2008-09-26 In Beijing we had booked a hostel in advance via www.hostels.com. Originally we planned to stay one night in Beijing, then take a night train to Shanghai, stay another night there and then fly home from Shanghai. We had already booked the flight from Beijing to Vienna via Dusseldorf with AirBerlin, but some weeks before the trip, we were notified, that this flight would be cancelled. AirBerlin offered a full refund of the ticket price (~450 EUR) and a discount of 150 Euro for any other AirBerlin-flight. So we booked a flight from Beijing with them and due to the discount it cost only 304 EUR. This flight was on the same day as the other flight from Shanghai, so we extended our stay in Beijing by two nights. The hostel for the 1st night (Beijing Downtown Backpackers) was already fully booked for the other two nights, so we booked another hostel (Wangfujing International Youth Hostel) for the 2nd and 3rd night. After arriving from Pyongyang at the main train station, we went to the hostel by taxi. Going by taxi in Beijing is relatively cheap and easy. It is just necessary to have the destination written on paper in Chinese. Fortunately the hostels adress was written also in Chinese on the booking confirmation. The hostel was in a quiet narrow road north of the city center. As both of us had already been to Beijing before, we were not in a hurry to do as much sightseeing as possible. We decided to make a day-trip to Tianjin with the new highspeed-train, but apart from that we had no plans yet. It was also good to have some time to work through all the impressions of our trip to North Korea and sometimes we couldn't believe that we really had sucessfully done the Tumangan-route to Pyongyang. On of the 1st things I did after arrival at the hotel was checking my e-mails and telling relatives and friends that our trip was a success and we were still alive. As expected there were also some e-mails from our travel agency in my inbox, which I could read only now. Our last-minute-announcement about the "modified arrival details" for Pyongyang caused – initially – a lot of confusion and then a lot of troubles at the travel agency (Korea Konsult) and within KITC. But it was not possible to prevent us from entering at Tumangan… However, it seemed that our trip was quite a shock for KITC and that they would now do everything to prevent that something similar happens again. Well, back to Beijing. After hanging around at the hostel for some hours we decided to make a walk around downtown Beijing. The narrow road, where the hostel was located: We made a lunch break at a restaurant in Jingshan Xije road, then headed for the Jingshan park. View from the hill in the Jingshan park, Beihai lake in the foreground. It is quite unusual to have such a clear sky in Beijing which even allows to see the distant mountains! Usually one cannot see further than one kilometer due to the fog/smog… View from Jingshan park to the east: We then went around the Forbidden City down to Tiananmen Square. Forbidden City, palace moat: Meridian Gate of the Forbidden city: Tiananmen Square: The Qianmen Dajie road leading to the south from Tiananmen Square had been totally rebuilt since my first visit to Bejing in 2005. It is now a pedestrian zone, all houses are new, but everything looks very kitschy and artificially…