After a very relaxing sea day yesterday, we've arrived in the port of Tianjin. We had another early wake up call at 5am which got us into gear for the very big day ahead of us. (This trip we booked through Princess as we had to be assured of returning to the ship on time.) After waiting in the Vista Lounge for well over an hour, we finally boarded our coach for the 3 hour drive into Beijing, with one comfort stop along the way – Asian dunnies!!!! Our guide Martin (a very nice, young Chinese fellow), was about to give us our day long history lesson on Beijing!!
We travelled on a relatively new expressway, although the bus was only allowed to do 80kph. The scenery was fairly bland, with only tree nursery farms along the way and barely any sight of civilisation. In saying that, every few kilometres apart, there were masses of high rise, new residential buildings, which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and the majority are totally empty.
As we crawled through the bumper to bumper traffic, Martin told us the air quality was extremely good, great news as when it gets too bad, they literally stop the traffic until it clears!!! From what we saw, the CBD wasn't very exciting, very bland, grey, plain buildings, but all was about to change as we arrived at Tiananmen Square. It is the world's largest public square and is equal to the size of 90 football fields and able to hold 1million people!! It was such an incredibly large space with a very tall "Monument to the People's Heroes" standing proud in the centre. There appeared to be hundreds of tourists excitedly taking photos in all directions, but they looked like ants in this huge arena…. To be continued:……
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