese food, it was filled with Chinese people!  The food was delicious and a great start to our vacation.

Ghost Street in Beijing

The next morning we flew to Taipei, met up with IAC’s Father, and boarded the high speed rail to Kaohsiung.  We finally arrived at our hotel after three trains, two flights, a couple of subways, and countless shuttles (buses, cars).

As for the subject line of this post.  When we arrived at our Aunt’s house we were given some toothpaste to use while we were there.  The name of the toothpaste was “Whitemen”, the tag line is “Guadian of Tooth”.  I think I found a new moniker for me.

Guadian of Tooth

Tags: Air China, Beijing, Forbidden City, Taiwan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Holidays and Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.