Episode Five: In which our heroine sets off to Beijing alone

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Including her experiences:

Dragging her bag through the streets of Beijing
Catching her first glimpse of Tiananmen Square
Visiting a Fine Art exhibition
Checking out the Night Markets
Walking through the Forbidden City
Hanging out with Hostelers
Hiking the Great Wall
Being chauffered around town
& sleeping in style,
Among others...

I left the hotel in Shanghai early, after saying goodbye to Mum and Dad, and headed in a taxi to the airport to catch my flight to Beijing. After checking in, I had some time up my sleeve, so I had some toast and a glass of (hot!) milk in the only open restaurant before getting on the plane. The flight was fairly short and I didn't have to clear customs, so the next thing I knew, I was on the airport bus heading into Beijing City. Surprisingly, considering the number of foreigners in the airport, there was only one on my bus, and he lived and worked in China and had for the past 20+ years. However, I had been asked by about 5 drivers on the way to the bus whether I wanted a taxi, so everyone else may have thought that taxis were the way to go. An hour later, I was thinking that they were the smart ones. At Beijing Railway station, I swapped to a local bus, which took me past Tiananmen Square (and let me tell you, that first sighting was amazing) and dropped me at Qianmen, at the base of the square, from which there was a 700m walk to my hostel. Well, a 700m walk through the streets of Beijing is not the same as a 700m walk in Adelaide. There were construction sights and blocked footpaths everywhere, not to mention about 4 underpasses that I had to drag my bag up and down to get to the other side of the road, but I finally made it to the hostel, and that was a pretty good sense of achievement!

After dropping my bag off and checking in, I made my way back to Tiananmen Square - a much easier walk without luggage! It's absolutely enormous. I was expecting an empty piece of pavement, but it's so huge that there's no way to comprehend the scale of it unless you're there. The mist (or smog?) wisping around it added to its vastness and the soldiers on every corner gave a great sense of importance. I felt incredibly insignificant among the throngs of Chinese tourists coming to see their national monuments with an understanding of what everything around them meant to the history of their country.

Anyway, I wandered around the square and took a few happy snaps, and the next thing I knew I was approached by Jenny and Ice (yes, that was her English name) from Beijing Fine Arts University, who I had a friendly conversation with. It turned out that they were about to graduate and had an exhibition in the National Gallery across the Square, to which they would give me free entry in exchange for my 'international cultural perspective' of their artwork. It was a pretty amazing exhibition of all types of artwork in different styles from Chinese to very Western-looking, and the two of them took me through and explained the background behind many of the pieces, including the traditional styles of work and cultural meaning. They gave me a cup of tea and wrote my name for me in Chinese characters, and then they got down to business, wanting me (as I should have seen coming) to buy some of their work. About 15 minutes later I managed to escape, not having bought anything, but feeling slightly guilty because of the effort they'd put into my tour. The guilt wore off a couple of minutes later, however, when another lady asked me to "come and see my artwork" in a different building nearby.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Tiananmen Square and the outside of the Forbidden City, taking pictures and watching the world go by. When it got dark, I headed back to the streets around my hostel and walked around the area for a while, looking at the different stalls at the night markets and wandering into some of the tourist shops. I had tea at a little Chinese restaurant in the back streets after a man out the front beckoned me inside, and had rice and a seemingly popular Chinese dish of fried egg and tomato (sounds boring but tastes great!). After some more wandering, I headed back to the hostel where I watched the end of "Supersize Me" in the DVD lounge with some of the other travellers, and talked to them for a while afterwards. It was really interesting hearing everyone's stories about where they had been and where they were headed. The two that I mainly talked to were Ben, an English guy who has been on the road for about 19 months including working in Australia for a year, and Sally from the US, who along with her Finnish boyfriend has been travelling through Asia and most recently Burma, where she helped to start an orphanage.

The next morning I woke up early and left the hostel at around 8. The skies around Tiananmen Square were clear, so I took some more photos there, before heading into the Forbidden City. I didn't bother with the audio guide, instead wandering around myself off of the beaten path a little, and was often the only person in a whole area of the city. I think this may partly have been due to the weather, which was freezing cold and windy, but on the whole I was surprised by the lack of tourists, particularly foreigners, as nearly everyone there appeared to be part of a Chinese tour group wearing matching hats and following their leader's flag. I was probably in the Forbidden City for around 4 hours, because once again it's a huge place, and it doubles as the Palace Museum, so it was also interesting to look at the different aspects of Chinese history and understand a little bit more about what it all meant.

I then headed off to the Beijing Friendship Store, which has 5 floors of souvenirs aimed at tourists, as well as a grocery store with some foreign products. I spent a little while looking around, but it wasn't that exciting, so I then headed to the Silk Markets, a building filled with floors and floors of market stalls, complete with cries of "Lady, buy purse" "Lady, you need pants," "Lady look, handmade," "Special price for you," etc. etc. I spent some time walking through the various stalls, but by that stage I was getting tired and a little sick of shopping, so I made my way back to the hostel and relaxed for a while. I watched "Life Aquatic" with a couple of the other backpackers and we then decided to go our for dinner at a Peking Duck restaurant up the road. Along with Ben, the English guy mentioned above, and the second guy, who was from Turket but lives in Australia, and whose name I never quite mastered, I had quite a good meal of Chinese vegetables and rices, and we had a good night. Both guys were leaving the following morning, Ben to catch the train to Moscow with a few stops along the way.

Although I awoke early the next morning at left the hostel at 6:30, both other people in my room were awake and gone before me, which I thought was pretty impressive. I caught a taxi to The Great Wall Sheraton, where I met Ulli, who is a friend of my uncle Lindsay. Ulli works for Daimler Chrysler in China, and introduced me to his driver George, who drove me back to Ulli's enormous house in a fancy van complete with DVD player in the backseat and a button that closed the passenger door automatically. Back at Ulli's, I met up with Lindsay and the family, and we set off with George about half an hour later for our trip to the Great Wall of China. The section we climbed was at Mutianyu, and considering the amount of people I had expected to be there, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were sections of the wall in which we were the only people around.

We caught the cable car up to the top of the wall, and had a choice of whether to walk right or left. We chose the left-hand path, and walked as far as it was possible to go before the Wall had deteriorated so badly that there was no way to continue. That walk in itself was a pretty big effort, including some very steep sections with lots of stairs, and I was very impressed with Ben (10) and Emi (7) for making it as far as they did. The weather was great - slightly cold, but we didn't need jackets after we started walking, and the sky was clear and blue, so it was great for photos, of which we took many.

After a rest at the top, we headed back down the wall, luring Ben and Emi with promises of the luge ride that awaited to take us back down to the base of the Wall. Just before reaching our original starting point, we realised that the luge was not, as we had thought, right next to the cable car, but further along the wall to the right, about the same distance as our original walk to the left. Determined to make it to the luge, we set off again, and after an impressive effort, made it to the top of the silver slide curling down the mountains. Although the luge didn't seem to belong at the Great Wall any more than Starbucks did at the Forbidden City, it was a fun way to end our long walk, especially for Ben and Emerson, who put in an impressive effort and both managed to finish the whole walk that even I found difficult.

After getting through the mob of stall holders at the bottom without buying too much, we met George in the carpark and started the journey back to Beijing. This involved watching the DVD, "Kicking and Screaming," which I had managed to see approximately four times by the end of the day's driving. Once back in town, we went to the Toy Markets, where Ben and Emerson picked up some "Heelies," or shoes with rollers in the bottoms. We then walked over to the main market next door, where Lindsay was again enticed to a warehouse in the backstreets. We all duly followed him, resulting in tears from Emerson when she thought we would be locked inside. It was worth the walk though, as Lindsay picked up a good number of bargains, including some shirts and sweaters that were pretty snazzy.

From there, it was off to another Peking Duck restaurant, as Lindsay wanted to try the delicacy for himself. What better place to do it than in Beijing, the home of the dish itself? Looking at the menu and finding a prawn dish that seemed like a bargain, I was amused to find that the price was actually per prawn, and that one of the little critters would cost more than the combination of my entire meal and a drink the previous night. However, the meal was still a bargain by Australian standards, especially for a restaurant that must have been quite famous, considering the photos of various ambassadors and other guests who had dined there.

After our long day, we finally made it back to Ulli's, where we met his children, Nina and Nicholas, and I had a game of Yahtzee with Emi and Nina. Nina was most impressive, beating us both before it was time for the kids to go to bed, and I then sat up with Ulli, Lindsay and Steph for a while. After some interesting conversation, I finally got to my (huge) bed in the (huge) basement I had to myself, hoping to catch a few hours of sleep before my flight to Hong Kong the following morning

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Photos

Tiananmen Square Soldier
In front of Tiananmen Gate.

Beijing 2008
Not long to go now...

Forbidden City
As seen through Tiananmen Gate.

Inside the Forbidden City
Yes, there's a Starbucks everywhere

The Point of Return
Not much chance of walking any further from here...

Comments

[Jon and Jenny]

Beijing
The photos look great. Now that we're out of China, it's good to look back. Sounds like Lindsay enjoys the bargains in the back alleys.

[David Dewar]

Appreciation
Kirsty, Love your style of writing and the great photos. You really should publish your travel diaries!