University of Southampton has a number of exchange partners across the world where you can conveniently enrol for a summer term abroad, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. After looking up the universities, I found Hong Kong Polytechnic University the best choice because apart from a month long summer course(more on that in the next blog), they offered a field trip to Mainland China at a nominal price of 1500 HKD. They even offered a choice of Beijing, Shanghai and Xi’an for the trip. Visiting the Wonders of the World, including the Great Wall has always been on top of my bucket list, so choosing Beijing was a no-brainer.
‘Bigger is Bigger’ in Beijing, remarked our tour guide as we slowly passed through Beijing’s never ending traffic and she really could not have been more accurate. China’s capital covers a massive area of over 16000 square kilometres, with a concentric ring road structure, the number of roads continue to increase steadily. In spite of massive 6-lane roads on both sides, Beijing has a slow moving never-ending traffic almost everywhere. Traffic aside, the city is an amazing amalgam of contemporary skyscrapers and historic monuments from the past kingdoms that ruled in Mainland China ages ago.
We started our trip with a tour of Beijing Shichahai Sports School and ‘Old town Beijing’. A rickshaw tour of Beijing’s old town provided a sneak peek into ancient Beijing houses, and also a fun Dumpling making lesson. The sports school near the old town had world-class sports facilities where children as young as 6 years old to China’s best athletes trained and prepared for various sports. Following a tour of the school, we also had a short Tai-chi lesson, which was super fun! Shichahai School also hosted a daily ‘Kung Fu Panda show’ which was an amazing experience as well. That was followed by a campus tour of one of China’s most prestigious universities, the Peking University. Keeping up with the Beijing norms, Peking University had a huge lush green campus with beautiful traditional Chinese style buildings. Peking University also boasts of the largest library in the world in terms of number of books.
Beijing was the host city of the 2008 Summer Olympic games and will also host the 2022 Winter Olympic games. The iconic Bird’s Nest stadium is one of the largest stadiums in the world and was the main stadium for the Summer Olympic Games in 2008. A quick tour of the stadium from inside showcased it’s gigantic seating capacity and we followed that with a quick tour of the juxtaposed Water and Aquatics Cube, the site for water sports at the 2008 Olympics and soon to be reused for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
While the tour was fun so far, the day of the main event, i.e. The Great Wall of China, finally came. We visited the Jurong pass which is around a 2 hour drive from Beijing city. The over 2000 years old structure still stands magnificently across North-Easter China, and in spite of the scorching heat that day, climbing all the way up the ancient Wall was an amazing experience, something I’ve always wanted to do but never would have imagined to have gotten a chance to do it while studying. Our trip ended with a tour of Beijing’s famous ‘Forbidden City’, which, obviously was huge like everything else in Beijing and had a number of beautiful palaces in traditional Chinese architectural design. All in all, Beijing was a fabulous experience but my tryst with Mainland did not end just here.
While studying in Hong Kong, we also decided to visit neighbouring Guangzhou, an import historical port city, just 2 hours of a convenient train ride from Hong Kong. Guangzhou like the other big cities in China was not short of skyscrapers, but the one that stood out the most was the Canton Tower, China’s tallest building, and the third tallest tower in the world. The central business district around the tower is a fun place to go around with a number of malls, but that’s about all in Guangzhou!
