China travels

So we've just returned from our trip to Beijing, China. Where we spent only one week, which several people called 'decadent', and which isn't nearly long enough to see all the sights, but it was everything we could manage with our limited off-days and busy jobs and stuff (the upside is that the busy jobs make us able to actually pay for the trip to China, so it does feel like a good balance).
Anyway, one of my friends from university decided about a year ago that she wanted to teach English in a Chinese high school instead of a Dutch one, so off she went to Beijing, where she teaches the lucky few in the special 'international program' how people think and work and study in the rest of the world. All of this to prepare them for their studies at Yale or Oxford or Harvard or Cambridge, because that's where most of them end up (although most of them also fail quite quickly and go back to China, because just 2 years in an 'international program' won't really prepare you for the culture shock). But as soon as she decided to live in China for a year, we decided to come and visit her.
I'd never been to the 'real'  Asia before; I visited Jordan in 2007 but that's more the Middle East than Asia. My boyfriend had already travelled extensively in Vietnam, China, and Malaysia, so he was probably more prepared. Although there wasn't that much to prepare us for; Beijing is a lot like any other big city around the world, only with a lot more smog. Otherwise; congested streets, great metro system (really, the best I've ever been on), lots of international restaurants, supermarkets, shops, etc. Lots of tourist attractions, although not always in the shape one would expect. And, even more unexpectedly, it's also a very green city; the Chinese love their plants, both flowers and trees, and there are some nice parks.
My friend lives in one of the typical Chinese apartment buildings, with oddities such as a refrigerator on the balcony and showering over the toilet, so we got the real local resident experience. She had the first three days of our visit off, so she could show us the sights and explain some Chinese customs and words to us, which was nice because most of them don't speak any English except for 'bye-bye'. But we managed anyway, because smiles, hands and feet, and a friendly tone will get you by almost anywhere in the world.
So what did we see? More temples than I could ever have imagined in a country that went through a Cultural Revolution and doesn't really like religion all that much. But there are lots of beautiful Buddhist temples around, the biggest and most impressive of which was the Tibetan Lama Temple quite close to my friend's house. Apart from billowing clouds of incense and lots of worshippers it contains a 27 meter high Buddha statue, the finest we saw in the whole country. We visited some other Buddhist temples, some newer and some older, but this was by far the best.
Then there was the Temple of Heaven, which was visited by the emperors to pray for good harvests. This isn't so much a Buddhist temple as a general heaven-worship temple, it also has something to do with fung shui (there used to be temples of the earth, fire and water as well), but the whole picture never really clear. These were really nice round temples with lots of numerological detail, which was nice after seeing all the other square temples. Also lots of guardian animals on the roofs, which is probably my favourite thing about these temples (we used to call the figure in front 'guy on a chicken' before we found out it's supposed to be a phoenix). The Temple of Heaven is situated in the Temple of Heaven Park, one of the many parks dotted around the city (sadly, no sitting on the grass, only on benches).
Of course we also visited the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, playgrounds of the former emperors. The Chinese call the Forbidden City the 'Palace Museum' and have put little shops and toilets and everything in all the buildings, but they're still standing and great to see. We loved the nine-dragon screen, of which only a few are left (we saw the one in Beihai Park, too). But mostly it's biiiig, way bigger than you'd think, with more than 800 buildings and huge squares that could fit thousands of people.
The same is true of 'the' square, Tian'anmen Square, to the south of the Forbidden City. This was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever had in a touristy place, with loads of jumpy policemen and military standing around, and very detailed security checks to get there (apart from the regular bag searches, you had to show your identity card, and there was some not-friendly frisking going on, especially of elderly Chinese ladies. As usual, we could walk straight through). There was some disturbance when someone threw a lot of leaflets into the crowd, with the stressed-out policemen shouting and pointing and running as if it were hand grenades rather than leaflets. On the lighter side, there were lots of Chinese tourists (also at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City), many of whom wanted to take pictures of us, because they're from tiny villages and we're weird Western tourists. Different people took different approaches to sneaking a picture, with some of them outright asking us to take a picture with them.
And last but certainly not least, we visited the Great Wall of China. This took some organising to get there, as we had to take two buses out of town, the first of which got stuck in a massive traffic jam and the second of which we couldn't find, so we took a black cab to the wall and arrived there about 4.5 hours after we set off. But it was well worth it, as we visited an unrestored section of the Wall, with all its crumbling beauty and very few other tourists. We had a great walk, and then a great bus ride back, again getting stuck in traffic and spending a total of 9 hours on buses (this was the day after we spent 9 hours on a plane, so you can imagine the state our legs and backs were in by that time - Chinese buses don't really accommodate people over 1.80 m). But again; it was more than worth it.
Beforehand I thought food might become a problem as I'm a vegetarian and allergic to lots of other stuff, but it was a breeze. We had some dinners in Western restaurants and some in Chinese restaurants, including a hotpot 'fastfood' restaurant and two vegetarian 'mock meat' restaurants (close to Buddhist temples, of course). My boyfriend didn't get to eat the much-anticipated Peking Duck, so we'll have to go back for that some day. There are some other things we didn't get around to doing as well, but then my friend is somewhat thinking about staying another year, so we may visit her again. Or we'll take a larger Asia trip one day, as this one has warmed me to that part of the world, which I didn't really know that much about. All in all, it was a great trip, and if you're unsure where your next city trip should be to, put Beijing on the list!