First impression of Beijing were quite mixed. After passing passport control I grabbed a cab to go to the hotel. From the airport to the city goes quite nice motorway. It looked like it was a foggy morning, but it turned out to be just pollution. On the motorway all signs were dubbed in English. Taxi driver asked 400yuans for a trip to hotel. Interestingly enough, the same trip back was just 100yuan.

When motorway entered a city traffic became chaotic. Just later, walking in the city I realised how chaotic it is. Traffic lights, lanes, priorities do exist in theory, but in practice it is not safe to cross a street, even on the green light.

Guards, police and army are everywhere. I’ve never seen so many people in the uniform on the streets of a city before.

You can often see groupls of people in similar clothes doing exercises in the parks or outside the factory buildings.

When the plane was approaching Beijing a spectacular view opened to my eyes – endless kilometers of brown mountains, in some places covered with snow. Then the city appeared. It looked almost the same as if you were aproaching Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, except that all houses were really tall and there were many more of them. Also quite many industrial sites and factories could be seen around the city.

After landing we had to go to the bus and it was quite chilly outside – just +1 C.