Park Hyatt Beijing
The ride to the hotel at that time of the morning was traffic free and quite fast.
The lobby is on the 63rd floor. I was able to check in right away.
Here's some pics of the room, shower was AMAZING.
Air was pretty bad that day
For the first day I just slept and walked over to Tiananmen Square.
The hotel sits on a high-end mall that has some restaurants downstairs. Keep in mind everything at the hotel has a 15% surcharge. I had a 1/2 order of Peking Duck at the restaurant downstairs for dinner.
Yum
View from the lobby at night:
The next day was set aside for the great wall. After a bit of research I decided on Juyongguan for a first visit (plan to return with the GF later this year). I did not want to take a taxi all the way there, and prefered someone who spoke english. Doing more research I found that most of the english tours are rather crappy, stopping at trinket shops ect. I found a guide named Victor that was recommended by many on tripadvisor. He would pick me up from the hotel and take me to the wall for 3 hours and then back in a new model car for an extremely reasonable price.
For some reason the other side was WAY more crowded. I think it was because the tour busses dropped people off there.
Stopped on the way back for more peking duck at about 1/3 the cost of the hotel restaurant.
The tour was great, he was very experienced and will definitly use him again next time we visit.
His website is
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5648227d0100uq5r.html
He also does inner mongolia/gobi desert tours during other times of the year. I would love to do one of those.
That night I went downstairs to the XIU club (
http://xiubeijing.com/) and it was actually quite fun.
Next day I woke up late and tried to push the checkout as late as possible. I was planning on doing the forbidden city but wouldn't have had enough time so I'll save that for the next trip. I just walked around the city a bit instead.
Checked out and left for the airport early at about 3:30pm.