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Published: December 12th 2005
Old Beijing
Mural etching of life in old BeijingWe are still laughing about the silly documentary we watched last night on the only
English channel on Beijing TV. Did you know that Beijing Duck is less greasy now than it used to be? Customers demanded that it be less greasy so chefs developed new non-greasy ways to prepare it. The traditional way of cooking Beijing Duck by pumping it with water and roasting in a wood fired oven gave it a melt in your mouth juiciness (read: greasy), but The People demanded less greasy duck without sacrificing tenderness. Now, modern Beijing restaurants use leaner ducks, no more fatties! They roast them in efficient gas ovens, which reduces the cooking time, the use of non-renewable fuel, and the grease factor.
What’s not giving us chuckles is our new noisy neighbors and their bratty kids. Hey parents - guess what? You are in charge and it’s OK to tell your children to stop running in and out of the hotel room at 7am, slamming the door eighteen times!
Time to get up anyway, but that’s not the point.
Off to the free breakfast buffet, so from the front courtyard we wind our way to the back.
Beijing - Dongchangan Street
Looking east at the impressive Beijing Hotel Clearly this courtyard is quieter - with the rustling trees, birds chirping and flitting about, and the peaceful feel of the soft morning light, you can’t imagine that you are smack in the middle of 13.8 million people. The rooms in the front are the less expensive standard decor doubles, in this section are the proudly advertised (what sold me on the place), and for us unaffordable, opulent suites. We will only be able to view them from the hotel brochure, a fanfold pictogram of elaborately decorated rooms in a mix of traditional Chinese styles. Many guests are already in the restaurant. It has a comfortable down-home feel, the staff is gracious and the food looks great. Laid out is a simple, yet odd mix of poached eggs, rice, broccoli, toast, juice, stale buns and what I thought was very watery yogurt but turned out to be sweetened milk (duh) - I guess it’s for the bitter coffee.
The front desk has info about tours to the Great Wall. Zoe says she’s up for the most difficult hike at Simatai. I’ve only read about it in LP, which says that it is not for the fainthearted. The hotel uses
Beijing - Dongchangan Street
Looking west towards Tiananmen Travel Compass Tourist Information Service (long enough name?) who offers several day & a couple overnight trips to the main Wall destinations: Simatai, Jinshanling, Badaling & Ming Tombs, along with other Beijing tours like the Summer Palace and Forbidden City. We book the trip for ¥180 ($21US)for both of us - tomorrow we’ll have a very early departure of 7:45am! I have no idea what to expect…
That done, we head to Dongsinan Street (or Dongsi Nandajie - depending on the reference, the street names are spelled slightly differently) to buy some items we spotted last night. We pop our heads in every single store that we stopped in last night looking for one in particular. It had a pair of Esprit capris that just might fit me but the store can’t be found. It no longer exists! I buy another pair that will do…but what the heck happened to that store?
Beijing is flat. Flat, like 'the valley' in LA - a featureless grid of overly wide main thoroughfares and too narrow side streets. And like LA, the smog has water colored the horizon a pale brown; were that haze not there you could see the mole
Beijing - Canal
Canal that runs along the front of the Working People’s Cultural Palace on Mao’s mug a mile away. A certain unnamed travel guide would like you to think, “it is flat and ideal for bicycling”. Maybe if your head is flat, or you want to be flat, you would take up biking in central Beijing as a total newbie. But anyone with partial eyesight and an IQ over 15 can see that the streets are dangerous for bicyclists, not “more adventurous and more efficient”. Vehicles heed the traffic signals for the most part, but there is guesswork at each intersection as to who’s got the green light. Any vehicle that wants to turn into a group of pedestrians or bicycles legally crossing a street does so, and in full view of the traffic cops. If you want to see Beijing up close and personal, then walk. If you get tired, hail a taxi.
The goals today are to book our train tickets to Xi’an and visit the Forbidden City. There is a CITS, China International Travel Service, on Donganmen Street, so after scouring the other side of Dongsinan for potential clothing bargains, we hunt down CITS. On the corner is a huge building with a giant lobby - this must be
Beijing - Canal
I take pic of you, you take pic of me. These girls soon found their way over to us & now they have photos of us together in their vacation album the HQ. It is. The smiling and helpful receptionist asks around but isn’t sure where to find an actual branch location, still, she confidently points down the block. Scrutinizing both sides of the street as we walk along, there is no CITS booking agency. Probably one of those China-isms where they give a positive answer rather than disappoint. We’ll let the hotel take care of the train reservations as we’ve got plenty of sightseeing to do and no extra time to waste.
Continuing down Donganmen we reach a boulevard on Nanheyan Dajie. On the corner is an historic site in a sunken area with a display of the remains of the 15th century Eastern Peace Gate. (Note, later I find that this is a small part of a very ambitious development and restoration of
historic central Beijing. Too bad it wasn’t listed in any tourist resource, it would have been a rather nice walking tour to add to our agenda.) Of course, most of the inscriptions are in Chinese so we only get half the story. There is a police officer patrolling the area and he keeps watch, not on us, but the local youths who are meandering about and surreptitiously
Beijing - Canal
Another beautiful bridge eyeing us.
The boulevard stretches south, all the way down to Dongchangan Jie. Flowerbeds and blooming shrubs line the paved pathways, we stroll slowly along, shaded from the stark sun by a mature canopy of trees. Park benches and 19th century styled streetlamps, strangely enough, create an old fashioned European atmosphere.
At Dongchangan we turn west along a tree lined walkway. A bit further we see an arch to our right, with a parkway leading west - decide to take it since it's generally on the way. A canal runs the length and is crossed by Monet-inspired bridges, which draped by willows, reflect in the water as in his painting, Water Lily Pond. We stop for a photo or two of this lovely scene and soon attract several giggling young girls who muzzle in for pix with and of us.
Escaping further photo ops, we come upon an entrance, but this is just to a gallery and not the main entrance to the Forbidden City. Have we passed it? Did we get sidetracked? Unsure, we continue west, and are stopped again for a quick photo, soon though we let out onto an enormous promenade, crowded with tourists,
Beijing - Canal
Mother and daughter in Beijing! where we see a large entrance gate with the famous portrait of Chairman Mao hanging garishly above. Tiananmen Square is directly across the eight-lane street. We have arrived!
This is actually the
Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen Gate) that leads to the Working People’s Cultural Palace, not the gate to the Forbidden City, but you can enter here to get to the south gate. Like all of the other goofy tourists here, and I mean the Chinese tourists, we must get our picture taken beneath the famous Mao portrait.
Initially, it is not apparent to us that we haven’t yet entered the
Forbidden City, as we did not do our homework, having squandered our time on the train ride playing games & gabbing. Through the gate, we run the gauntlet of tour touts gathered in the square. No, no, no, no and no, we don’t want a guide. A young Chinese guy motions that he’d like a photo, once again we politely nix the pix. Is this what the pop icons deal with? We wander about for a bit (error #1) to see what there is to see. Soon, we are approached by a young student, she has a badge and speaks
Beijing - Canal
Our new picture buddies... quite good English (clue #1). She explains, "I am an art student and my work is on display here. Please come and see. No one goes in so no one sees....". In the chaos I keep listening (error #2). It would be nice to see her work - to see a real Beijing art student's work. I tell her, "Later". She becomes more insistent (clue #2) and takes my arm. Somewhere deep in the foggy recesses of my mind, I wake up and smell a scam. "No thank you, maybe later, thanks, good bye, no, bye." I don't like the disappointed look on her face. I don't like the guilt I feel.
After extricating ourselves, we search in earnest for the real entrance and find it at the north end of the huge square. We locate the ticket booth oddly situated away from the actual gate. Rather confusing set-up. We opt out of the self-guided tape tour; hindsight says maybe we shouldn’t have? Pay ¥60($7US) each.
The enormous Wumen Gate opens to a massive courtyard, with buildings off to either side. There is major renovation, probably readying for the rush of tourists expected for the 2008 Olympics. It’s
Beijing - Tiananmen Gate
Gate of Heavenly Peace or Tiananmen Gate not as colorful as I expected, but the completed renovations show bright new yellow glazed roof tiles and repainted eave details. Though plenty of tourists fill the space there is still a feeling of emptiness, drabness that modern day culture can’t fill. Built for royalty, the color and life must have been provided by the Imperial clan and the thousands who served. I can hardly describe the vastness - one square leads to the next and the next. This place, this palace, is gigantic. Corridors split off to specially built halls, sweeping stairs, & squares - it just goes on and on. The sun beats down, sweating and starving through the maze, we explore. Just past the Hall of Supreme Harmony, a line of guards march through the square and hustle the crowds off to one side. What’s going on? They shoo everyone way over, so that you can’t get into any of the major buildings. The guards are s-e-r-i-o-u-s. Finally we all see that the stir is about a diplomatic delegation. Shuttled by Chinese guides, a black man in a bright green print African type garb, who appears to be THE guy, is ambling along the clean swept vista
with an entourage of similarly dressed black men and a woman dressed Western style (the wife?). The private tour is taking so long that they must be getting the complete history of Ming and Qing dynasties with a bonus description of the assorted fires and reconstructions. Zoe says that there is a Nobel Laureates Forum in town. Could this be someone from that? We’ll never know who it is…
We move on as the delegation moves ahead, but are blocked from getting within 50 yards, which means missing some halls. Hot and tired we trudge about the side buildings that house the galleries. Though exhausted, we spend a lot of time at an excellent exhibit about the Emperor’s concubines, their lives in the court, and relationship to the Empress. Though depicted here as living tranquil lives of leisure, spending their days painting or writing poetry, the real story is the stuff of lurid Chinese history where murderous envy and devious collaboration elevated a consort and protected
her rank in the Imperial court. How can you blame them? It was either abject poverty and near slavery if you stayed at home, or hope that your beauty or demeanor impressed the Empress
Beijing - Tiananmen Gate
Me and Mao - I think that sign says keep out or else enough to be chosen as part of her court. A society that prohibited freedom to women, bound their feet to restrict movement and ensure dependency, deserved a bit of back-stabbing.
So much of a maze, I’m sure we skipped many cool spots. Tired, hot and hungry we drag ourselves to the far northern end, to the Imperial Garden, where we find relief in the shade. There are many convenience shops, all with nothing but soft drinks, ice cream, nuts & chips. It’s after 4:30 and this whole place will be closing soon. Grab some nuts and water, awful tasting, and we recuperate enough to continue.
Here at the north end we can exit to a Prospect Hill, a park where you can get a birds eye view of the Forbidden City, but we think we can race back south and see those buildings we missed, along with Tiananmen Square. Speed walking we begin to realize that we are being guided along to the exit; just like at the grocery store they plan to close precisely on time.
Hey! We’ve only been here four and a half hours! Not only did we miss the halls where the delegation
Beijing - Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square across wide Dongchangan Street travelled, it seemed that only about 1/3 of the place was accessible. There is so much more to see on the grounds outside to the west and north, as well as many more exhibits in FC and in the Working People’s Cultural Palace - you could easily spend a full day here, maybe 2 days. But bring a picnic lunch!!
Out the front gate, we work our way thru the crowd, looking for a quick way across the wide Dongchangan Street. Get to the curb and see that T. Square is closed off! A row of official looking SUV’s are lined up in the plaza, all peeps cordoned off to the sides. Again is this for the delegation? Must be.
We rest on a grassy curb waiting for the square to clear & and us to cool off. It has been a very hot day, skin reddened, feet burning. Ahh, to sit and relax. Uh, not for long. Our iconic presence has grasped the attention of a large group of tourists and we become recipients of stares and gawking. Two brave girls break out, excitedly hop over to us & ask, well not really ask, they gesture for
Beijing - Through Tiananmen Gate
Plaza inside the Working People’s Cultural Palace a pic. They are Tibetan. Giggling Tibetans. Hilarious Tibetans. Each Tibetan wants his/her pic with us. We’ve become a bigger sight than what we’re sitting in front of! After a full photo shoot in various heart-stopping positions of standing, sitting, and kneeling, arm in arm, we deftly extract ourselves from the grip of popularity, wave bye-bye, and head down the street.
An odd bunch of non-touristy Westerners are walking towards us. Zoe says that she recognizes one of the guys - it's U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Guiterrez. He's in town making speeches to the Chinese government on how the US needs their compliance to rectify a trade imbalance. Later, I see a blurb on TV and his speech, completely lacking content, explains why the US wants to curb textile imports this way: "it is too complicated to explain... I can't go into that now". Huh? Did you pick the short straw? Did you not do your homework? Maybe the stupidity of this sentence was overlooked by his hosts, but the intent of the message was not taken well. However, even with the crudeness of the delivery, the Chinese respond conservatively in their criticism of this policy. Overall, they are
Beijing - architectural detail
Restored detail under the eaves of the Gate of Supreme Harmony (I think...) generous in praise of the US, and go out of their way to avoid negative comments. A lesson that the US would be wise to learn.
Whew! We hit Wangfujing Street, turn north on to a pedestrian shopping/hanging out area. How convenient - we need food! Oh, but there is only ice cream and soda. About ten ice cream and soda tents, all exactly alike. We could stop for a Big Mac or duck into a dark, formal Chinese place, but all we want is a nice outdoor café with a filling snack & a frosty one. Could this lack of foodstuffs and overabundance of cheap ice cream be a holdover from decades of rationing and shortages? Will China be ready for the onslaught of
hungry 2008 Olympics tourists? Not that I advocate food gluts like LA or Hong Kong, but I smell a business op here if anyone wants to open a restaurant on Wangfujing! The Chinese have a long ways to go. I can’t criticize too much because you can tell they are trying in the best way they can.
We hoof it back to the hotel and eat a decent meal there for only ¥80($9US). We finish off
Beijing - Forbidden City
Inside the gate looking at the Hall of Supreme Harmony the night with another exceptional documentary about a US envoy sent to China during WWII. Slow moving, non-essential, uninteresting, repetitive details - meant to fill in the gaps as to what the government didn’t want to say about the visit??
Hey, click on this cool website I found, the
World Heritage Tour **********************************
Visit our website:
Tony & Martha Dancy Visit my Ruby Lane shop for Fine Art and Funky Finds:
Martha’s Art Mart Visit
Martha's Squidoo Lenses
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Bonnie Guerra
non-member comment
It was good to receive your Aug. 19th blog. I am glad to see a picture of you Martha and the last picture of Tony I finally saw, he still looks the same. Looks like your having a good time with your daughter. I loved the pictures, in fact all the pictures you take of something I have never seen. Keep it up. Bonnie Guerra