Catch Up

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It feels like it's been forever since I've written. It's mainly my mom and dad who are responsible for this, as they got here 3 weeks ago and had almost 2 weeks with me in Shanghai, and the other week was May Holiday when I went to Tibet and they did Beijing, Xian and the Three Gorges by themselves. Pretty much all of my spare time when I wasn't in class was spending time with them, but Thursday they left to go back to the states and pick up Dan from college, and I went to Beijing for the weekend, and today feels like the first day in weeks that I can actually slow down and catch up. But that also won't last long - although we decided not to travel this weekend, which means I won't get to go to Guilin and Yangshuo while I'm here which I am pretty sad about because that's supposed to be one of the most beautiful areas in China - today we booked our trip for the next weekend which is also the weekend before finals to Hainan, like the "Hawaii of China," so we can finally relax and have a beach vacation and basically have the best possible end to this semester that we can imagine. I half hate thinking in terms of the end but other times like this weekend I am equally excited to go back home. This weekend was particularly hard because I knew I was missing my friends' graduation and it was hard not only to be so damn far away, but also to not even be "home" here. Because I was in Beijing I couldn't really talk to anyone from back home, and I realized as I was packing for Beijing last thursday that I hadn't even unpacked from my trip to Tibet, and although there's still so much traveling in China that I'd like to do, it's also becoming completely exhausting and I'm really really looking forward to this weekend when I'll just be home and around in Shanghai.
Beijing.
A lot of people here who've already been to Beijing haven't liked it that much, and in some ways before we went it felt more like one of the places we HAD to go to while we were in China rather than a place like Guilin which we really really wanted to go to. So we were definitely ready to have mixed feelings about Beijing, although the ride there got me really excited about it, because we were taking an overnight sleeper train (11 hrs) there and a plane back, and we booked our train tickets pretty late which meant that the only option we had was to take a soft sleeper (although we'd been planning to budget and take a hard sleeper), but in the end this was an excellent choice. The soft sleeper meant we were in private compartments with 4 beds, and so it was me & Shana & Kelly and one random "zhongy" (our new term for Chinese people that was invented on the train ride, haha!) and it was like a real luxury train ride, they served us food and there was a little flower on the table in our room and there was even a western toilet. I think it was actually the best night of sleep I had had in weeks, which was really necessary because we got there at like 7:30 in the morning and had to be ready to use the day. When we arrived we knew we had to get a cab to our hostel, and we'd all been pretty worried about taking cabs in Beijing because we hear that they're gonna rip you off, but we knew we had no choice. At the train station there was a really long line for cabs but we've learned a few things from the Chinese by now and we went on the other side of the line and tried to hail a cab in front of everyone, and it was incredible because one of the Chinese policemen yelled at us to "pai dui" which means "wait in line" and I couldn't believe that the Chinese were yelling at US to wait in line when that's like unheard of for them. That was just too funny, but we got a cab anyway and were pretty proud of ourselves. After the hostel we went straight to Tiananmen Square and all we wanted to do was eat breakfast but there wasn't anywhere around and we went around asking the guards where the nearest McDonalds was and we did feel kind of bad about being so American about things. When we got to McDonalds at first I was relieved but then realized that I can't actually eat anything about McDonalds, so I had to wander around some more looking for food. 2 things were very obvious, as always - that being a vegetarian makes things a lot more difficult for me, and that the food thing here is really getting on my nerves. By the food thing, I mean Chinese food and Chinese restaurants (believe me my parents would agree) and walking down the street and being really hungry but not wanting to eat anywhere because we are so sick of Chinese food. Honestly I think food is the main factor motivating me to want to really really go back to the states - I'm dreaming of American food and having so much choice again, and "what's the first thing you're gonna eat when you go home?" is really starting to become a topic of conversation around here. Anyway, going to McDonalds first thing for breakfast really stands out to me because we ended up going to that same McDonalds a few times during our weekend in Beijing and that just shows how desperate we're all getting...
After that, our friend Mike met us in Tiananmen after he just flew in that morning, and we all did the Forbidden City together. To be honest, the Forbidden City was not the highlight of our weekend in Beijing for me. For one thing, it was pretty disappointing that some of it was under construction (presumably to get ready for the Olympics) so a few buildings had a humongous screen up in front of them with a picture of what the building was supposed to look like, and needless to say that just didn't do it or give us the same feeling. The other thing is that I actually kind of regretted going to Beijing so late during my stay here. That's because by this time traditional Chinese architecture and gardens and temples aren't new to me, so they don't have the kind of awe affect that they did at the beginning, and I guess its just that I saw things in the reverse order because I know that the Forbidden City has more significance than any of the other sites historically but I guess it never really hit me that the Emperors used to live there, and certainly the construction didn't help. BUT, that's all not to say that our trip to Beijing was in any way subpar. If the Forbidden City didn't affect me enough, the presence of Mao affected me more than I had anticipated. Even though in my history class we'd seen a bunch of slides showing the entrance to the Forbidden City, which is directly opposite Tiananmen, and so we knew that there was a huge picture of Mao hanging there, I was still pretty taken aback to see it and only then did I realize how out of place it was there. And, we had a pretty weird experience when we woke up super early on our last morning in Beijing to try to get to see Mao as he is buried in the Mao Mausoleum before we left. It didn't open until 8:30, so we figured we would leave our hostel by 7:45, but when we arrived at Tiananmen the first thing we saw was a long line which happened to be starting from the Maosoleum and wrapped around the whole square, just packed with Chinese tour groups and we didn't even bother to find where the line actually ended. On the one hand we were mad that China had so damn many people, all of whom seemed to be trying to see Mao, but I think we were even more weirded out, and kind of decided we didn't want to be part of it, since to us it was a historical curiosity but to others it seemed to be a cult or even religious kind of thing.
The highlight of the trip really was the Great Wall. Our research of where to go on the Great Wall consisted of finding out which part we could luge (/tobaggan/alpine slide?J) down. We also didn't want it to be too touristy, but we managed to take care of that once we had taken the cable car up to the Great Wall. As we were walking along, we found a "secret" route, which involved us climbing out of the window of one of the towers, onto another section of the wall which hadn't been much repaired (that and there was also a sign that said "Not Allowed"), and sure enough we were the only ones doing what we were doing - OFF-ROADING that part of the wall. The tallest part of our section of the wall was visible in the distance and that was our goal, but getting there required us to climb up a really steep portion, and I wasn't kidding about it not having been repaired cause there were no stairs, and we were basically just going from rock to rock. Especially on the way down, when we looked up at the sky and discovered that it was about to rain, so we were going down as fast as we could, I'd say we all fell at least once, and later were comparing our Great Wall Scars (not gonna lie, some were also due to the branches that were in our way). But honestly, particularly because we were hiking and all of a sudden found ourselves in this part of the wall where we were completely alone, and even our view from atop the wall which was spectacular, was entirely scenery and NO people, I felt so strongly that I was witnessing the real heart of China. And Kelly and I were sitting in one of the windows of the tower at the high point of the Wall and swinging our feet off of the edge, and were staring out at hills and mountains and greenery that seemed to go on for forever, and I was thinking that I had no idea that China was this beautiful, but I felt like at that moment I could really understand it, and was definitely absorbed in the "love" part of my sometimes love/hate relationship with China. But this country is really spectacular. I think it really is hard to convey in what way the Great Wall affected me, but I have mentioned this and I'm pretty sure that walking along the Great Wall and feeling like I was really able (maybe for the first time?) to take in the whole country was a more profound experience for me even than being on Everest. Cause I guess when it comes down to it, Everest is still a mountain, but the Great Wall is China. As if that wasn't enough exhileration for one day, we got to alpine slide down. It was great! And then we bought "I climbed the Great Wall t-shirts" that also have the Chinese characters for "hero" because in the Chinese culture you're considered to be a hero if you've climbed the Great Wall. And we so did!
It was also a really weird thought that while my friends at Rice were going to be waking up in a few hours to graduate, I was walking along the Great Wall in China...
The rest of the night (and again the next morning before we left for the airport) we went to this Hutong area that when my parents had been to Beijing the week before made them think of me, and whenever they say that to me they always get me exactly right. It was this neighborhood consisting of really narrow alleyways that had cool store after cool store which were still open at midnight, and at night it turned into lots of bars and during the day time they were all outdoor cafes along a lake, and it was when we were in this area that I was thinking that I could come back in live in Beijing. Really mostly because of this area. But its really what I look for in a city, and who knows it really may be in my future b/c Beijings the place to be if I want to work in an Environmental NGO over here. We had brought all of our bags to go straight to the airport after lunch in one of these cafes, and because that was our last impression of Beijing, our feeling about the whole trip was very positive.
EXCEPT for Beijinghua, the dialect of Chinese that they speak in China's capital, which is completely undecipherable because they add a damn "er" to everything. I'm not even sure if its worth writing down how strongly we disliked the language they spoke in Beijing because it won't make sense to anyone reading this from back home, but I do think its an indication of how much we've been able to immerse ourselves in this culture over here, but we were basically making fun of the language the entire way home back to Shanghai. Is that when I know I've been here too long?

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