An evening walk: Jingshan Park to Donganmen night market

It was 5pm by the time we'd unpacked and headed out to explore, but it was still hot and muggy.

We wandered through Jingshan park, the eastern entrance to which was less than 100m from our hotel's front door. This was full of people, but big enough that it wasn't actually crowded.

the Forbidden City moat

We climbed over the pagodas and came out the southern entrance, facing the Forbidden City.

We sat for a while next to the Forbidden City moat, watching people fishing, passersby, a mad Western jogger, and so forth. Then we bought some meat sticks to snack on and headed to Wangfujing Daje via backstreets.

Donganmen night market

The Donganmen night market offered pretty much anything you could think of on skewers, but it was rather shiny, with a neat row of stalls and everything very clean — and a family affair, with a lots of children and teenagers. We avoided the scarier looking offerings, and had dumplings, some kind of wrap, meat and chive pancakes, and jelly.

Afterwards we returned to our hotel along the park section of Beiheyan Street. The sun came out, sort of, but it was not too unpleasant.

One big surprise about Beijing was that there was hardly anyone smoking, or hawking. As with the clean tidy streets, I suspected government regulation of some kind.

Next: the Forbidden City
Previous: the Beijing Hotel Shatan
Up: Beijing