This is the famous Wangfujing Street Market in Beijing ten years ago This is how it looks like today In the decade since both of us
last wandered through Beijing the changes to the city is truly remarkable For this video we'll not only explore the
city's stunning evolution but also delve into the vivid contrast between its then and now So if Beijing has ever been on your travel list let us share with you how this city has truly evolved [music] Like and subscribe :) If you do not know about us yet we are Aaron and Char and over the past year we've been
traveling across Asia and Australia from our home base - the sunny Singapore At the start of this year we had this humble idea to document our travels on this YouTube channel and we have no
idea where this will take us But we are driven by curiosity, wonder and the sheer thrill of discovering new places So come along and join us on this journey as we travel across the
world one journey at a time [music] Should we start? 3...2...1...*clap* [music] We just visited China for the
first time since the pandemic So much has changed After all it's our second time in Beijing I've been there in 2019 and I was there in 2014 Time flies [music] This was back in 2009 and I remembered I was in an immersion program
through my secondary school It is a 6 weeks program and during the 6 weeks we are
immersed in the local culture we're visiting a lot of different
places including the Great Wall, including Palace Museum, every other day we were visiting attractions And part of the immersion program gives us the opportunity where we immerse
ourselves in the local school and we learned wushu, we learned
table tennis, we were taking up classes alongside Chinese students in the
secondary school that we were affiliated to And we spent a lot of time exploring the city Back in 2014, I visited Beijing
with my family and my family friends and we visited many of the attractions
that we visited in this trip To be honest, I don't really
remember what I visited back then but I do remember walking around not knowing the
significance of like the places that I was at Something I remember was that I
couldn't get used to the food in Beijing Like it just tasted a little different.
I just couldn't get used to it. So for this trip we travelled with my parents In fact it's their first time in Beijing My dad's lifelong ambition was
to visit the Great Wall of China and I'm just glad he did it We tried a lot of food and
we visited a lot of places I think we averaged about
like 20 to 30,000 steps a day And we also visited some of the newer places
that sprung up within the last 10 years [music] There's a massive ton of things that have changed I think it's fair to say that
from a technological front we needed to use a lot of QR codes Everywhere we go we had to use QR codes and we had to use the apps such as Alipay, Wechat or like Meituan So you have to use these apps
to scan QR codes to order food to rent a bike to take the public
transport like the metro or the bus and even booking of the highspeed rail Within each of these apps,
Alipay, WeChat or Meituan apps there are also mini apps as well that allows you to order food
at the particular restaurant So there's no other way to actually
order food except for through these apps And for us as a tourist getting anywhere
without these apps is quite difficult And because of how prevalent QR codes are and
how dependent we are on the use of these apps a lot of these apps actually requires us to register our particulars
including our phone number It was a little bit challenging for us as tourists most of them will require you
to use a Chinese phone number If you don't have a local number it makes it
a little bit more challenging to get around And for us it was a little bit challenging to
actually try to read these apps in Mandarin, not because that we do not
speak Mandarin or speak Chinese, we found that it was a little
bit slower to actually try to read these Mandarin texts and
Chinese text in a small phone. It took us a little longer
to order food, for instance So as visitors, we also face some other
issues such as linking our cards to these apps Before we visited China we wanted to link our cards to these apps and we
actually face some issues Not all foreign cards are accepted by these
apps and we wouldn't know until we arrive there and then we realized like oh we need to
change the card and then we need the OTP and for the first few days I actually had some
issues with my card or with the app I do not know so every time I tapped onto the bus or
the metro they would double charge my card and I was like very confused
like why why was that happening so I contacted the customer service on the apps and they actually responded very
quickly like I resolved the whole thing and got the refunds within like 10 minutes I was so impressed with this
increased use of these digital tools, it also means that your phone
has to be somewhat charged at least you have 1% battery
in there without these battery and without internet connectivity as well it's really difficult for you to
get around from a place to another so if we did rely on Wi-Fi only
we couldn't get around easily Speaking of apps another thing that we noticed
when we were taking a taxis there was that the drivers were using a map app they actually told them how the traffic condition
are to a very high level of precision At a red light the app will actually tell
them how many seconds to the green light I was like so amazed The assistance that app provided the
drivers was just like another level And also this apps tells you
where the speed cameras are Another thing that made me feel there a little bit different from 10 years ago
was the aspect of security the aspect of safety in fact Beijing definitely
feels a lot safer today than 10 years ago I remember 10 years ago my parents would
be telling me beware of pick pockets, beware of homeless people, beware of losing your
stuff and you never ever get it back afterwards but but this time around when we were
there the impression of being safe is very different like compared to 10
years ago because we don't have to face as much of these fears today as compared to before and I think a large part of that is because many
of the payments are mobile payments right now so people don't really carry cash so you
don't feel like you will be pick pocketed It's almost kind of discouraged to use cash When we actually tried paying certain
things in cash, they give an eye at us like "cash?" like and then they know that we are tourists "Do you have change?" and that it took a
long time for them to get change as well yeah another aspect of this is because we have this
impression that there is a tighter security check like almost every attraction that we go to
there is some for airport-style security line Yeah and we have to allocate more
time for each attraction because we will have to take 10 to sometimes
even 30 minutes to get you security And one other thing about security is
that there's also random spot checks too So it's a hassle for us because like we're
not used to travel around with our passports And these random spot checks
could happen on the street walking down a famous tourist
district and police will come up to you and ask you like "can you show
your documentation / show your passport" and as a tourist you have to carry
your passports around quite frequently Char, do you want to talk about Amap? Yeah so we were using one of these navigation
app that a lot of the locals use called Amap And we noticed that there was this
feature that was pretty interesting that I've never seen before let's say you want to get from point A to point B the map tells you how many
percent of that route is lit up Another thing that I noticed
was that as we were walking along the parks especially at a Beihai Park area the lamppost at these intercoms which
you can call security if you need And electric cars There are so many electric
cars everywhere in Beijing it's so insane The streets were so peaceful
and I couldn't figure out why Initially I thought it was that the cars weren't honking as much which made
the streets very peaceful but then Aaron's parents pointed out that most of the cars on the road
are actually electric vehicles which meant that the engine
sounds just weren't there And the other thing that we also
observed is that like the number of petrol kiosks or like gas stations in Beijing like we only saw one across
the entire 7 days of our trip there's only one like can you believe it like one petrol kiosk that
services the entire city Yeah but on the other hand we noticed that
there were a lot of electric charging points even at the hutongs They're just everywhere and it goes to show how much rapid transformation has taken place
in the car industry over the past 10 years Other than the electric car charging
stations, we also saw a lot of battery lockers and these lockers are actually
used by the electric motorbikes so they would go to the lockers,
they would take out their battery and replace with the charged
batteries from these lockers so it's like instantaneous charging It's the first time that I've
ever seen such a technology I'm not seeing as much in Singapore at this point
of time but like it's very predominant in Beijing There also a lot of street
food vendors I remember in the streets in Beijing right after
the 2008 Olympics when I was there I don't see a lot of them right
now I remember getting yang rou chuan (lamb skewers) beside
the dormitory I was living in I used to order 20 or 30 yang rou
chuan (lamb skewers) to share with my friends during the entire immersion program And now like these yang rou chuan
(lamb skewers) stores that are used to be very predominant around
Beijing now it's no longer there Another thing that we noticed is that
there are so many subway lines now There are almost 30 subway lines How do they even name all these lines They're naming from like number
one number two number three So yi hao xian (line 1), er hao xian
(line 2), san hao xian (Iine three) and all the way to like er shi
hao xian (line 20) right so like there's 20 over lines that are named by numbers However are there even as
many colours to begin with? If it's a purple line or purple colour on the map Light purple, dark purple, maroon, violet What kind of purples are we going to choose? At some point of time I feel like they're
going to run out with colours to use the map will just be a kaleidoscope And many of these subways or
these metros have a classification So I was kind of impressed to
enter a carriage or car that is called "qiang leng" (strong
cold) or "rou leng" (weak cold) So you can choose which part of
the train car that you want to go For stronger wind or a less strong wind I think it's really interesting
right like I've never seen this kind of concept like anywhere in the world Yeah so in other countries the carriages
are split by like "women only" and "mixed" but in China they split it
by the strength of the wind In Beijing In Beijing yeah just in Beijing So another thing that we were lucky
about is by the time we entered China China actually lifted most
of its Covid restrictions Before August 2023, visitors into
China still have to take a Covid test the ART kits before entering China but this time
round we didn't actually need to take a Covid test Something that caught us off guard was
that after the plane landed in China they made an announcement
to call out a few passengers which were randomly selected for a Covid test Yeah I was kind of scared because like I
was kind of not actually prepared for that You also have to do a lot of health declarations before you enter the country
and upon exiting the country so it's kind of like a hassle to
actually fill in all this declarations because you have to go through all the details input your passport number, input your name, input like the place of travel,
input so many different things it's kind of a pain actually Ya but once we got into the city center of Beijing we noticed that actually most
people don't wear masks anymore A lot of people are still riding bikes Even though public transport
is very very efficient bikes is still seen as a very common
way of getting from one place to another In fact that's probably the most
common form of transport across Beijing There's e-bikes, motorcycles,
shared bikes, personal bikes, PMDs, all these kind of bikes gets
people around very very quickly Another thing that is very prevalent
around Beijing are the public toilets These toilets are free, but the
conditions vary from one to the other At some point of time
especially early on in the trip we were doing this thing called toilet spotting where we kind of wanted to determine whether or not that particular toilet or
this particular toilet is cleaner and if there's privacy or
if there's hand washing etc We would rank what kind of toilets
would be more suitable for our use So even if we didn't need to use the toilet, we
would just go in walk one round and take a look just for our own information I mean it's kind of funny actually The best toilets are still the ones
that are in the shopping malls, especially the shopping
malls that are slightly newer So we also see a lot of people
actually spitting on the floor as well Pretty gross to be fair I don't not
know if habits are going to change I'm pretty sure it will We also notice that there are still a lot of
people smoking even indoors around Beijing Non-smoking places are kind
of hard to find especially if you're in eateries or if you're hotels If you there already consuming of food, you do not know your next door
neighbour is going to take a smoke It's kind of a common practice there to
smoke indoors especially in these areas And part of it is that like they have also been discouraging smoking in
museums or in shopping malls In fact in museums like the
Palace Museum that we went smoking is completely discouraged They even like take your lighters and tell you to deposit it in the storage
area and claim it afterwards So you couldn't smoke in this attractions And speaking of smoke, there's
still a lot of air pollution It feels like we're in a
movie set sometimes, right? Like as as if there's a lot of like
fog, as if there's a lot of dry ice but in fact these are all smog I think it's really part of the geography as well as the industry that contributes
to a lot of these air pollution not the electric vehicles anymore or less Ya even though there smoke all around and it
looks rather dark, we still need sunscreen because when we walked around we realize that
the sun is actually heating very hard on our skin and sometimes we will get sunburn Absolutely There are so many attractions in
Beijing and most of them are so huge so spreading out these attractions into multiple days across your itinerary
would be a very good idea And one of the places to go
to is the Great Wall of China Of course that is the most famous
place in entire China, I would suppose Ya I mean it's a UNESCO World Heritage site right? And it's one of the Seven Wonders of the World Right ya So that's the must-visit place if
you really want to be awe-inspired and in fact we have been there twice once to Badaling and once to Mutianyu chang cheng The last time around we were
there, we at Mutianyu chang cheng which was less crowded And this time around because we
wanted a different experience we decided to get to Badaling It's a big big big mistake The Badaling section of the Great Wall of China
is one of the most convenient sections to get to Right now there is a high speed rail
to get from the city center to Badaling and it takes about 30 minutes but we didn't realize that we had to book
these high speed rail tickets in advance By the time we decided to purchase
the tickets, it was all sold out so we have to find other modes of
transportations to get to Badaling Chang Cheng And one of the other ways to get there is by buses There are two kinds of buses - the public buses, as well as the private chartered
tourist buses by the city of Beijing Of course the public buses are much cheaper It takes 1.5 hours to get from
City Center to Badaling Chang Cheng It's pretty fast Yeah but we just have to try to get there early, because by the time it gets
to about 8 or 9:00 a.m. there's a little jam forming And these are just one stop right?
Like there's not multiple stops It's direct
It's a direct bus from the city either from Qianmen or Deshengmen. Another must visit attraction is the Forbidden
City, also known as The Palace Museum The Forbidden City is in the
literal center of Beijng City and is probably one of the most
visited attractions in the whole world The palace used to be the place where emperor
of the Ming and Qing Dynasty used to live It's called The Forbidden City for a reason Even Beijing locals back
then couldn't enter the city Only the emperors, the people who were working
in the palace, and the foreign delegations We spent about 4 hours at the Forbidden City, but
we still didn't manage to explore the whole Palace And the best route to take is to travel from the south of the Palace Museum all
the way to the northern exit And another attraction to go to and a
must-visit attraction is the Summer Palace It's called "Yiheyuan". Summer Palace is five times the
the size of the Forbidden City It took us about 5 hours or more and we also couldn't finish exploring the
entire grounds of the palace This Palace has actually been burned down
multiple times and it has been rebuilt since And it is also very convenient to
get there because now there's a subway stop that gets you close by to the entrance So we also visited Yuanmingyuan, which
is a collection of three different parks And this used to be called the 'Old Summer Palace' Why is it called the 'Old Summer Palace'? It's 'Old Summer Palace' because the palace was
burned down in 1860 because of the Boxer Rebellion The 'Old Summer Palace' is so big, most tourists only visit the Northeast
part of this Palace, where the ruins are And there's also a subway stop to get
there, right in front of the entrance So there's also other must
visited attractions as well, that includes the Temple of Heaven
which is called the Tiantan. Tiananmen Square, the Beihai Park, and they all within the Second Ring,
so it's pretty accessible to get to Yeah we just cannot stress enough how
convenient it is to go go around Beijing It's just a lot of walking to do [Music] Although I can't remember exactly
where I went during my first trip I still had the same feeling and it was just that all the attractions
were huge, there's a lot of walking and sometimes I get a little bored to be honest But somehow all these places
have not deteriorated at all I think they did a very good job
in maintaining all these places Kind of wish I paid more attention
during my lessons in secondary school, so that I would like better
appreciate what happened, like the history of China,
the architecture and all that The 14 years that I haven't visited Beijing Beijing seems like it'd evolved tremendously, as if 30 years of development has
kind of compressed within 14 years It's kind of insane to think
about that from this perspective Architecture in terms of like the old buildings,
the old palaces and all those kind of things those might not have changed but yet there's also a lot of
new buildings that sprung up in fact - yeah the skyscrapers - the skyscrapers, exactly
and those are so beautiful s Something that I haven't expected that they will
grow like to this scale in a short period of time During my first trip I couldn't quite appreciate the food in Beijing, but this
time I think I was more receptive like I enjoy the food more. And we also
explored more of the Chinese food around Beijing And I think part of the reason is that there
has been more Chinese food in Singapore recently and I kind of got used to it Yeah your malatang (spicy numbing soup) right? Yeah malatang and then there's also the yang rou chuan (lamb skewers) here
and a lot of chuan chuan (skewers) We also challenged ourselves this time
around to actually visit new places as well For example we found that 751, 798 those are
places that used to be an industrial area like with the power plants with factories and
heavy Industries but now it's completely changed it's changed to an art district and it's kind
of surprising to walk through these areas and to see how art galleries and
art museums are now in these areas and the day when we visited 751 and 798, it coincided with the China fashion week So it's like the biggest fashion
event in the entirety of China So Char, how many tips do you think we
have for first time travelers to Beijing? I think we can give our top five? Top five? I mean we might have eight of them Eight really, really good tips for
first time travellers to Beijing So what's your first tip? My first tip is that booking tickets to
attractions in advance is very very important Especially now, right after the pandemic Yeah, for us everything was
planned this time round by us I didn't have a tour guide, we didn't go through
a school, so everything has to be done by us I wish that somebody have gotten
on behalf of us like how we did it the last time round when we were school kids but now we had to figure
things on our own, by ourselves If you are local there, it's actually very easy to book because you can actually book
through Alipay or WeChat or Meituan but as foreigners, we didn't have our
account set up yet and we had to find alternative solutions to booking these tickets such as like using their websites, and using email Honestly was quite a hassle For example Palace Museum right? Yeah The Palace Museum requires you to
book the tickets 7 days in advance We were trying even before seven days on
whether or not we can access WeChat Pay Or because you had to book the
museum tickets through WeChat Obviously couldn't get to access WeChat pay from
Singapore and so we couldn't get the tickets and we tried asking around for our friends like people who are living in China That didn't come to any good lead, and
in the end we saw a particular website from the Palace Museum that allowed us
to actually email in for these tickets Yeah so we had to email in like
the date that we wanted to visit, how many of us, and also our
particulars, including our passports And these passport numbers are the only form of
identification for entry into the Palace Museum Another one is the high speed rail
because like high speed rails those could potentially book up quite fast as well especially from big cities to big cities Like you could book it through Alipay
or book it through WeChat but like as foreigners we didn't have access to those accounts so we had to book it through trip.com So what's tip number two? So even without phone numbers
or local Chinese phone numbers it is still possible to get by, but without
it, it's a little bit more challenging We need phone numbers to
register for tickets for instance or for site tickets as well,
like within local attractions Or even ordering food they
will ask for your local number Without this phone number is kind of a
little bit challenging for us as tourists One of the more important things, rather, if I could emphasize is the
idea of getting mobile internet I think that is super essential without mobile internet is impossible to even get
into the subways or get into places or order food as well, because you
need that around and there might not be public Wi-Fi everywhere we go in Beijing What's tip number three? Tip number three would be: to get to
Beijing you can actually go through Tianjin, and then take a highs speed rail down to Beijing Yeah that safe us about $300 because getting
the Beijing was a little bit more expensive, even though like it's very convenient but like $300 is quite some amount of money And to get from Tianjin airport to the city
center of Beijing is actually very convenient There's a highs speed rail which
took us about 30 to 40 minutes Super fast, super clean and super convenient And we also took the opportunity
to explore Tianjin as well, on our last day before heading back to Singapore Tip number four I hope that we did more due
diligence during our trip What we did was the usual Googling and all that We read a lot of blogs we watched some vlogs It's still not enough Many of these blogs and vlogs in
English were actually outdated Yeah in fact there's the
Wangfujing snack street right? We saw you on the map and we were
walking down like Wangfujing Street, and we just didn't see the street at all So we thought we like missed it So we walked back and we
still didn't see it at all So we saw this security guard and we decided
to ask him like where the snack street was and he told us that the snack
street was actually closed in 2019 like 4 years ago and none of the
blogs or vlogs even mentioned that Even Wikipedia didn't update on that I remember going to Wangfujing Snack Street
back then and there was a lot of food to eat and I was pretty impressed by the weirdness
of the food that's on display as well like there's crickets, there is scorpions those
are weird snacks and we really want to try that Yeah, I thought it would be
our first time trying insects Well we didn't have the
opportunity this time around, maybe in the future there might
be because across the street, the security guard was saying that something
might pop up in a much more enclosed space So what's tip number five? So that is about language barrier I mean English is definitely
not a language that most people living in Beijing actually use or
employ in their daily way of life For us like speaking Mandarin
is like the choice of language Even in Beijing itself, a lot of people
actually do not come from Beijing so they bring their own dialects to Beijing, and this is something that
we couldn't really recognize And the other thing is also about accents too like people native to Beijing who lived and grew
up there also have their own form of accent too this accent is very kind of distinguishable it's very, very
sophisticated with the "er" sound in the back Those are accents that I really
couldn't really understand so I strained my ear sometimes
listening a taxi driver like what you trying to say to us? And we were like nodding our heads and
thinking that we actually understood but half the words like we couldn't
really understand what he trying to say Yeah so even when we were
talking to the taxi driver he couldn't really understand us also so we could tell because he took like
an extra half a second to reply us so I'm pretty sure he was also processing just like how we also needed to
process what he was saying Yeah Beijingers tend to roll their words
right quite often because the "er" sound like it's like a pretty nasal way
of actually saying things as well so like I think it's really interesting
to have that kind of spread and diversity Also there's a lot of Chinese words that we use in Singapore it's very different from
the Chinese words that you use there Especially for regular things
that we see on the streets like for example 'buses' in Singapore we call
it 'ba shi' in Beijing we call it 'gongjiaoche' For example 'spoon' can I get a spoon from you because there's
only chopstick, I would love to have a spoon You ask the waiter or waitress for
'tang chi', they wouldn't understand like you have to ask for 'shaozi' And the other one is: 'where is the toilet?'
Where do you want to find the public restroom You don't call it 'ce suo', you call
it 'weishengfang' or 'weishengjian' So these are the small little
words that we had to code switch Of course we understood what it means, but the
choice of words are actually very different I would say that I would understand
about 70% of the spoken Madarin, which is pretty much of an achievement right? Yeah... I think I could only understand about 30%? So does that make us like 100% in total? Next, water is not potable in Beijing Yeah so on very hot days, we actually found
ourselves needing to buy bottled water Bottled waters are about like 2 to
5 yuan depending on where we were Definitely we shouldn't skimp on
that, because it can get pretty hot Especially during the summer Ya Because we went during the summer,
this is Char's most feared enemy What? The mosquitoes
Oh yes Tip number seven: there's a lot of mosquitoes,
so please bring your insect repellent So during the summer, especially in the
mornings and evenings the mosquitoes are rampant like the only time I know that the sun is
setting is where mosquito start biting me In the end we had to buy an inside repellent
because I just couldn't take it anymore The last tip I could think of is
really about a very significant cultural difference that I feel that is not
prevalent here in Singapore at least, right and not prevalent elsewhere in the world and it's about personal space So what about personal space? It's very normal to get pushed,
it's very normal to get stepped on, especially in your tourist regions,
especially when you're queuing for stuff people are literally right behind
your shoulders, super close to you and it's kind of uneasy for the
first couple of days we were there Yeah like when people were pushing me from
the back when we were queueing for things I'm just like wondering, like the queue
doesn't move any faster if you were to push me But after after a while, I just realized that it's not that they
were trying to offend me or anything, it was just like a way of life. It's very very normal for them to
be like very close to one another So after a while it got pretty okay As long as we in Beijing
or as long as we in China, this is something that's quite predominant there Yeah, so as a result we also need to fit in, and we have to like squeeze
with the people in front of us otherwise people would think that there is a
space in front and they want to cut the queue So just just adapt wherever we go So Char, how much do you think
Beijing will change after 10 years? At this rate, I do not know But I do hope that we get to
visit Beijing again in the future So catch how we spend one week
in Beijing in our next video! [music] LIKE + SUBSCRIBE :)
