Day 1: ArrivalOn Friday afternoon, after an almost five-hour flight from Thailand, we arrived in the Beijing airport. On the plane, we filled out three different arrival forms—one for health, one for immigration, and one for declarations. At the airport, we handed the three different forms to three different officials, and only the immigration official actually looked at the form! Then, we made our way out to the airport shuttle buses, figured out which bus we needed, and made our way to the waiting area. There were already heaps of people there, and when the bus arrived, we weren’t even able to get on because we weren’t aggressive enough! We got on the next bus, though, and after about an hour of sitting in Beijing traffic, the bus stopped at what we thought was the railway station. We’d hoped there would be taxis available, but, alas, there were not. After some clueless meandering around the area—I really thought we might never get to the hotel—we finally found a taxi. The driver took off speeding down an alley, or hutong, supposedly toward our hotel. Several minutes later, Dad happened to look out the rear mirror and see our hotel. We both shouted and pointed, desperately trying to convey to the taxi driver that we were at our hotel. And, finally, we arrived—a good two and a half hours after our flight landed.
Already, we had figured out that taxi drivers don’t speak much English. After meeting up with my friend Grace, she informed us that a lot of the taxi drivers don’t actually know their way around the city too well. The government decided to recruit a lot of drivers for the Olympics, but they pulled the drivers from rural areas of China. As a result, most of the drivers know no English, and many of them are unfamiliar with major tourist attractions. As a general rule, every taxi ride in Beijing is an adventure in itself.
Day 2: The Summer PalaceThe next morning, we headed to the Northwest section of the city to meet Grace and to go to the Summer Palace. After two taxi rides, we arrived at the palace, the summer home built by the Empress Dowager Cixi. She was a concubine of the Emperor who took over the country after he died. Instead of helping the country, she put China’s money toward a summer home for herself. Apparently, the Forbidden City wasn’t fancy enough for her! Cixi’s nephew was supposed to rule, but she wouldn’t let him; she even had him murdered the day before she died, just because she could. Although she was ruthless, she certainly knew how to build a palace! Her home was truly extravagant, with multiple buildings and corridors set on a hillside. We spent over three hours walking around the grounds and exploring the lake while trying to avoid stabbings by Chinese parasols and such.
Upon leaving the palace, we attempted to find a taxi to take us back to our hotel—not an easy task! The first taxi offered to drive us there for 250 yuan (pronounced “you-an”, equivalent to $40 American). We refused him and hastily agreed to go with another driver, who promised to use the meter. Somewhere along the way, he mentioned “meter three”, but we didn’t know what he meant. When we arrived at the hotel, we discovered that he’d meant the price would be three times what the meter read. As it turned out, he wasn’t a real taxi. We learned our lesson quickly—only ride in taxis that are clearly marked!
Then, we headed out to find a vegetarian restaurant near our hotel, but, after some searching, we realized it didn’t actually exist. Not so surprising, considering in China it is said that people eat “everything in the air besides airplanes, everything on land besides the table, and everything in the sea besides boats!” We ended up at another restaurant, where I quickly discovered the challenges of Chinese eating customs. The Chinese drink hot tea (usually jasmine) at every meal, no matter the outside temperature. In fact, they think that the higher the outside temperature is, the hotter their drinks should be! So, ordering drinks proved challenging, as Dad wanted black tea (which the Chinese scorn) and I wanted some water. We ended up with jasmine tea, which Dad calls not tea but “floating a flower through hot water” because it’s so weak. We had to page through a menu—a thick book with pictures of food—for a while before we decided what to order. In China, people don’t order individual meals; instead, they choose several dishes to share. The food arrives as it is ready, and it doesn’t even come with a serving spoon. Plates are hard to come by—if you don’t want to eat out of the communal dish, you have to use your saucer! Quite an experience for my germophobe self! I found the chopsticks impossible, and Grace had to ask the waitress for a fork for me. So, I ended up eating food I couldn’t recognize off a saucer with a plastic fork! As if that weren’t enough, on the way out of the restaurant, we saw a cooked pig—yes, a whole pig—wrapped up in a plastic grocery bag as if it were just any take home item!
Day 3: Church, temples, and shopping
On Sunday, we left our hotel early for church in another part of town. We all had to show foreign identification (passport or driver’s license) to prove we weren’t Chinese. Places of worship in China must register with the government, and this church had a license to exist so long as only foreigners attend. I’m not entirely sure about the rules for registration, but most Chinese people who go to church go to home-churches instead of traditional, Western churches to avoid government intervention.
After that, we headed to the Lama temple, a famous Buddhist temple in town. It’s not just a tourist attraction—lots of worshippers come to burn incense in front of statues of Buddha. I felt a bit like an intruder—like I was that annoying person wandering through a famous Cathedral during a worship service. Most of the worshippers seemed to just ignore the tourists as they bowed before the Buddhas. After a while, we all became Buddha-ed out! They all started to look the same! Finally, though, at the very back of the temple was a Buddha four stories high—and supposedly made out of a single piece of sandalwood!
Later that afternoon, we went to the Friendship Store, the place where, just a few years ago, only foreigners could shop. In theory, Westerners bought western designer-label products with their own currencies, thus strengthening the Chinese government financially. These days, the store still sells expensive products, but anyone can shop there. Then, we moved on to the Silk Market, a major tourist attraction for foreigners wishing to barter Chinese-style. Heaps of merchants line the aisles, begging shoppers to buy their trinkets and knock-off products. We left with a Red Army hat, a chop, and a blinking key chain of Mao that the vendor claimed was “good for the ecology” because it used solar power.
Just outside of the market, we hopped into a waiting taxicab, but we soon found out that the police wanted to write the driver a ticket! We think that he pulled into an illegal area to pick us up . . . so, the driver pulled over into a crosswalk while a policeman wrote his ticket. When the driver got back in the car, Dad gave him the card for our hotel (it’s common to give taxi drivers the Chinese name of the place where you’re going) and showed him his new keychain. Soon, we realized we’d passed our hotel and were in front of the Forbidden City—where a huge photo of Mao is displayed!
That night, we took another adventurous taxi ride over to the Haidian district to meet Grace’s host family. They live in a teeny flat, which is typical in China due to the high cost of living. Grace tried to translate for us, but mostly we just nodded and smiled.
Day 4: The Forbidden City and HutongsThe following day, Dad and I ventured to the Forbidden City, home of the Chinese Imperial Family up until the early 1900’s. Officially, it’s called the National Palace Museum, but most people refer to it as the Forbidden City because it used to be forbidden for anyone to enter who wasn’t invited. It takes up about one square mile of the downtown area, and it’s filled with numerous elegantly decorated halls. After several hours there, we had seen only a fraction of the small area that’s even available to the public.
Dad and I enjoyed the translations here in particular . . . especially the Halls of Medium and Supreme Harmony and the Hill of Accumulated Elegance. We sometimes thought the Chinese named everything with the words, peace, harmony, or bliss—but maybe the names are just a result of a creative translator!
That night, after yet another taxi adventure, we met Grace near a park in the northern part of the city. We walked around the lake in the park, sometimes venturing into the hutongs to get a glimpse of normal life for the Chinese. There were lots of bars and street vendors along the lake, and people swam in the lake and exercised in what seemed like adult parks. Around Beijing, there are lots of parks with brightly-colored metal exercise contraptions similar to stationary bikes, elliptical machines, and chest presses. Grace told us that adults use them at night to get exercise, but it’s funny because they seem like a combination of a playground and a gym, and they’re in public.
Day 5: The Great WallOn Tuesday, Dad and I set out early to meet our guide for the Great Wall, Aileen, and our driver. The day before, we planned the private tour to the wall, which was actually cheaper than the group tour offered by the hotel. We headed out to the Mutianyu section (there are about five popular sections of the wall near Beijing that are restored), where we hoped there would be few people. The Chinese people believe that they have to go to the Great Wall sometime in their lives to be good Chinese people; consequently, the small restored sections of the wall are usually packed with Chinese tourists. And, Chinese tourists tend to travel in large groups, stop often, take lots of pictures, and walk without looking where they’re going (there didn’t seem to be a general custom of staying to the right, as in the US, or the left, as in NZ).
Fortunately, the wall wasn’t too crowded, and we were only pestered by vendors on the way to the cable car. On the way up, we took a car that the claimed that the Seventeenth Living Buddha rode in it. We walked along the wall for a while, although it was not nearly as tall as I’d imagined—and apparently it’s a myth that it can be seen from space! On the way down, we rode in a cable car that Bill Clinton took when he visited the Wall in 1998.
That night, we met up with Grace to go to what we thought was Beijing’s only Mexican Restaurant. Chinese food all tastes the same to me! We had a pseudo-Mexican meal, complete with salsa, rice and beans, and peas and carrots!
Day 6: The Temple of Heaven, The Beijing Zoo, and another Taxi Adventure On our last full day in the city, Dad and I took a taxi to the Temple of Heaven, the temple and huge park south of the city where the emperors used to go to pray for good harvests. Yep, an entire park and temple complex devoted to asking the gods to give the Chinese people a good crop yield. As Dad often says, and was clear at the park, “The Chinese don’t dink around.” When they build something, they go all out!
Then, we moved on to the zoo, where we met up with Grace to look at the Giant Pandas. Sadly, the zoo only had four, and only one lived outdoors. Two lived in depressing glass cages, and the other lived in a big, wire box outside. The one outdoor panda was fairly lively, walking around his pen and eating bamboo shoots for the crowd.
We decided we’d try to find a different vegetarian restaurant for dinner. Since the first veggie restaurant didn’t actually exist, we called this restaurant first to make sure that they were open. Our maps didn’t show the street where it was, so we made an alternate plan. We flagged a taxi as Grace rung the restaurant again and handed the phone to the taxi driver. We thought it’d be simple to just have the people at the restaurant tell the driver how to get there . . . after about forty-five minutes of driving, we weren’t so sure! The driver drove down some hutongs, and eventually he used his hand to make a phone sign, and Grace dialed up the restaurant again. We thought that surely this time we’d get there.
Several minutes later, the driver pulled down another alley, and, still confused, turned into a side street. Other cars started to honk while the driver talked to the restaurant again. Then, he got out of the car and asked some of the locals where the restaurant was. He came back over the car, motioning for us to stay put. Of course, we weren’t going anywhere—we had no idea where we were! Soon, we looked back and saw a woman in a green dress coming toward the taxi . . . it was a waitress from the restaurant! Needless to say, our driver got a nice tip! The waitress led us through some thick shrubbery inside (we couldn’t possibly have seen it), where we enjoyed a nice meal of fake meat, including the famous Peking Duck!
Day 7: FlyingOn Thursday, we woke up early to head to the airport, finally! I was tired of China’s dodgy hygiene, unorderliness, overcrowding, grey haze of pollution, censorship, and unpurified water. Due to the amount of pollution in the city from the 14 million people who live there, the sky doesn’t get blue. Only in autumn does the grey haze go away. The water is unsafe to drink—even the locals avoid it—so tons of people are employed every day to transport bottled water by car (or bike!) to locations all around the city. Dad and I are really curious to hear about the Beijing Olympics. We imagine marathon runners won’t be too pleased about the air! And it should be interesting to see how the influx of Western visitors view the Chinese government, the city of Beijing, and the more mundane aspects of the country such as the hole-in-the-ground toilets and the suffocating pollution. Although Beijing is excited about the Olympics, the city certainly doesn’t seem at all ready for the big event!
After yet another adventurous taxi ride (we were stuck in the same place on the highway for about twenty minutes because a high-ranking Chinese politician was also going in our direction), we arrived at the airport. There we filled out more forms that nobody looked at, passed through customs, and awaited our flight to a more democratic country! We had to stop in Hong Kong because the Chinese government doesn’t permit airplanes to fly straight to Taiwan. There’s more than a little tension between the two countries. After a full day of flying, we landed in Taipei, where cousin Bill and Crystal met us at the airport. We’re enjoying Taiwan, its culture, its freedom, and the company of Bill and Crystal, but I’ll write more about that later.
