Day 9: Visiting Universal Studios

Today Angie and two of her cousins all went together to the Beijing Universal Studios. Angie’s aunt kindly drove us all there first thing in the morning so we would arrive right before the opening time. When we arrived at the entrance, we waited in the queue for a while to be let in. Standing there many people were intensely staring at our group, probably since it seemed at that stage, I was the only foreigner there.

When we entered the park, we started by heading towards the Transformers rides first starting with the less sickening more 4D movie-styled car ride, before heading to the main Transformers ride since we had just eaten breakfast. The main Transformers ride is probably the most thrilling ride at the park with many loops, drops, and spirals.

After this, we next went to the Kung Foo Panda section of the park. Here we took two different rides, one 4D movie-styled ride and one carousel-styled ride.

After Kung Foo Panda, we happened to walk past the Harry Potter ride right as it opened (it had been closed all morning). This is one of the most popular rides at the park and usually requires more than 2 hours of waiting, so it was quite lucky that we happened to be there when it opened as we could see many people running to join the queue. It seems that Harry Potter is very popular, with many of the other people at Universal Studios renting Harry Potter outfits to wear at the park. Even though the ride just opened the line to the start of the ride was extremely long. We walked nonstop for 15 minutes through the queue area to get to the front of the line. I can’t imagine how long that must take when the queue is full. The ride itself was a 4D-styled movie ride through the Hogwarts castle. After taking the ride, we walked through the Harry Potter village outside before heading to the Minion part of the theme park for Lunch.

For lunch, we had Minion-styled burgers. Something I found kind of funny was learning that the Chinese word for Minion is 小黄人 (pronounced xiaohuangren) which directly translates to little yellow people.

After lunch, we went on a few of the Jurassic Park rides before then watching the 4D minion’s movie. After this, we went on the Transformers ride one last time before leaving the theme park.

We were all feeling extremely tired after walking around the park for the entire day. We later met up with Angie’s mum for dinner where we had some fish head soup and other tasty local Beijing dishes. I am finding that in general, the Chinese donuts are good here, especially at this restaurant where they had handmade Chinese donuts.