This is the continuation of my two journal entries last week on my our adventure in the amazing Chinese capital, Beijing. Even though that the highlight of our trip is our Great Wall experience, I consider our second day more fun. Read on to find out…

DAY 2 – 第二天

After an extremely exhausting first day in Beijing, I was pretty surprised that my body wasn’t aching when I woke up on our second day. Right after I took a shower, Deng, my Chinese project mate from IBM China, called. He asked me if I am available for dinner that night. We agreed to meet up at around 7:30 PM at the lobby of Novotel.

Arman, ate, and I went down to Novotel’s cafe and ate our breakfast. As I have mentioned in my previous posts, I was a little short on cash so I was very thankful that my sister treated me to breakfast that day. We didn’t have anything planned for our second day aside from going to the Tiananmen Square (天安门广场). Fun right? I tried to stealthily persuade my sister and Arman to seeing other historical sites by squeezing them in our conversations during breakfast but I failed miserably.

After breakfast, we headed to the Chongwenmen Station of the Beijing Subway which is right in front of Novotel. My sister and Arman trusted me in taking them to Tiananmen Square so with a map of Beijing at hand, I did a Dora the Explorer and headed to the ticketing machine.

Chongwenmen Station - our gateway to the rest of Beijing 😛

I was a little confused at first with the subway’s ticketing machine. I wasn’t able to take a photo of it but it’s like LRT’s ticketing machine with a touch panel for choosing your destination. Initially, it was all in Chinese so I really had no clue as to what I was doing. Good thing that I noticed a button with “English” written on it so I pressed that one. The ticketing machine presents you a map of the entire Beijing Subway and you can choose to show only a certain Subway Line. I pressed Line 2 since the Qianmen Station, the station nearest the Tiananmen Square, was in that line. Each ticket, or piao (票), only costs 2 RMB (~14 PhP) regardless of destination. Seriously, you can go to any station along any line and you’d only have to pay 2 RMB. I’ll rave a little bit more about their subway system later in this post. Continue reading →