The great thing about travelling is, whatever you read before or whatever you had in mind, when you're actually there it's a completely different experience. I don't really now what I expected from Beijing but being here it just seems to be a very nice city. People are friendly and the guys in our hostel are so helpful. After a day of relaxing I packed my gear on Friday to capture normal Beijing life. I was wandering around some older neighborhoods and I really found a lot of people to take portraits of.

I pretty much used my 50 1.2 most of the time, even when I was in the Forbidden City the late afternoon. It's a great lens for separating subjects from the environment and it gives you a bit of working distance not interfering with people as much as you do with wide angles. The 50 is a great focal length for portraits for me as I still like to be close to the subject. I had lunch in one little street restaurant with the locals and the noodles were delicious. In the evening we had Free Dumpling Friday, typically Chinese, and it was nice, too. I haven't quite figured out where to head today, we will be at the Great Wall on Sunday and we booked our train rides down up to Guilin, leaving for Shanghai on Monday. We might take the plane from Guilin to Hongkong at the end of the month as we already spend two nights on the train, China is really huge :-) ...

But have a look at my images from yesterday in Beijing first ...

That's Part 1, more Beijing to come the next days ...

KIKI