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Okay dokey, pig in a pokey! You'll be glad to know that we're in a slightly better mood tonight. We've still got the rotten cold from hell, however we think it might be on the mend after spending today doing absolutely hee haw except for sleeping, watching films on HBO channel, eating nice food and munching on the Panadols.
Since arrived in Beijing we've been pretty floored with this wee cold virus thingy that we picked up in Shanghai, so we haven't got around to seeing as much as we wanted to so far. However - we HAVE been to walk on the good ole Great Wall, and we've been to see Tiananmen Square and a little bit of the Forbidden City, and even managed to fit in a short trip to see one of the late emperor's mausoleums at Changling. Oh, plus some un-scheduled redirections to a teahouse, a jade factory and a cloisanne factory. Really that's not too bad, is it?!
Well then... on Saturday we planned to get out an about super early and get down to the sightseeing. We were really up for it. That is 'till dawn arrived and we couldn't drag our heavy
Another section of the Great Wall
This part here was much busier than the section we visited. It was heaving with people making the climb to the top Watch Tower.heads out of bed. So, we went back to sleep, got up late and ventured out about mid day, taking the subway to Wanfujing station and having a nice Thai lunch in one of the many malls around that area. After that we walked to Tiananmen Square for a bit of a reccie but found that we were struggling energy wise. So about 5pm we headed back to our hotel and had a night in, but not before booking ourselves on a trip the next day to see the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs.
Now, we had been researching the Great Wall trip to a reasonable extent, and we had planned not to visit the area we ended up at (Badaling) because we thought that was just a bit too touristy. Also we'd heard that a lot of the Badaling tours end up taking you on unscheduled visits to stores to encourage you to spend your cash on tat. However, the thing is that because we were feeling so rotten, we couldn't find the energy to go looking at travel agencies for different options, so we just got our rep in our hotel to make the booking for
Near the entrance gates at Badaling
Shaz was desperate to find the bit that WHAM! were photographed on during their 1985 tour of China. As she recalls, Andrew Ridgely wore these black slip-on shoes with gold motifs, on the uppers. It never ceases to amaze us how much crap is hoarded away in her head. It would be great if she could remember useful info in such detail - we'd be millionaires by now. While on the subject - did you nkow that Andrew R married Keren from Bananarama (the one with dark hair)? us. We did tell her that we didn't want to be going on any shopping trips, but we don't think she seemed to understand us properly, or maybe she did but wasn't letting on - either way we couldn't be arsed making any fuss, and decided to go along with it anyway as the whole thing was so cheap - about 15 quid each for a small tour group party trip lasting from 8am to 6pm also incorporating the Ming Tombs. Also - we were determined not to waste another day.
We were picked up at 8am the next morning after a terrible nights sleep (probably due our late rise the previous day) right outside the door of our hotel. After picking up another 9 people, we headed out towards the wall. As it happened, we did end up on one of the pesky tours which take you to the shops on the pretence that you are visiting museums etc.. but we weren't that bothered as A) we had prepared ourselves the night before for this eventuality and decided to go with the flow anyway and B) it was actually really interesting and a lot of fun. The other
people in our group were nice - all professionals in the tecky trade from places including India, Texas, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. They were a good bunch (apart from one couple who we nicknamed Lurch & wife who didn't talk to anyone), and our guide Wendy was very funny and made us laugh a lot with bad jokes and constant tales of eunichs and concubines from the Forbidden City in days gone by.
Our first stop was a Jade ''museum''. ''Museum'' should be interpreted as ''Factory and Tat Retail Outlet''. We were given little passes (like the ones that we give visitors in the office) and ushered through these doors to join the masses, and we do mean masses, of other tourists already in there. The factory was good though - the craftsmen were all hard at work making ornaments, vases and jewellery, plus there were some highly ornamental white and green jade pieces in glass display cabinets which looked so intricate that they must have taken a long time to carve. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing the guys at work - it was good. Unfortunately the shop part was a bit like Ali's Cave, but we didn't mind
Entrance to the Forbidden City
Interesting factoid: apparently the original painting of Mao that this massive hanging is copied from is to be auctioned here in China on the 3rd June. so much - we just had a look round, and no-one gave us any pressure to buy anything. They had some nice stuff, but mostly the pieces for sale were expensively priced cheap rubbish. We reckon the guys doing the work in the factory must be churning out goods for places outwith the factory show room.
Next up was the Great Wall - the part we were looking forward to the most. Despite the fact that the tour went to the touristy Badaling site, which is nearest to Beijing incidentally, it was still brilliant. There are two parts of the Wall here, located on seperate sides of a motorway. We were taken to the less busy side which was useful, because we noticed that the other bit on the opposite side of the road was absolutely heaving with bodies, and by this time the weather had majorly perked up and was approaching 30 degrees celcius. Not sure that we could have coped too well with all those people round about us in that heat, especially seeing as how we were doing a fairly steep climb. To reach the top watchtower on our trip only took us around 30 minutes
Tiananmen Square
We haven't been over the road into the main bit of the square yet, but this photo was taken just outside the entrance to the Forbidden City, next to the big road which goes round the circumference of the square. You'll remember this from the news clip where the young student walked out and stood in front of the approaching tanks during the infamous demonstrations for democratic reform. Tiananmen translates as 'Gate of Heavenly Peace' with lots of stops, and although it was steep it wasn't that bad. The trickiest aspect was the constantly changing height of the steps, and if you have a look at some of our photos you'll see what we mean. Shaz kept looking about trying to work out if this was the bit of the wall where George Michael and Andrew Ridgely had their photos taken when they were here in 1985 as WHAM! but we couldn't tell in the end. We must just make a side note to Heidi here, who left us a message on the previous blog yesterday ...... ** Sorry Heidi - we got your message about the toboggan too late - but we didn't see one anyway at our bit!! **. When we were on the way back down, we passed a lot of other people who were seriously panting during their climb, in fact at one point we wondered whether we'd crossed into another dimension and were now partaking in some sort of dirty phone call! Anyway - we really really enjoyed our wee walk on the wall. At the resquest of Shazza's siter, we have taken loads of photographs, but we've not put
Main entrance to the Forbidden City
Taken from the walkway outside Tiananmen Square them all on here. CATHY: You can see the others when we get back next Friday!
After our walk on the wall it was 12:30 already, and we were due to go to some Chinese restaurant for a group lunch which was included in the price of the tour. Again we were duped! A short drive away was our next stop, which although it did cater for our lunch, it was also a cloisanne factory. Cloisanne is a method of decorating vases, jewellery, pictures, and bowls etc by creating metal patterns over a metal base then filling in the spaces with coloured enamel. Again, we found the workshops really very intriguing - in an 'every day's a school day' sort of way, and don't get us wrong - some of the goods were beautiful, however we weren't for parting with the cash, y'know. All the gear was fairly expensive, and we were told that we couldn't barter for reductions becuse the government in China forbids this at factory outlets. Well, this might be true but it didn't matter - we still weren't going to be buying anything. It's a matter of principle for us you see. We had already
At the Jade factory
This man is carving jade ornaments using a machine. Their worshop was closed off to the public behind big glass windows, so although we couldn't actually go in, we got a great view of the delicate work that they were involved in during our visit. decided that we wouldn't buy anything from anywhere that hadn't been flagged up to us beforehand as a scheduled destination on our trip. It's a mindset thing. We had to be prepared for the event that we'd be taken to these places - but we'd agreed that we'd enjoy the experiences as much as possible thus avoiding getting pissed off. After about 20 mins checking out the cloisanne workers (who Shaz was jealous of because they get to do ART all day for a job while wearing their mp3 players) we headed off for lunch upstairs in an huge dining area. There were lots of other groups there already but most were on their way out and we secured a nice table next to the window. Lunch was great - the waiting staff brought lots of different dishes out and we all tasted about 10 - 15 different types of food. We had a wee Tsing Tao beer aswell and a groovey chat - it was social to say the least!
After lunch we headed to the Ming Tombs - well to be more specific it was one Ming Tomb - 'Changling'. That was kind of OK but Wendy
Another Jade artist
This one looks like he's doing some metal work. the Guide tramped us about a bit and we were all tired out after the big lunch. She kept saying ' come here, come here, hurry up, hurry up' and because the Chinese do this tonal thing with their voices it sounded like she was harrasing us, but she wasn't really. Most of us were doing that thing that little kids do when they drag their feet on the ground when they're tired, and yawned all the way through. To tell you the truth it wasn't all that interesting and again it was pretty busy with lots of other people. We hung back a bit after a fashion and did our own thing, while remaining ever watchful for Wendy's triangular yellow flag disappearing from view - when that happenned we made a sharp move to catch up.
The last stop of the day was a wee bit of a pain actually - it was a stop near the end of the day in a tea house on the outskirts of Beijing. We were all asked into this room and two nice well spoken friendly young girls gave a presentation showing and telling us all about 4 types of Chinese
tea - they might be Oolong, Black, Jasmine and Green but we're not entirely sure. Now these young lasses were great at their presentation and we all had teeny bowls of each type of tea served to us - and that bit was lovely - but at the end of their speil they gave a bit of a hard sell to everyone, and they were so good at this via a mega guilt trip sad face action, that EVERY single one of the people of our tour bought something from them. Everyone that is except for the two tight fisted, iron willed Scottish people (that's us by the way) who declined politely and didn't give a monkey whether she was guilt tripping us or not - we were not to be moved on the matter. And we'll tell you something else too - our tour pals were absolute mugs, because she was selling them small boxes of tea for a tenner. A TENNER! For tea that you can buy out of Tescos for a quid!! You see - all those years of telling people they can't spend over their budget / get their compuer fixed today / desk moved /
phone line switched etc etc etc has paid off very nicely in that we can be the most stony faced buggars in the face of coercive young lassies trying to dupe us! Ahahaha!
Anyway - that'll have to do us for tonight - we are definately going to have to get a good nights sleep because we are determined to get up early and do the Forbidden City tomorrow. No buts about it!! Hopefully we'll be able to book an acrobatic show too and maybe (if we are good) have some Peking Duck.
Check this link for other great wall sites, if you are interested.
Great Wall Locations And this is the link to the Olympic stadium info - check it, the design is spiffing!
Birds Nest Bonsoir!
Al & Shaz. xxx
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Ant
Tony Steer
BLOODY GREAT WALL
You see the Great Wall you saw looks like the one I was expecting to see? I've just taken a look at your great wall links to see what it says about Simatai where I went. Quote... 'Remember that much of Simatai is in a state of ruin.' 'Because this section has retained much of its original 500 year old features it offers a quite hazardous passage' 'take particular care not to loose your footing when stopping to take photographs!' YEAH, NOW THEY TELL ME? Hope your having fun. Tony