Beijing Part 2

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The next day, I booked a tour to go to the Great Wall. I opted to head to the Mutianyu section because it has both restored and un-restored sections and is known for being crowd-free. And it was! It was amazing! It was also incredibly difficult! That's something I didn't realize until quite recently. But when you hike the Great Wall, you're hiking all of the mountains that they sit on. And it's hard!

The wall is about an hour and a half north of Beijing, so we left at about 8:30 in the morning. We had 3 hours to hike, take pictures, buy souvenirs, and use the cable car and toboggan. I'm glad I booked a tour that didn't include the Ming Tombs because those tours only give you about an hour and a half at the wall, and that wouldn't have been enough. I spent about 2 hours hiking the wall and taking pictures, then I headed for the toboggan, which was the only reason I bothered with the cable car up in the first place. It was fun, but unfortunately, there was a string of slow-pokes in front of me, so I couldn't go as fast as I would have liked.

I found that everything at the wall costs approximately 5 times what it would cost normally. I'll pay the price-gouging 10 yuan for water ($1.64 instead of $0.33) because it's still fairly cheap for a major attraction and I didn't have much choice. But I was looking at some sunglasses that cost 280 yuan, when I've bought them before for 30 yuan. After laughing hysterically at the price and explaining that I"d bought them before for 30 (down from 85! master bargainer...), he offered them for 50 yuan, which I accepted. And I felt like a bargaining rock star. I'm such a wimp about bargaining, but sometimes it just falls into your lap.

We ate lunch together at a restaurant next to the wall that also specializes in food for foreigners. I was there a bit early, so when a guy hooking up people with taxis asked me to sit down and chat, I (hesitantly) took him up on the offer. We had the standard "Where are you from?/What is your job?/Why don't you have a husband?" conversation in broken English and Chinese for awhile.

At the restaurant, we were seated at circular tables, so we all ate together. I particularly talked to an older group of Polish tourists. The youngest member of their group was a woman who spoke English very well. An older man spoke a bit of English, and the older women didn't speak any English, though one was taking some free classes.

The women taking classes wanted me to know that her sister lived in Chicago and her brother lived in Los Angeles, though she did all of this communicating through the younger woman. The other woman wanted me to know that she had guessed that I was American. And the man wanted me to know that he was a fan of Stephen King. He likes the style. I also talked to a Canadian couple who had recently been through Chicago and really loved it. So score 1 for Chicago!

After Beijing, I went wandering and got lost again. Interestingly, in an effort to find my way back to my hostel, I found myself in exactly the same back-alleys as I did on my first day, which was lucky because I remembered how to get out of the neighborhood!

On Friday, I left my hostel 15 minutes before the Forbidden City opened, with the intention of walking there because it looked very close to my hostel on the map. I did walk the whole way, but it took an hour. When I got there, the gates were swarming with people. I was a bit dismayed, but then a young woman approached me and told me that there was an art exhibition through a side door and if I went to see her artwork,, she could tell me how to get there. This seemed obscenely sketchy, but I thought about it and agreed. Obviously she tried to get me to buy her artwork, which I got out of, but she made me a personal calligraphy roll before I could say anything to stop her. That only cost me 20 yuan. A donation to her art school in Xi'an.

She did in fact point me through a park, which cost 2 yuan to get into (she did insist on being firm about the 2 yuan. They've been known to tell foreigners that it costs 15 yuan.) The park was a nice break from the craziness on the other side of the wall as a large portion of the Chinese population was in the capital for the national holiday. I was pretty sure she had conned me because I had to walk to the back of the entire park before I found the entrance to the Forbidden City, but that walk had only taken me from the front gates to the ticket booth! Everything in Beijing is massive!

As I wandered around the Forbidden City, I ran into the Canadian tourists from the day before. Which was cool/awkward. I was really glad that I had gone to the architecture museum because I could do my own tour of the different techniques used in the complex, which was interesting. Tour guides generally tell you which person slept in which building during which season, which is NOT interesting for me. My favorite part was the garden at the back of the complex. I think it's really interesting how Chinese gardens use massive rocks. Maybe symbolic of mountains?

After I figured out how to leave the Forbidden City (not as easy as you would assume), I crossed the street to see Tiananmen Square. As I had no intention of waiting in line to see a dead guy, this was not very interesting. It's just a plaza, with no seating, and an obelisk in the middle. The obelisk ifs the Monument to the People's Heroes. There are some more interesting sculptures of Cultural Revolution soldiers in front of Mao's tomb.

At that point, it was lunchtime, so I headed back to my hostel for lunch, a nap, and some rest for my legs. I bought a roasted sweet potato for lunch and concluded that they should be sold on streets everywhere in the world. So delicious!

After my break, I set out to find Nanluogu, a walking street that I had ridden down on my tour. It's a famously updated tourist street with several famous hutongs crossing it. It has a mixture of luxury stores, small boutiques, nice restaurants, and snack windows. I liked it a lot. It was another place I'd frequent if I lived in Beijing. And I'd buy another rose-cranberry juice everyday, because yum.

At the end of the street, I knew I must be close to Jingshan Park. In fact, I found the backside. You can't enter that way. They yell at you. Not like I know this from experience or anything... The park has a hill in the middle with temples on it that overlook the Forbidden City to the south and the Drum and Bell Towers to the north. It's a very pretty park, but the pollution covering the city kind of takes away from the beauty and your ability to photograph it properly.

If you exit out the west side, they have a sign that points you towards the winter palace, which is the direction that I saw an interesting white tower in. So I wandered back into this neighborhood to figure out what it was. This led me to another park on Beihai Lake. You can climb another hill on an island in the middle of the lake. This area is gorgeous and just south of the other lake that I had ridden around on the motorbike. There was also an area with ancient caves, filled with statues. I was pretty excited.

At this point, my legs were killing me and I still didn't haven any great ways to get back to my hostel (I'm too cheap to take taxis unless an airport is involved), so I just started trudging/hobbling back east until I had the bright idea to move north a block (a LONG block) and pick up the subway from there. I only rode two stops, but it was worth it.

Saturday and Sunday, I knew I could take it easy. This was lucky because my entire lower body was in complete agony from all of the climbing/hiking/walking. First thing in the morning, I walked north a couple of subway stops worth to see the Lama Temple, advertised to me as the best temple to see in Beijing, Buddhist or otherwise. Unfortunately, as I found when I showed up, it's not a place where many foreign tourists visit unless they're on a guided tour. As I was walking towards it, I thought I had gotten lost because I kept seeing signs directing me to the temple that pointed down alleys, but no temple. The only thing that kept me from panicking were the street vendors hawking bundles of incense. Not to me. I must not look Buddhist. More than possibly any temple that I've ever been to, I felt like I was disrupting a religious process and people were definitely giving me weird looks. No foreign tours had shown up yet. But it was very interesting to stand at a (respectful!) distance and observe the prayer process that they go through with each bundle of incense. They have to buy pretty large bundles to get through the whole complex properly. When they finished praying at a particular altar, they would walk through the building to the next courtyard. I was NOT comfortable doing this. Luckily, there were gates on either side of the buildings.

After stopping for a Green Tea Smoothie at Cafe Bene (yeah South Korean franchises!), I headed far down the subway line to the Temple of Heaven, which is now a park south of the Forbidden City used for a lot of the ceremonial praying that the emperor had to do back in the day. The main structure is an altar used to pray for good harvests. There were several other monuments and altars throughout the park, where I heard is 5 times as large as the Forbidden City. Luckily, it has benches, so I could take a few breaks, read a book, and rest my legs. I got hungry, so I left the park and was met with a wall of fast-food restaurants, which didn't sound appealing, but I knew the restaurant that I had visited on my tour was nearby, so I went and ordered myself (entirely in Chinese!) some delicious food and people-watched.

After the meal, I had my first amazing experience of being able to turn down the persistent and annoying taxi/rickshaw drivers in Chinese, which works WAY faster than saying "No" a bunch of times!

On Sunday, I headed north to the Summer Palace, which is another large park, this one set around a pretty large lake. Luckily, my legs were almost recovered. Unfortunately, it was extremely overcast all day. I entered through the North Gate, which has several buildings leading up a small mountain. I thought it looked really neat, like the buildings had just been dropped among the boulders. Then there was a shallow decline as you walk back towards the lake. On the east side of the lake, there's a famous bridge leading out to an island, but it was hard to see with the fog and a giant rubber duck , which is part of a traveling modern art piece (it was Beijing Design Week). There was the same sort of mix of performers that you can find in many Chinese parks, so I watched a woman dancing, a brass band, a man doing taichi with a whip, and a man and a woman who were doing large-scale calligraphy down the sidewalk with buckets of water and giant brushes. I took the "Western Causeway" across the lake, as directed by my travel guide, and there were, in fact, much fewer people than there were on the main loop.

I headed back to my hostel to rest and pack and FREAK OUT about leaving Asia because I love it so much!

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Comments

[Eriksen]

I guess the view from up there was awesome :-) do you have other pictures of the Great Wall Cheers^^