Shanghai to Beijing

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BTW, just added photos to our Shanghai page - check em out.

On our last day in Shanghai, we met up with a girl that Caroline had met through work who is a Chinese girl called Mandy. She used to work as a tour guide, and grew up in Inner Mongolia, and now has just graduated her university degree in algorithms, and is working providing IT strategic commercial solutions for major international banks. A smart cookie. She took us on a mini tour of Shanghai, while chatting about her life and the way China was going. It was very interesting getting a young (mid twenties) intelligent female perspective of the China phenomenon. We found out that now Chinese women are actually getting paid better than the men (there’s less of them I guess), and she is quite western in a lot of her ways of thinking (loves to shop and wants to travel). When we asked her if she thinks that China will be the next superpower, her response was "of course", as if there was no other conceivable option. However, when we asked her some questions that she didn’t want to answer, she would basically stop talking (and she talked alot most of the time). These were mainly the questions around politics. She is not the only Chinese person like this we talked to - I think that once people become more well off, they have more to lose, and so if they are doing alright its easier not to think (or talk) about it.

After walking around a lot, and a yummy lunch, it was time for us to go to leave Shanghai, and jump an overnight sleeper train to Beijing. But we did have time to get a quick (45 minute) foot massage. Mmmmm, just the thing for your hooves after walking everywhere for a week. We arrived in Beijing, found our hostel, had some egg crepes for brekkie, and went off exploring. Saw the old city wall, and just basically cruised around (read - I got us lost). We were already finding Beijing to be a much more laid back city. There are less high rises, a little more space, and people were actually smiling and talking to each other. In Shanghai, everyone was frowning or cold faced and pushing each other out of the way. We also visited the Lama temple, which was about 100m walk from our hostel. It is massive, I think the biggest Buddhist temple in China, and has a 17m high Budda carved from a single piece of sandalwood. Big. I felt a little weird leaning over people making offerings to their deity to look at a pretty statue but Caroline said I should just get over it (because we were welcomed to be there and it could be meaningful to us too, so long we we don't get in their way). So I did.

That night we went to see an acrobatics show organized through our hostel. The car picked us up, and our "guide" got out after about 5 mins, saying that his "mother" would drop us at the show. Another young girl in the car (which I can only assume was his sister) took us to the gates of the theatre, but they wouldn’t let us in. So then she had to go buy tickets. It was about this point that I realised that the scam was that our guide knew some of the people checking tickets at the theatre, so he would get us in without tickets and split the money that we paid. Then they gave us 25RMB out of the 320RMB we paid them for us to get a taxi home. How nice of them. We caught the metro back 😊

The acrobatics was ok, a little amateur, but still pretty cool. During the plates on sticks spinning routine, I kept wanting some to fall (so I could see if they really were balancing on the little sticks), and I got my wish - yay! It happened when one girl was standing on the shoulders of another doing a bend back. Should have gone to see the Shaolin Monks.

Next day we started our 2 day tourist binge - first on the agenda, the Great Wall. We were on a tour bus with a Norwegian family (Mum, Dad, 2 early teenage sons) that were 9 months into their 12 month round the world trip. That was cool, and the kids were digging it - as much as surly teenagers can. There were also these 2 loud American guys who worked as business consultants for Fortune 500 companies, whose brains we picked for ways to make money on the road (yay more travel time! - sorry Mums).

We caught a chairlift up to the wall - Caroline shat herself. Not so good with heights. Looking down didn’t help. Once we were up there, the view was magnificent, intimidating, and polluted. I can imagine being a raiding tribe coming down from the north on horses to rape and pillage, and then running into this 20-30 meter high fortified wall. Fuck. Ok boys, time to go home. However, it really didn’t stop them in the long run. The scope was immense, especially considering it was all done by hand. Over a million people literally gave their lives to the wall, their bones are within the filling of the wall, our guide said.

When we were there, there were heaps of schoolchildren in colourful tracksuits on an excursion. Much better than the ubiquitous guided tours all wearing coloured hats and vests that were everywhere else at Beijing tourist sights. They were quite noisy and pubescent in a cute Chinese way. The two Americans were doing a podcast of "on the wall thinking", and so one of them was wearing a giant lightbulb on his head (what else?) and getting stopped by Chinese tourists every 30 seconds for photos, so the group all just split up. A dubious highlight was seeing young Chinese schoolgirls sitting on the Great Wall proudly waving Chinese flags eating McDonalds. Sign o the times.

After the wall, we went and ate lunch at a Jade factory. WTF? The tours are run by the government, and designed in a way to get tourists to buy things from government owned shops - at highly inflated prices. So we got a guided tour of the premises, then ate lunch, and then milled around the jade showroom for 20 minutes to give everyone "a chance to look at everything". The sales team here weren’t that good. We didn't buy anything.

After that, we went to see the Ming Dynasty tombs - or so we thought. We actually just saw the entrance gate - mind you the entrance gate was a kilometre long and lined with massive statues to protect the dead. They must have worked, because we didn’t see inside a tomb. We had a silk shop to go to! We watched how silk was made (which was actually quite interesting) and then got left for another 20 minutes to check out the silk showroom.

The next day we went to see the old-school palaces. On this trip it was just us and a guy from Malaysia who had just been in Mongolia organizing an international table tennis tournament - table tennis is big business in Asia.

First stop was the imperial pleasuredome in central Beijing - the Forbidden City. It is about 400m wide and 1km long - and no commoners were allowed in until the last emperor got overthrown (1912). It was massive and architecturally impressive. Such extravagance. The emperor even had different rooms to have sex with the empress and concubines. Apparently, concubines were delivered naked by eunichs to the foot of the emperor's bed on demand - so they couldn’t carry in weapons. Lots of significance in everything they did. In one room the empress even had the character for longevity written thousands of times in different ways so that she would live long time... which strikes me as being about the same as writing longevity in lots of different fonts on your bedroom wall.

Then we went to the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor did his monthly rituals to smite his enemies and grow good crops. By now we are a bit over temples. It was once again massive and impressive and slightly obsessive compulsive - "we have to have nine of everything coz thats the number for longevity, and blue is for heaven, and yellow for the emperor, and red for luck, and grey for the people, and we can't have four of anything because that means death...." (the word for four sounds similar to the word for death).

Then we went to the pearl factory. Saw how pearls were made, and then they led us to the sales floor. And these guys were slick. And I mean SLICK. Great sales staff, all mid twenties pretty Chinese girls. We noticed them using about 8 different persuasive/sales techniques - and god only knows how many we missed. It seems to work though, most people I saw in there bought something. Even Caroline bought some crushed pearl face cream - apparently pearl is good for your skin (???) The staff were a pleasure to watch, but made me a bit scared that the government is so good at training sales people. But then again, I guess they’ve had the whole thought control thing down for quite a while now.... one of their key lines was "our shop is owned by the government, so its top quality, we must keep our promise to you" and "we are both young so you can talk to me about what you think" and "we give you a special price because you can be a model and tell your friends"

Then off to the Summer palace... one palace is never enough. The extravagance and opulence was disgusting (but beautiful in its design). One empress known as the dragon lady who dominated Chinese politics for the last half of the 19th century and even house imprisoned one of the emperors (her nephew) because he tried to reform the antiquated country, ate four meals a day, each consisting of 27 separate dishes, prepared by an army of chefs. Each day, she wasted enough food to feed four families for a year. There was also a massive sailing ship made entirely out of Jade - and no it didn’t sail. Mindblowing in its scale.

Then we were off to the tea factory. Given our last shakedown, we certainly weren’t going to buy any tea, but the young, new saleswoman did a brave job anyway. She would nod her head 'yes' very subtly after each thing she said (to gain our agreement) and got a little put off by me shaking my head 'no' very subtly. When we left the tea room, our guide was not prepared, and she was still sitting in sight. She quickly scampered off "to the toilet" so that we had the usual 20 minutes to spend looking at teacups. The three of us walking out and waiting outside may have alerted her that we were not going to be making any purchases at this time, thank you.

The guides were interesting. They spoke English quite well, but it felt like they were reading off a text book in their heads - the second guide could tell us every fact and figure about the palaces, but was thrown off by a question outside her 'text'. It was quite convenient though, and well subsidised by the government, we could have never have done it that fast or cheap on our own.

The next day we ate Peking Duck. It was at a killer restraunt that party members (Communist party) wined and dined international guests. One duck, which they carved in front of us, heaps of pancakes, lots of oyster sauce and a heap of left over skin later, we were stuffed. Very cool. Then we went shopping at this 6 level market where we did our best not to get ripped off by all the stalls. Starting at 6 or 7 times the end price was normal. After some hard bargining, we came out with some cheap stuff, but were mentally drained after a few hours. Oh, to just walk into a shop and just look at the price! Fun though. Caroline even started saying things like "lucky number" and "happiness", terms we heard a lot at all the palaces, and it worked. they said "you are smart"!

That night we went and stayed with a couple of people we met on couchsurfing.com, Richard and Yonnie. They are both from Canberra, and trained as lawyers, and Yonnie was born in China. She is working very, very hard on a copyright law brochure (15 hour days for the last few weeks) - the Definitive Guide to Intellectual Property for China, but she took some time off to take us back to their apartment and get settled in. Both of them are really, really nice people who opened their house and friendship to us. They had both learned Mandarin at university, and so could speak the language, and were working in Beijing. They loved being in the city at such a historically significant time, namely the rise of the Chinese superpower (not just the Olympics). They told us that every single Chinese person had the same arguments to defend China's role in Tibet (they were slaves and serfs before we civilized them, the monks attacked the Chinese army, the Dalai Lama is a terrorist and a liar, Tibet has always been a part of China). They too had the palpable sense of paranoia that we found in every foreigner we met living in China. Richard insisted that the very first thing we do in the morning was to go to the police station and get us registered - foreigners are usually only allowed to stay in registered guest houses. They told us how the police had searched their place, by just turning up on the doorstep and saying 'we are searching your house'. I guess the paranoia is justified, living in a totalitarian country. If they want you in China, they got you.

The next day, we left Yonnie to work (even though it was May Day public holiday in China) and Richard took us to the police station. It was very Kafkaesque. One officer told us to go one place, the next one told us to go to a different place, and the next place told us that the person who deals with that was on holiday and to come back tomorrow. "But these foreigners have to be registered within 24 hours, or I am breaking the law." Shrug. So that was that, and we left.

Then we went off on a Hutong tour. Hutongs are the alleyways that dissect the main roads in china, where most people live, so it could be considered like the 'backstreets'. It was very cool. We got to see how 95% of Beijing residents live their lives. The sense of community was palpable, and everyone was friendly - very tight knit communities. Old men playing chess, kids running around, wives gossiping - life. We got to eat some cool street food, which was really good because Richard actually knew what we were eating (as opposed to our usual pointing at things). He took us through some buzzing neighbourhoods, and some that were condemned, and some that were already demolished. The saddest part was the borders between the parts that were now rubble, and the houses that had the condemned sign on them. It felt like the loss of a community, and the inevitability of progress. They were making way for high rise apartment blocks, and the poor who live in the hutongs will be pushed out to the outer lying areas, and split up from their neighbours. People getting in the way of progress. Like usual in China, the poor people lose.

We also walked to Tiananmen Square. It was not as impressive as I had thought it would be. It was May Day (International workers day) and I thought that Tiananmen would be going off. There was lots of people, but it was sedate. We played spot the undercover cop - the place is crawling with them apparently, ready to stomp on any dissent. Walking was like walking through a music festival - people as far as the eye could see. We had a pickpocket (or was it undercover security?) trailing us for a while, but he gave up when he realised that we were wise to him. The structures around the square are impressive, square and communist looking, lots of flags. We went back later in the night to watch the flag lowering, but we missed it by 5 minutes. Damn cops told us the wrong time, we were five minutes early (for once) Apparently it is pretty cool, full military procession, traffic stops when they go past (major main road). When we got back from Tiananmen after being disappointed, and walking for about 8 hours straight, Richard and Yonnie informed us that a foot bath place just down from their building was having a opening special - free foot steams! So we went down with our books, and sat chilling out with our overused feet getting steamed and kneaded by rollers. That is just the kind of random cool shit that happens on the road. [But they put my - Caroline's - on at double the heat of others and I struggled to communicate due to speaking a different language, that my feet and legs were burning, slowly they turned it down form 6 to 4 to 3. Steve later told me his was on 3 the whole time. No permanent damage! - C]

The next day, Richard had developed a bad chest - the pollution on our walk was pretty sick. So we set off on our own. The pollution was even worse - we were walking down a street to the Olympic plaza, and we could barely breathe. It was crap, we both were coughing and had headaches. I could only imagine what it would be like living there. The Olympic plaza is still not finished, we saw it from outside the walls, with everyone else, clambering for a view. The only people who could go in any further were construction workers with passes (like many, working on the May Day three day holiday). Then we went and sat in a park to get some fresh air - trees are good, so are lakes, when air quality is involved.

That night, we went out for lamb kebab skewers, chicken pita bread stew and 50c big bottles of Tsing Tao, with Richard and Yonnie. Gotta love the local knowledge, it was killer! After saying goodbye, it was back on the overnight train to Xi'an.

Loved Beijing, and Shanghai, such an eye opener. Seeing how different cultures work, but how humans are basically the same when it comes down to it.

Steve and Caroline

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Photos

Dinner
On the sleeper train

Devotees
prayin to Budda

Pineapple Beer
Chinese chicks drink

Yes...
It really is a great wall

Maccas
Hahahaha

Forbidden City
A really really big palace

Palace
and Princess

Sacrifical oven...
claims another victim

Peking Duck
Mmmmmmm

Sign o the times
Richard in hutong on his Blackberry

Comments

[Louise]

Loving the couchsurfing
Hi Caroline and Steve, I'm babysitting my niece Emma today so delighted to get a chance to check out your blog while she's snoozing. Keep up the great blogging. Really enjoying the couchsurfing so far! Hope to see you some time soon and look forward to reading the blog from that experience as well! Louise x