The next day was our last day at Beijing and we had a flight to Bangkok that
evening, so we decided to just go randomly wandering the streets to see the
actual city and not just tourist attractions.
The next day was our last day at Beijing and we had a flight to Bangkok that
evening, so we decided to just go randomly wandering the streets to see the
actual city and not just tourist attractions.
Another thing which struck in in Beijing (I had noticed this in the previous
days too) was the high amount of contrast. You could walk a nice modern-looking
street with nice houses (even much nicer than the ones on the photo on the
left), shops, modern buildings etc, and then you could go to the next
parallel street and encounter 1-story houses which were almost in ruins,
full of junk and dirt. At some places the contrast was very striking. You
could walk 50 meters from an ultra-modern clean street to a street which
looks like from one of the poorest countries in the world.
Believe it or not, the "building" on the right is a police station(!)
As I have mentioned earlier, bikes were often used for the same role as pickup
trucks. On the left you can see such a bike used in this case to transport
coal (a rather common way of warming homes there).
Actual lorries were sometimes used too, often to the extreme as seen on the
left. On the right you can see one of the things I have been mentioning:
Pollution. You could see dirt in everything that had not been moved for a
while.
Somehow it wasn't a tempting idea to buy and eat meat sold like this...
In our walking trip we stumbled accross a huge marketplace selling food and
all kinds of stuff.
