Shijiazhuang

This weekend me and Stella decided to go to Shijiazhuang, a city about 300km from Beijing. It used to be a small and unknown town, but since it became a railway crossing between Beijing and Wuhan, the city began to grow rapidly. At first we thought there would be nothing to see in this industrial city and we were right, BUT outside the city are some interesting things. To sum up a few: Zhending (one of the only ancient cities left in China), Canyang Mountain (2000m+ high mountain), Wuyuezai (a huge national protected park with a mountain in it, loads of waterfalls and flowers).

We left for Shijiazhuang on Friday from Beijing West station. For the second time I was standing at front of this huge building and I was yet again amazed by its architecture. Too bad I was again in a hurry and I couldn’t take time to inspect it properly. Luckily I had more time this time to board the train, but even so, the train was already loaded! Every seat was taken, including ours and the hallway was full of standing people. It wasn’t as crowded as last time, so we had no trouble to get to our seats in order to claim them. 

3 hours later we arrived in Shijiazhuang and it didn’t look as bad as I had imagined. Stella looked up an Hotel before we left and I we tried to find it and when we finally found it, it turned out to be a first class crappy hotel, so we looked on. We searched hotel after hotel and each time we had to look on, because a lot of hotels here don’t accept foreign passports… bah. Then we got a tip from the last hotel we visited and they told us to go to the Jin Yuan hotel and upon arriving we saw this large and luxurious hotel and thought: OMG, this is gonna be expensive. Aaaaaand we were right, the first night we paid 428 yuan (about 50 euro) for 1 room, but it was very high class. We had a flatscreen tv, a computer with internet, drinking water from the tap, but the most funny thing was the shower cabin, made entirely out of glass and it was placed outside the bathroom, hehe…. 

Once we dumped our stuff at our fancy hotelroom, we went outside to find a nice place to have dinner. We found a small but attractive fish restaurant near our hotel and we had a really tasty dish. It was a fish of almost 3 pounds and we ate it whole! WOW I was stuffed after that, but it was really delicious. To loose some of the calories we just absorbed, we went for a walk outside. There wasn’t really much to see and the roads were dirty, just like Wuhan, but then we saw a long street, full of small shopping tents selling all kinds of things like shoes, clothing, candy, jewelry, etc. Every tent was lit up by their own light, which gave the street a nice and warm feeling when we walked through it. Once back at the hotel we weren’t sleepy yet, so we decided to go bowling in the basement! How great is that! 

The next morning we woke up at 7AM and had breakfast at the hotel, which was really nice. There was a wide diversity of dishes you could choose among and my belly was loaded after that! We took the cab to Zhending, the ancient city and checked out Longxing temple, the largest building there. It covered up an area of 40.000 square meters or something and besides the fact that it was yet again the same old ancient architecture that I’ve seen so many of, there were some nice surprises. The most dazzling thing was a Buddha statue with ‘1000 Arms and Eyes’ of 22meters high. It was placed within an ancient building of 4 stories high, so you could do your prayer at the face of this enormous statue. 

We took a bus back to town and went to a large water park near a lake in Shijiazhuang. Once we arrived we saw how big it was… it was a huge lake and around it are all kinds of attractions, like a ferry wheel, a rollercoaster, an empty swimming pool and a Go Kart track! First we rented a peddling boat and explored the lake, but after that we went to the Go Kart track to race around, which was loads of fun TILL it began to rain! Arrgg… we stepped out of our cart and walked around to check out the surroundings, but when the sky began to pour we sought cover at some pool tables, which had a roof on top of them. We played some games of pool till the rain became little less severe and took a cab back to the hotel. There we went to the 32^nd floor to have dinner. It was really cool, because it was a moving restaurant. It moved slowly in a circle and at every wind direction we got information of our view of that moment. 

The next morning we woke up at 6:45AM and dressed up quickly to have breakfast afterwards. We wanted to catch the bus of 8:40 to Wuyuezai Park (national protected forest park with a mountain in it of 2281m high). The traveling time was estimated at 2hours, but it took us 4hours to get there! That gave us little time to check out the park, but even worse was the fact that the last bus leaving that place was at 2 o’clock PM!! Who the hell comes up with these crazy times? We were unaware of this and were forced to leave right away when we arrived. Ah well… we had 20min. before the bus left, so we could only check out a little creek, instead of the huge waterfalls inside the park and on the mountain. The trip back took another 4 hours and we had only a few hours left before our train left for Beijing, so we decided to go to the waterpark again. What a day.. .8 hours of bus sitting and the train trip has yet to come. 

At this moment I’m sitting in the train towards Beijing. This time we took the more expensive and faster one. It kinda looks like the TGV in France and it’s max speed is around 350km/hour. My weekend to Shijiazhuang was a fun one, but I was also a bit disappointed, because we couldn’t see the huge forest park. The city itself was very dirty and some places were the dirtiest I have ever seen. Fortunately there are a lot of things to do outside the city and we have only seen a fraction of it. Maybe I will be back, but I’d rather not.