It seems to get worse …
The taxi drives us from the airport, it’s quite a long drive as the airport is situated someway from the city of Beijing. All is going well and I’m tracking the progress of our taxi using Apple Maps which actually works quite well in Beijing. travelling from south to north doesn’t provide a lot of options for getting the route to our hotel wrong. However, the detail comes in actually dropping us at our hotel and the taxi drives to the wrong hotel. Now don’t forget here we don’t speak a word of Chinese, and our driver speaks not a word of English.
For weeks I’ve been psyching myself up for where this hotel is, it’s location in respect to the famous landmarks, where the subway trains are and how we will get in and out of this hotel. Our research has been as usual, top spec. If we were spies having planned our mission, we would be good … no great, spies.
As I’ve said in this post, Always carry hotel details in the local language, make sure you carry your hotel information in the local language to get you to the right place; we did. So, we were somewhat perplexed at why the taxi driver had driven us to this hotel over 5km away from where we should have been, more than a ten minute drive to our chosen hotel. As much as I tried to communicate that we were in the wrong place did the taxi driver try and convince us we were in the right place. There was only one to fix this, Wendy would confirm with reception we were at the wrong hotel and explain to the driver his predicament.
Well, as the driver was trying to tell us, the picture I showed him was the hotel we were at. He had indeed brought us to the correct hotel. It didn’t dawn until later when we debriefed on the situation that the Holiday Inn – Temple of Heaven is not the same hotel as the Holiday Inn Express – Temple of Heaven. It’s the ‘Express’ part we determined afterwards was the determining factor. And an ‘Express’ Holiday Inn isn’t as nice as a none ‘Express’ Holiday Inn.
We got to our room, it wasn’t quite what we were expecting; it doesn’t have a fridge … It’s fairly small and the bed is hard. There are 60 channels on the TV, all Chinese. The official notice in the room which says don’t talk to strangers in WeChat, and that you must always check-in all guests with the front desk is slightly unsettling. We decide we’re not staying here, in the five minutes we’ve been in the hotel room we’ve decided we don’t like the room, Beijing or China. Therefore, we will look for an alternate hotel for the night and then high-tail it out of this country.
Just before we do that though, let’s give it an hour and Wendy found a famous area around Wangfujing subway. It’s a fairly quick trip on the subway to get there, and our Alipay worked well. The street is great, all pedestrianised with plenty of Police presence. We find a little kiosk along the way where you are served by a robot, and a restaurant where we were able to get dinner and a beer. Okay, now we’ve been out and seen somewhere nice, subway was easy and safe, and we got food. Let’s give this a few more days …
