FOLLOW OUR STORIES · WHERE WE STAYED
Some hotels become part of a journey because they’re extraordinary.
A beautiful view.
A historic building.
A rooftop swimming pool.
A five-star breakfast.
Our Motel 168 near Lishuiqiao (立水桥, Lìshuǐqiáo) wasn’t any of those things.
😂
It was simply a clean, inexpensive hotel outside central Beijing where Dad & Elaine could sleep, wash our clothes, eat breakfast and catch the Metro into the city.
But after coming back night after night from exploring Beijing, something funny happened.
Room 1106 started feeling a little like home.
❤️ Our Story Actually Started Before We Checked In
If you’ve been following our journey, you’ve already met this hotel.
Dad & Elaine had just returned to Beijing after traveling through Shandong Province (山东省, Shāndōng Shěng).
And getting here had already produced one story.
On the G190 high-speed train from Dezhou (德州, Dézhōu) to Beijing, Elaine somehow managed to celebrate Dad’s birthday while we were traveling at 305 km/h.
Read: A Birthday at 305 km/h — Our Evening High-Speed Train from Dezhou to Beijing
We finally reached Beijing.
Metro.
Hotel.
Room.
Dad thought the birthday was finished.
It wasn’t.
😂❤️
We Had Just Checked Into Our Beijing Hotel — Then Dad’s Birthday Dinner Arrived
That was our rather unusual introduction to Room 1106.
After that, however, life became wonderfully ordinary.
🚪 Room 1106
There it is.
1106.
Not exactly one of Dad’s great photographs of China.
😂
But perhaps that’s why Dad likes it.
Travel stories usually show you the spectacular bits:
The Forbidden City.
The Great Wall.
The Temple of Heaven.
Beautiful mountains.
Ancient temples.
They don’t usually show you the corridor you walked down at the end of every exhausting day.
But when you’re actually traveling for weeks, this is part of the journey too.
Walk down the corridor.
Recognize the number.
Open the door.
Put the bags down.
Shoes off.
Ahhhh. We’re back.
After enough nights, even an ordinary hotel-room number becomes familiar.
🛏️ Two Beds, a Window — and That Was Basically All We Needed
This was our room.
No wide-angle hotel publicity photograph.
No flowers carefully arranged beside the bed.
No champagne.
😂
Just:
- two beds;
- a desk;
- a kettle;
- television;
- a window;
- somewhere for our luggage;
- somewhere to sleep.
After spending the whole day walking around Beijing?
Perfect.
Dad wasn’t coming back thinking:
“The interior design could be more inspiring.”
Dad was thinking:
“My legs hurt.”
😂
Shower.
Charge the phones.
Check tomorrow’s plans.
Sleep.
Then do Beijing all over again.
🧺 One of Dad’s Favorite Hotel Facilities 😂
Look at those beauties.
When you’re at home, a washing machine is an appliance.
When you’ve been traveling around China with a suitcase?
It’s practically a tourist attraction.
😂
We had already been moving from city to city.
And unfortunately, clothes don’t care how exciting your China journey is.
They still get dirty.
Having washers and dryers in the hotel meant we could simply:
wash → dry → repack → keep traveling.
No hunting around Beijing for a laundromat.
No carrying enough clothes for every single day of the journey.
No suitcase slowly developing its own ecosystem.
Dad genuinely appreciated these machines.
😂 Meanwhile, Hotel Life Continued Around Us
Bedsheets.
Towels.
Toilet rolls.
Cleaning supplies.
Probably not the photograph Beijing’s tourism authorities would choose for their next advertising campaign.
😂
But Dad likes this one too.
While Dad & Elaine were outside exploring Beijing, people were working here.
Cleaning rooms.
Changing sheets.
Restocking supplies.
Getting everything ready before hundreds of travelers returned that evening.
It’s another tiny piece of travel we usually don’t photograph.
Dad did.
📦 Then Room 1106 Became Our Delivery Address
This was when things started becoming dangerously domestic.
😂
Dad & Elaine even had online purchases delivered to the hotel during our stay.
We simply used the hotel as our temporary delivery location and collected our parcels after they arrived.
Dad unfortunately didn’t photograph our own parcels.
But he did photograph the hotel’s parcel collection area.
This was another little glimpse of everyday China.
Parcel delivery — 快递 (kuàidì) — is so deeply embedded in daily life that even while traveling, we could participate in it.
And think about what had happened.
We slept here.
We washed our clothes here.
We came back here every night.
And now…
we were receiving parcels here too.
😂
Room 1106 was starting to behave suspiciously like home.
🌅 Then Morning Came
Every morning, downstairs we went.
This wasn’t an enormous international-hotel breakfast buffet.
It was simply…
breakfast.
People came down.
Someone ate quickly before leaving.
Someone watched the television.
Someone went back for another steamed bun.
Dad & Elaine ate.
And then we’d head out into Beijing again.
After several mornings, even this little routine became familiar.
🥟 What’s in the Steamer?
Bāozi (包子) — steamed buns.
Keeping warm and waiting for breakfast.
This is one reason Dad enjoys staying in ordinary Chinese hotels.
You don’t necessarily need to organize a special “local cultural experience.”
Sometimes everyday China simply appears at breakfast.
Take a bun.
Sit down.
Eat.
🥛 And Dad Notices Things Like… Warm Milk
Dad photographed the milk.
Of course he did.
😂
牛奶 (niúnǎi) — milk.
Warm.
For travelers accustomed to pouring cold milk straight from the refrigerator over cereal, warm milk at a Chinese breakfast can produce one of those tiny:
“Huh?”
moments.
Nobody needs to explain 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.
😂
It’s simply different.
And increasingly, those are the little things Dad & Elaine enjoy noticing in China.
Not everything needs to become a Big Question.
Sometimes noticing is enough.
🍳 Dad Could Already Read Elaine’s Breakfast Mind 😂
We were staying at Motel 168 for about a week.
Dad was quite happy with the simple hotel breakfast.
But before too many mornings had passed, Dad could already predict one particular scene.
Elaine would come downstairs.
Look at the breakfast.
See another hard-boiled egg.
And then…
stare at it.
😂
Dad knew his daughter.
He could almost read the thought bubble above her head:
“Hard-boiled egg AGAIN?”
One morning would be fine.
Two mornings, probably fine.
But we were here for a week.
And Dad was already worrying:
“Is Elaine going to eat enough breakfast every morning?”
🥚 The Egg Was Familiar — But Not Quite OUR Familiar Egg
There was also a tiny cultural difference hiding inside Dad’s concern.
Growing up in Southeast Asia, half-boiled eggs are very familiar breakfast food to us — soft, runny eggs, often made much happier with a salty, savory seasoning.
But during this hotel stay, what kept appearing at breakfast was:
hard-boiled egg.
Properly hard-boiled.
Every day.
😂
Dad could already predict Elaine’s solution too.
Give her that same hard-boiled egg every morning with Maggi seasoning?
Different story.
Dad knew she’d happily add a few drops and eat it…
even if the hotel served her the same egg every morning for the whole week.
Dad could read Elaine’s mind. 😂❤️
📦 So Dad Ordered the Solution Before the Problem Became a Problem
Remember the parcels Dad & Elaine had delivered to the hotel?
One of Dad’s very important Taobao purchases was:
Maggi seasoning.
😂😂😂
Dad ordered it on Taobao (淘宝, Táobǎo) and had it delivered straight to Motel 168.
[PHOTO — MAGGI SEASONING]
Dad’s fatherly breakfast insurance: Maggi seasoning ordered on Taobao and delivered to our Beijing hotel.
And Dad’s prediction was basically:
hard-boiled egg + no Maggi
→ Elaine stares at egg.
😂
hard-boiled egg + Maggi
→ perfectly acceptable breakfast.
Problem solved.
❤️ Sometimes Dad’s China Travel Planning Is Very Advanced
Train tickets?
Hotels?
Metro routes?
Attraction reservations?
Dad plans those too.
But apparently Dad’s China-travel risk management also includes:
predicting his daughter’s reaction to seven consecutive mornings of hard-boiled eggs.
😂
And somehow this tiny story connected everything about our temporary Beijing home:
one-week hotel stay
→ same breakfast every morning
→ Dad reads Elaine’s mind
→ Taobao
→ parcel delivered to Motel 168
→ Maggi appears at breakfast
→ Elaine eats her egg.
Nothing about this would ever appear in a Beijing guidebook.
But Dad remembers it.
Because when you’re traveling together for long enough, the journey isn’t only about where you go.
It’s also about knowing the person beside you well enough to think:
“She’s going to need Maggi.”
❤️😂
🚇 Every Morning, We Left
Breakfast finished.
Back upstairs.
Collect our things.
Then out of the hotel.
From here, we’d walk toward Lishuiqiao Metro Station (立水桥站, Lìshuǐqiáo Zhàn) and disappear into Beijing’s enormous transport system.
And suddenly our ordinary little hotel could connect us to almost anywhere in the city.
Some days we went far.
Some days we didn’t.
But eventually something changed.
We stopped thinking of this as:
“the hotel somewhere outside central Beijing.”
It became:
“where we’re going back to tonight.”
There’s a difference.
🌙 At 8:33 PM, Sometimes We Walked Out Again
On the evening of 4 September 2025, Dad & Elaine could easily have stayed upstairs.
It was already around 8:33 pm.
We’d had another long day.
Shower.
Phones charging.
Feet up.
Finished.
Instead…
we went for another little walk.
Not to see a Beijing attraction.
Not because Trip.com told us there was something we must visit.
Not because Dad had constructed another ambitious itinerary.
😂
We simply walked outside our hotel.
[WATCH OUR NIGHT WALK]
The video isn’t spectacular.
And that’s precisely why Dad likes it.
Elaine walks ahead.
We pass through the ordinary area around the hotel.
Scooters and bicycles are parked nearby.
A few people are still outside talking.
Small neighborhood businesses remain open.
Streetlights shine through the trees.
People are simply getting on with their evening.
No Forbidden City.
No Great Wall.
No tour groups.
No sightseeing checklist.
Just Beijing at 8:33 pm.
And after staying here for a while, it didn’t feel as though Dad & Elaine were “exploring Beijing” anymore.
We were simply…
going for a walk outside home.
For travelers, that’s quite a lovely feeling.
🏙️ One Day, We Didn’t Take the Metro at All
That little feeling of familiarity eventually led to one of Dad’s favorite discoveries.
Instead of heading into central Beijing, Dad & Elaine decided:
Why don’t we just walk around Lishuiqiao?
No itinerary.
No guide.
No admission ticket.
No famous attraction.
We found shopping malls.
Restaurants.
Supermarkets.
Families.
Neighborhood life.
And then somehow…
Dad found an antique market.
😂
🐇
That innocent walk became another ChinaTravelBUG story:
Had we stayed beside Wangfujing or another major tourist district, perhaps we’d never have experienced this particular little corner of Beijing.
Sometimes where you sleep changes what you see.
❤️ Why Dad Remembers This Very Ordinary Hotel
Here’s the funny thing.
Dad has stayed in much nicer hotels.
Much, much nicer hotels.
But travel memories don’t seem to organize themselves according to star ratings.
Dad remembers:
Room 1106.
Elaine walking down the corridor.
Doing laundry.
Breakfast downstairs.
Steamed buns.
Warm milk.
Our parcels arriving.
Walking to the Metro.
Coming back tired.
Walking around the neighborhood at night.
And the birthday surprise that somehow followed Dad all the way from Shandong to our hotel room.
None of those things is particularly remarkable by itself.
Put them together?
They became part of our Beijing.
☕ ChinaTravelBUG’s Take
This isn’t our hotel review.
If you’re deciding whether Motel 168 near Lishuiqiao makes sense for your own Beijing trip — price, location, Metro access, breakfast, laundry and why Dad deliberately chose accommodation outside the tourist center — we’ve written that separately:
Why We Stayed Outside Beijing City Centre — One of Beijing’s Best Budget Hotel Finds
This story is about something else.
It’s about the point when:
“the hotel we booked”
quietly becomes:
“the place we’re going back to tonight.”
For a little while, Room 1106 was that place for Dad & Elaine.
And yes…
Dad would definitely stay here again on our next Beijing trip.
Not because it was extraordinary.
Perhaps partly because it wasn’t.
It simply made living and traveling around Beijing easy.
And sometimes that’s exactly what you need from a temporary home.
❤️
🐇 Come Outside With Us
Now you’ve seen where Dad & Elaine slept.
Come outside.
Because just beyond the hotel, tourist Beijing begins to fade — and the everyday neighborhood of Lishuiqiao appears.
NEXT STORY → A Walk Around Lishuiqiao: Shopping Malls, Local Life and Hidden Antique Treasures
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