Our last morning/day in Beijing! Better get moving! We woke up nice and early, finished packing, and left the hotel. After failing twice trying to enter the Forbidden City we were determined not to fail a third time. We got there about 20 minutes after it opened… and wouldn’t you know it… all 80,000 tickets that they sell a day were sold out. Again. Looks like we won’t be seeing the Forbidden City on this trip. If you plan on going, maybe try getting your tickets in advance through an agency (although they were much more expensive than at the door) or if you have been lucky enough to enter the Forbidden City, give us some tips! We clearly need them.

Again, it was clearly packed. Nothing left to do but wander around. We don’t need to leave the hotel for the airport for another 2 or 3 hours, so let’s go back to Tiananmen Square.

Nooope. That wasn’t happening either. It seems like everyone decided to see all of the tourist attractions today. So we will just wander slowly back to our hotel. Which is when we saw the National Centre for the Performing Arts. This seems to be on its own island, just one building (Great Hall of the People) from Tiananmen Square.

But that is the last picture of downtown Beijing we took. The rest was walking by things we had already seen and finishing back at the Forbidden City for one last glance before going back to the hotel and loading up all our stuff on my partner’s back. The hotel staff told us that the closest metro station was the Tiananmen Station, but do you really think we want to deal with all the people with huge bags? We said thank you very much and walked back to the station that we had previously used. There we found the remnants of Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics. By this point my partner had walked with all of our belongings for a solid 25 minutes. Not bad.

Then it was back onto the subway.

Then back onto the airport express. (From getting onto the subway to getting onto the airport express was only 25 minutes).

Before arriving at the airport. (For a trip time of about one hour from walking downtown to arrive at the airport. Not bad at all, especially considering it costs so little).

We got there early enough that we had time for a few final pictures, shopping, and wandering around the airport. We even made a few friends!

But, then our time in Beijing came to an end. 谢谢 Beijing!

Now it’s time to board the plane and get comfortable for the first leg of our trip home. 

Our first stop is San Francisco. Perfect! We had never been here before, we have about 4 hours of layover, by the time we get through security we can maybe step outside and look at the city. Boy were we wrong… At the very beginning we got our hopes up. Perfect! We landed 50 minutes early in San Francisco! Too bad our gate was occupied, and we had to wait 45 minutes before we could actually move. By the time we got off, we were actually late. No problem though, we still have plenty of time.

Nope! All those people are ahead of us in the line to clear customs. This is where we stood for 3.5 hours. By the time we got up to the agent and they asked when our flight was, we answered “in 15 minutes”. He just looked at us and said, “good luck”. We ran to get our checked luggage and switch it over. Ran to get to security. Politely asked the people ahead of us if we could skip them in line, as they called for final boarding of our next flight, we ran from security to our gate, and just barely made it on as they closed the flight. Hopefully our bag made it on. Fingers crossed! At least we still have a window seat and can enjoy the view. And try to relax a bit now that we know we’re one step closer to home.

This is our last flight of the “day”. We say “day” because we already had one “overnight” portion of a flight, even though we landed in San Francisco about the same time as we took off from Beijing.

And now we are in Boston. Here we have to find a spot and get comfortable. After having a lengthy talk about the greatness of Boston with a local (at about 3 am local time) we were able to claim a spot on the benches to try to get some sleep. Don’t I look super comfortable?

In the morning, when we weren’t able to sleep any longer, we got up and walked around the airport to stretch our legs a bit.

We even went outside to a car park to get some fresh air after checking our luggage in.

All of the grey above the coloured beams actually flutters in the wind, which is why we took the picture. We weren’t just sleep deprived, we swear.

Then, it was on to our final plane of this trip back home.

After a short flight we arrived home. Successfully completing a trip around the world in 47 days. We hope that Phileas Fogg would be proud. We hope you enjoyed following along with our trip as much as we enjoyed taking you along for the ride! We would like to thank everyone from all of the countries that made this trip so enjoyable and for all the help we received along the way! Now to try to reset our internal clock… and start planning the next trip!