The subway system in Beijing allows you to get almost anywhere in the city, it is great!
As we sat in our room waiting for 9:00 so that we could leave, I looked over at the clock on the desk and realized how much I appreciated it. It has not only the time, but also the day of the week and the date on the display. When you change 14 time zones and skip a day in your travels, it is so hard to figure out what day it is, and so I have grown to love this clock. Maybe we should get one like this to carry with us in our travels.
The clock finally struck 9:00, so we headed out to find the 5 line subway station. Just as the concierge said, it was about a block east and another block north from our hotel.
As you enter each subway station, there is a map of the station. It is only semi-helpful if you can't read Chinese, but we could at least tell that there are two exits to this station, so we would need to pay attention when we returned to make sure we went to the right exit.
We entered the station, went through the security check, and walked up to the automatic ticket kiosk to get our tickets.
We knew from looking at the map that we were going to require three transfers to get to the Olympic Greens station, but the kiosk was all in Chinese, and we had no idea how to get our tickets, so we had to ask for some help. The attendant graciously put all of the information into the machine, paid our bill and handed us our tickets and we were on our way.
We followed the signs to the 5 line, and then figured out which way we needed to go.
Looking at our map, we knew we needed to go north, so this looked right.
So we waited for our train to approach.
When we got on the five line train, it was very crowded. Apparently rush hour was still going, but it didn’t matter, we smashed ourselves in with the rest of the crowd and held on as the train took off.
We had to go about eight stops before our first transfer, so we just held on and rode along. The subway trains in Beijing are very similar to the subway trains in Spain.
Once you are on the train, the lights indicate which way the train is going and which stop will be next. The colored circles above the light indicate the stops that are transfers stations.
We got off at our first transfer station. So far both subway stations have been very clean!
The route lights on our second train were a little different than the first, but still very easy to understand.
Our final transfer station for today.
Our final train had a monitor that showed the next station.
Before leaving the subway station, we decided to use the restroom. We had to admit that we were quite skeptical, knowing how heavily used the facilities are, but we didn't know when we would find another one, so in we went. I was very pleasantly surprised. It was a squatty potty, which is very common in China, but it was so clean!
Then we followed the signs out of the Olympic Greens Station. We had successfully completed our first Beijing subway ride.
When we left the Olympic Park, we decided to take a different route instead of going back to the hotel. We decided that it would be fun to go see the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower before returning home. So we returned to the Olympic Greens Station and once again found ourselves trying to figure out the ticket kiosks. Once again, an attendant came over to help us, and this time, he switched the machine to English before getting us our tickets. But he did it so fast that we couldn’t see what he was doing. We are trying to learn how to use these silly kiosks, but they do it so fast that we can’t see what they are doing. Any way, we got our tickets and rode the train to the Bell Tower and Drum Tower. The train this time was much less crowded than the first train of the morning, so we even got to sit for part of the ride.
When we left the Bell Tower and Drum tower, we headed back into the subway station. This time, we figured out how to change the kiosk to English, so we could at least get our transaction started, but we still couldn’t figure out how to tell the kiosk that we needed three different trains to get to our destination. So once again, we had to beg for the help of an attendant to get our tickets. They have all been so nice and helpful, so once again, we watched very carefully, and this time we think we figured out how to select our final destination. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to try it again tomorrow and see if we can do it totally on our own.
The subway system here is so effective! There are probably 200 people in each subway car, and probably 20 cars per train. A train shows up at the subway platforms about every two minutes. It is amazing how many people these subways are moving around this city!
We did a search, and it said that approximately 12 million people ride the Beijing subway each day, with an estimate of 18.5 million by 2020. We have been surprised how little traffic there is within the city, and now we know why. Everyone is on the subway!
It cost us about 65 cents a piece for the first two rides, and about 50 cents each for the last ride which was shorter. We literally rode all over the city today and it cost us a total of about $1.80 a piece for the whole day. It was an incredibly fun experience and really saved our feet after all of the walking we did yesterday. We still put on about 7.3 miles, 20,000 steps walking, and about 24 flights of stairs today, and we could have never seen all that we did without the help of the subway.
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