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Published: September 23rd 2010
Empress Meri Jo and Emperor Bob
Short reign (30 seconds) waiting for the photo to be taken.China! It is the land of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and the home of 1.3 billion people. Its resourceful people invented the compass, the printing press, paper, fireworks and gunpowder. It is the place where people eat deep fried scorpions and cockroaches (according to our guide, “Chinese people will eat anything.”) It is where you will find spectacular architecture, amazing landscapes and 4000 years of history and smog so thick you can’t see the sky.
We are joined in China for the first two weeks by Bob and Meri Jo Bradler and the four of us are on a private tour. It is really nice to have a tour guide meet you and guide you when you can’t even read the language.
Our first five days were spent in and around Beijing. The sights were impressive…The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, The Bird’s Nest Stadium, and The Great Wall. But even more interesting are the small every day things which took us by surprise. This blog will mention the first but focus on the second.
In Beijing, most signs have the names spelled out in letters as well as Chinese characters and many public places have
both Chinese and English. But beware of the English…it seems to be translated by someone who does not speak English well and the result can be both confusing and poetic. Here are a few examples…
Sign in train bathroom: “Do not use while stabling.”
On the Great Wall: “Appreciate the lovely view of the Great Wall. Do not forget the fire is heartless!”
Pedestrians do not have the right-of-way, even if they have a WALK signal. First priority is vehicles, second is bicycles and last is pedestrians. When you cross the street, keep an eye on all traffic and try to cross with a local. But even though they have the right of way, traveling by car is infuriatingly slow in the city. The number of cars has exploded faster than the roads can be widened and it is not unusual to take 15 minutes to go one block. Traffic lights are infrequent and treated as advisory and merging seems to be one big game of “chicken.” I saw one six-lane road cross another six-lane road without any kind of traffic control. Just drive into the intersection and make your way across.
Our hotel was on a
Tiananmen Square
Chairman Mao looks over the largest public square in the world. hutong or narrow, one-lane street where there were many businesses such as restaurants, small shops selling fruit or cokes or ice cream or cigarettes, several unisex beauty shops and a seamstress. In Frankfurt, I had purchased a pair of shorts on sale for very cheap and when I went to try them on, I discovered they did not have a button hole. They had a button but not the hole. So I dropped my new shorts off at a seamstress to get a button hole installed. She spoke very little English (basically numbers) and of course I speak no Chinese but she was friendly and helpful and as soon as I showed her the button and the lack of a hole the situation was obvious and just 30 minutes and Y10 ($1.50) later the problem was fixed.
We visited another nearby hutong that focuses on food. It was wall-to-wall people and the sights and smells were incredible. We saw skewers of scorpions, starfish, sea horses, cockroaches and grubs (as well as beef, chicken and pork) all waiting to be fried and eaten. Many of the scorpions were still wiggling even though they were impaled. We saw many different vendors
selling dumplings, corn-on-the-cob, soup with meatballs, glazed fruit on a skewer, melon on a stick and more. We finally decided on a variation of won ton soup for dinner. One of the hutongs was full of sit down cafés and each one was vying for our business trying to get us to enter their shop. When we finally picked one, we were seated inside a small three sided room on a warm, muggy day eating hot soup. Thank goodness for cold drinks.
The next day, our Chinese tour guide, David, guided us to several of the key buildings. Most key buildings are built along a north-south line through the city called the meridian. These include Tiananmen Square (including Mao’s Mausoleum), the Forbidden City, the Drum Tower, the Bell Tower, the National (Bird’s Nest) Stadium and others. They are all lined up across the city of Beijing but several miles apart.
First up was Tiananmen Square. It is a huge square with national level or historic buildings on all sides, and a monument to the heroes of the revolution. We had decided not to ask our guide about the Tiananmen Square massacre but previous tourists had asked so he
Mao Mausoleum
Chairman's final resting place. mentioned it. Except for what he had heard from foreigners, he knew nothing about it. He guessed it had occurred during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s when it was in 1989. That event has been well and truly hidden.
Also on Tiananmen Square was Chairman Mao’s mausoleum and it was an interesting way to observe a personality cult. It is a large building about 100 yards on a side and three stories tall. In the front room there is a statue of Mao sitting with legs crossed in a comfy looking chair with thousands of white mums in front of it that people were buying to lay there. In the back room, we were hustled past Mao’s mummified remains in a crystal case guarded by two guards inside a big glass room. Then we popped out the back side into the arms of souvenir vendors.
For lunch, David led us to a real (non-touristy) restaurant where we had four dishes of food plus drinks. Most of it was fantastic and the rest was good. All of that food cost only Y82 ($12). Earlier in the day, as we walked by a KFC, I asked David if he
John, Beth, and Marble Boat
Signifiying the long reign of the Qing Dynasty which fell about 50 years later. ate there much. He replied that he ate there only twice a week. He said there were people who ate at KFC or McDonalds twice a day. Maybe getting the Chinese obese is our secret weapon for making sure China does not take over the world.
The next day we visited the Summer Palace which was the summer residence for the emperor and his family to escape the heat of Beijing. It was used by most of the emperors but is most well-known for Dowager Empress Cixi (chee-shee) also known as the Dragon Lady. When the Emperor died young, her son was only three so she acted as regent. When her son died at 19, she appointed her four-year old nephew as emperor and continued acting as regent. When he reached adulthood and tried to take over, she put him under house arrest for the 10 years until he died. She really liked power but was not very good at governing; for instance, she spent the money earmarked to upgrade the Navy on renovating the Summer Palace. David says she is 50% of the reason the Qing Dynasty lasted only three years after her death. It gives a new
insight to the term Dragon Lady.
Then we climbed in the van and our driver drove us three hours to the Jinshanling of the Great Wall. Along the way we passed a building site where there were 11 building cranes building 11 identical apartment buildings. Then we passed another set of 10 and another and another. Even with 14 million people already, Beijing is still growing.
I would like to call Jinshanling a town but can’t. It has one hotel with one restaurant, lots of individually owned souvenir shops, several parking lots and the entrance to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. On our exploratory walk, two ladies with some English attached themselves to us trying to get us to go to their souvenir shops. They stuck to us like glue, even waiting outside when we went into the paper cutting shop. So we checked out their shops. They are basically storage units about 10x12 feet and filled with trinkets. I ended up buying a magnet, two bracelets and a Christmas tree ornament. Bob got into trouble because he started negotiating with one shopkeeper over two walking sticks then when she met his price he changed his
Turtle Dragon
Statue in the Forbidden City. mind. A long theatric ensued where the entrepreneur kept coming to me trying to get him to buy. He finally did buy them but under duress. The pressure from the people is really annoying. I accept they are trying to make a living and I appreciate that they are working not begging but the constant attention and the overwhelming attempt to help (“don’t trip on the curb”) is really annoying.
For dinner that night we went to the one restaurant. Luckily the restaurant had one menu with English translations. Some were straight forward (assorted vegetables), some were unclear (meat with mushrooms) and some were surprising (dog meat). We ordered chicken, cabbage and potatoes along with rice. We liked the cabbage (really bok choy) and the potatoes were shredded and just lightly cooked and seasoned with cilantro and reasonably good. The chicken was very well cooked and in bite size pieces except for the fact they did not take it off the bone before cutting it into bite sized pieces. But we ate our fill and dinner was less than $13 for the four of us.
It started raining in the middle of the night and was raining hard
when we awoke but that was not going to stop us…we had a big wall to climb. When we set out, we were soon joined by the same two ladies from the day before. They just followed us and our guide explained they were hoping to “help” us and thereby sell something. I found their presence intrusive so when one of the ladies approached me, I just said “go away, go away.” I know it was rude but I had no intention of buying anything.
The first part of the GW was renovated and so was really easy walking. It wound up and down and around curves following the highest ridge. It was amazing where they built this wall, up steep cliffs and across entire valleys. David said it resembled a dragon the way it undulated across the landscape. Every 50 - 100 meters there was a tower. It reminded me a lot of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain except this wall was 20 times longer. John and I walked five hours total on the wall just enjoying the scenery and marveling at the engineering and sheer audacity it took to build a 6000 mile wall.
On our second
Crowds
The crowds in the food hutong near our hotel. day at the GW, John and I started the day with Chinese breakfast. It consisted of rice soup, a hard-boiled egg, and steamed buns (all very bland), cucumber pickles, spicy tofu, and another form of tofu with cilantro (all very flavorful). We liked the steamed buns but I could not get over the slimy texture of the rice soup. The three flavorful items were good but we were concerned about eating raw cucumber. Overall we got enough to eat but that type of breakfast will take getting used to.
That day on the Wall was pretty much like the first so we cut it short and went to visit a small village that Bob & Meri Jo had discovered the day before. With David there to act as an interpreter, we were able to talk with the people. When we entered the village we found a group of adults and two small children (21 and 9 months) sorting vegetables. We sat down to eat our snack and soon the people gathered around. Through David, we asked each other all sorts of questions. They asked how many children we had and also how many we were allowed to have. We
Beth, Bob and a Drum
Bob looks at one of the drums inside the Drum Tower. asked if they were farmers or had other jobs. They were farmers. They guessed our ages and were under the actual numbers. We asked how old the children were and took pictures. The children were wearing pants with huge holes in the crotch so when they needed to go to the bathroom they just needed to squat and their pants wouldn’t get wet. All of us really enjoyed just talking with real people.
Upon returning to Beijing we decided to walk to the Ming Wall Ruins Park. The purpose was really to explore and the park just set a direction. After several hours and a stop for dinner at KFC, our last stop before returning to the hotel for the evening was a bakery to satisfy our dessert craving. We walked among the self-service shelves, eyeing carefully items that looked delectable and to ensure they didn’t contain anything too unusual. We almost mistakenly grabbed them and put them in a plastic bag, but noticed others taking a clean tray and tongs from a cabinet and helping themselves. After we did the same, we approached the young cashier who took our tongs and placed each kind of treat into its
own plastic bag. One of the items we got was among the yummy treats were four butter cookies. When the clerk went to bag those, she dropped one on the counter and set it aside and we only got three. This was a good moment to observe how our culture differs from others. We’re sure that in the U.S. the cookie would simply have been picked up off the counter and put in the bag, or if it had fallen on the ground someone would have gone to get a replacement, and, perhaps given us an extra one for our trouble. Here, we got three. Or as Beth keenly observed, the Chinese word for ‘four’ sounds like the word for death, and maybe the cashier ‘accidently’ contaminated it. Even in a rapidly modernizing country old superstitions play a prominent role. As we write this blog on the train to Yichang we are in the fourth railcar, but it’s Coach 5.
On our last day in Beijing, John decided he needed a haircut so we went to a salon next door to the hotel and were shown a price list of various services, including a haircut, body massage and eyebrow
embroidery. Whatever that actually consists of given the language translation remains a mystery. He settled on a haircut only. While he tried to enlist one of us to go along with him, we were satisfied to sit back and watch the proceedings. The salon consists of many barber chairs just like home, but is staffed by many pretty young ladies wearing pink smocks, with a master beautician who was male. One of the ladies motioned John over to a chair and immediately began working shampoo into his scalp. Once the lather had built up, she captured it in her hand and rinsed it off, whereupon she repeated the process all over again. After rinsing his hair in the sink and toweling his hair dry, she began a long, slow, back, neck and scalp massage. John went from a look of befuddled concern to relaxed enjoyment. Wondering whether a haircut was part of the deal no longer seemed to matter to him. Finally the master beautician finished the person he was working on and came over. The cut itself was rather anti-climatic and he got it all for only seven dollars.
Now that John was relaxed and looking much less
Crane
Sculpture of a crane in th Forbidden City shaggy, we wanted breakfast. We stopped by a bakery and coffee shop near the hotel. We had various pastries (including a pastry with fish shavings) and they were all good. John had a mocha and I ordered pear milk tea. My tea was sweet but fine until I sucked up something slimy through the straw. Surprised, I pulled off the lid and spit it back into the cup. When I investigated further, I found many dark colored slimy objects the size of blueberries and the texture of large tapioca balls. Once I realized what they were it was fine…it was just an unexpected “treat.”
The tour company had nothing planned for us that day so we were on our own to explore the city. We went everywhere by subway and the cost was only Y2 or $0.30 per trip. The subway was very easy to use with everything being in both Chinese and English and the maps being clear and ubiquitous. Unlike many other subways, not all routes cross all other routes so it took three trains to get to our first stop and four to the second.
Our most interesting stop that day were the Drum and
Golden Throne
The Emperors throne in the Forbidden City Bell Towers which are surrounded by a hutong. We took the subway to the closest stop then meandered through the hutong and slowly made our way to the Bell Tower. The Drum and Bell Towers are on the meridian and were used for 400 years to announce the time to the populace. It was 75 steep steps up to the bell tower. It has a bell twice as large as the Liberty Bell and is so old it is only rung on Chinese New Year now. From the top, one could see this area was the old city with only a few buildings above 2 stories but it is surrounded on three sides by hi-rises. The fourth side might also have hi-rises but I could not see through the smog.
Across a square filled with tour buses and surrounded by rickshaw drivers awaiting the next group of tourists was the Drum Tower. It was the same size and shape as the Bell Tower but has 24 big drums and one huge drum instead of a bell. Shortly after we arrived, there was a drum performance where five men pounded on five drums creating chest-throbbing rhythms for several minutes. They
pounded the drum, hit the edge, scraped the rivets and slid their stick on the drum surface to create a variety of sounds. Also in the tower was a replica of a water clock. Three buckets of water slowly drained into each other and into a fourth which had a yardstick like stick floating upright which marks the time as it rises. There is also a small statue that clangs symbols every few minutes.
We headed back to the subway but decided to stop for dinner at a restaurant in the hutong. They brought us a menu with some English and the waitress helped as well. About 1/3 of the menu was some form of dog meat so we passed on those items. We ordered tempura vegetables, mashed potato cakes and a hot pot of chicken soup. All was delicious until the soup arrived. It was a whole chicken so it would be difficult to get the meat but we persevered. I served up the broth to everyone then Meri Jo started fishing around for a leg or wing and ended up pulling the head out. She gave a small yelp then turned away in a combination of shock
and laughter - loud enough to get the attention of nearby Chinese patrons to look at us with amusement. The rest of us weren’t sure if she was going to recover from the unwelcome surprise of seeing the chicken gazing at her with lifeless eyes but she pulled herself together even though she refused to touch the broth. I got over seeing the head but when I pulled out the thigh and leg, the foot came with it.
Thus our tour of Beijing ended on a note of culture shock. It is a fascinating city that has grown too big but still has a tremendous amount to offer.
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Chris Boe
non-member comment
Chicken
After traveling in Southeast Asia, I wondered if the introduction of KFC would change the way Asian cultures cook chicken. I guess the answer is "Not yet."