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Published: August 26th 2006
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Aug 20th - 24th
So apart for the eyes, what else did we get up to in Beijing? Now settled in our nice hotel we could properly explore the bustling city centre of Beijing. Our hotel was close to a busy shopping and eating street called Wangfujing which had a mix of ultramodern and very traditional eating choices. We frequently ate in a busy food court always packed with locals and which had an overwhelming choice of tasty and otherwise ‘interesting’ foods. Even Jen, who is not the greatest fan of Chinese food enjoyed eating here. Also on the street was a famous Peking Duck restaurant which we tried. The restaurant was spread over five floors and on arrival you were allocated to one! When you ordered a duck and it was cooked the chef wheeled it out whole on a trolley and carved it up right in front of you - and the waitresses even showed you how to roll the best duck pancake. The duck was really delicious. We also enjoyed wandering through some of the backstreets where we saw some more unusual snacks on offer, such as seahorses, cockroaches and even live scorpions on a stick, caramelised
tomatoes and bean curd drinks. The latter 2 we enjoyed fully - the former we left to the locals!
One of the bizarre things we noticed here is that we get stared at all the time by locals - they literally stop and stare at us with their mouths open, like they have never seen Europeans before. We find this a little unnerving, especially when Jen actually got stopped and two Chinese girls put their arms round her while their father took a photo - we've never been a tourist attraction before!
One of the days we decided to take a tour to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs, where the emperors of the Ming Dynasty are buried. The tombs and the wall were amazing, but unfortunately we hadn’t factored in 2 things - firstly, the absolutely vast amount of Chinese tourists, which in some instances made walking on the wall impossible, and secondly the non voluntary visits to two local factories (silk and jade). We were traipsed around the factories and strongly encouraged to buy very expensive items. We soon found out they had separate shops for Chinese tourists and ‘foreign’ tourists and the prices in
the ‘foreign’ tourist areas were often more than double those in the Chinese shops - this did not help encourage us to part with our money....
The 13 Ming Tombs were spread out in a vast area miles apart, protected by mountains on three sides as well as the Great Wall. Each emperor has his own monument and three of these sites have been opened to the public. The buildings were constructed of wood only, without nails but with advanced locking mechanisms in their place. The site was remarkably well preserved when considering that the buildings were well over 500 years old.
The Great Wall was truly an impressive sight and fully worth every hassle of getting there. We arrived at the Badaling part of the wall which was the most visited bit but apparently the most restored and easy to climb. To our surprise the tour operator tricked us to buy expensive tickets to a ‘sliding train’ which would take us half way up the 1000 meter ascent. The train soon turned out to be a ride clearly borrowed from Disneyland where we individually were seated in little plastic carts and dragged up through a steep tunnel
to the waypoint half way up. Well, we survived and emerged into an immense crowd of people climbing up onto the wall. Once up the crowds got worse as everybody tried taking pictures across the walkway, children running around dragging parents, grandparents and great-grandparents up along the top of the wall to the next tower. The views were breathtaking, though, and when able to take a pause from the constant noise and pushing of people we just sat and were amazed to see the wall snaking its way into the horizon on both sides of us. We were reminded of a story we heard in Mongolia: Once a Mongolian man talked to a Chinese man. The Chinese man said: The Chinese are a great people who built this great wall. The Mongolian man replied: The Mongolians are a great people who made the Chinese build this great wall. Ironically, the wall was constructed over hundreds of years to keep out the Mongolian barbarians, but during the reign of Genghis Khan the wall did little to deter the invasion of China.
Unfortunately, along with the beauty of the wall came literally hundreds of touts shouting 'Hello', 'How are you?' and
The Ming tombs
On our way out through the colourful gate you can see we had to shout 'I'm back' in Chinese so as not to be held in the realm of the dead for evermore ‘looki-looki-lady’ at us, trying to sell everything from jewellery to certificates of having conquered the Great Wall. Having made our way through these rather rude and intrusive crowds we saw sad displays of black bears locked up in all too small enclosures, being fed fruit by eager tourists. This upset us a lot, but since talking to other people we realise that the Chinese have a very different view of animals to us.
We saw the doctor again on the 23rd as planned for review. Fortunately she said that there were definite signs of improvement, but that she would like to start Jenny on some steroid eye drops and therefore needed to see her again in Beijing in a week. We decided to hold on to our plans for taking the train to Guilin, and to cut this trip from six to four days to return to Beijing as ordered.
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