20250830 Saturday, August 30, 2025. Prince Kung’s Palace, Beijing Hutongs, Beijing Zoo

20250830 Saturday, August 30, 2025. Prince Kung’s Palace, Beijing Hutongs, Beijing Zoo

This was our last full day of touring in Beijing.  The day started out with some cloud cover, but this dissipated over the morning and ended up with mostly clear skies.  We had carried our rain gear, but didn’t end up needing it, aside from using the umbrellas and hats to shield from the sun.

We drove into “Old Beijing” which is a neighborhood with preserved Hutongs- narrow streets and alleys formed between Siheyuans, single story residential structures with central courtyards.  Many have been converted into restaurants, galleries and shops. They line some canals and form historical neighborhoods around the Forbidden City.

We disembarked our van and boarded rickshaws that were actually one man powered with a fixed gear ratio.  There was no electric assist here, as we had seen in Singapore during our last rickshaw ride.  We pedaled through the narrow alleyways and streets at eye level with pedestrians walking on either side.  There were lots of parked cars on both sides of most of these Hutongs, and an occasional car was encountered trying to foolishly navigate the very narrow streets.  

We pedaled along a large canal with people fishing, boating and swimming in the water.  The water was thick with milfoil, algae and other aquatic plants.

We visited Prince Kung’s Palace Museum.  It was an example of what you could achieve with good looks and charisma in the late dynastic period of China.  Most of the museum exhibits weren’t captioned in English, so we breezed through the museum pretty quickly and got to walk through the gardens which had all manner of rock sculptures and mounds to create a diverse geography within the palace grounds.

It was like a miniaturized Forbidden City and Summer Palace rolled into one compact form factor.

Our final destination of our organized Beijing tour was the Beijing zoo.  Of course, the stars of the show were the giant Pandas.  Two were readily visible and both were in various stages of napping, with one rolling on its side to drop a deuce in front of its audience.  They are undoubtedly cute, but the exhibit space was crowded, hot and stuffy.  The exhibit also looked a bit outdated and sad when compared with the giant Panda exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.

We did a quick run through the rest of the zoo.  Some exhibits, like the primate cage and wolf enclosures looked aged and sorry.  Oddly, there is a canal running through the zoo which used to be an official waterway for the imperial palace, and there were inexplicable waves churning up the water.  Then a speed boat came blasting through the canal carrying passengers on a thrill ride.  That was what was causing all the crazy wave action.

We did manage to see rhinos and hippos before we had to head for the exit.  We had lunch at a restaurant within walking distance to the entrance of the zoo.  Amber has become our go to person for ordering meals because of their fluency in written and spoken Mandarin.

The drive back to the hotel took an hour through pretty bad traffic.  We got back to the hotel and started a final load of laundry before we head off to Mongolia tomorrow.

Unfortunately for us, a large group of Europeans had just arrived from a caravan along the Silk Road starting in Turkey.  They had all the washers and dryers tied up for most of the afternoon.  Janet and Price did finally manage to get their loads in.  

Kevin gave us a recommendation for tourist discount shopping, the Hongqiao Market, which happens to be across the street from the Temple of Heaven.  Ben, John and Franklin hopped a DiDi ride there and found it worth the trip.  Ben found lots of vendors selling the USB dongles he was looking for and was able to haggle the price down 25%, and also picked up a Nike Apple Watch band for only $5 USD.  There were lots of vendors selling CCC powerbanks and there was a wide variety of items including some with the MagSafe iPhone attachment system. 

John found some gifts for his girlfriend and Franklin found a fantastic deal on a huge box of Pokémon cards for his daughter. 

 
Connor and DJ had also gone to the same mall, and they decided to meet up with a friend of Ciara and Tom’s in the Hutongs for some bar hopping.  

Ben’s family ended up heading back to the hotel to get wash loads into the dryers, and then have dinner back at the Da Yali restaurant, where we had eaten on our first night in Beijing.  This time we had the Squirrel Fish instead of the Peking Duck, and managed to stuff ourselves one last time.

Most of us will head to the PEK airport at 6am tomorrow.  Amber will actually check out tonight and head to Beijing’s newer airport, PKX, because their airport is in the opposite direction from the hotel as PEK, and their flight is really early in the morning. They will get a capsule hotel inside the security zone of the airport.  DJ’s flight is actually just after midnight September 1, so he will get a late check out and take the subway to PEK.

  
This has been a grand adventure for all of us, made all the more enjoyable by being with family and meeting friends of the family and new relatives.  We were also impressed by the changes in Beijing since 2006.  China is really at the top of their game now.  Much of America is now turning away from science, tilting at windmills and pursuing delusions of a golden age driven by coal and empire building. It won’t take long for America’s dominance on the world stage to be supplanted by China’s progressive and forward moving society.