Country of Only Children

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[youtube=3odEwpDr7pQ]

I think China would offer an interesting social analysis. Since the 1970s, by law, each family is only allowed to have one child. There are some loopholes to the rule. If you live out in farm country and your first born is a girl, you can have a second. If that one is a girl, then you've got two girls. Also, if your first born is severely handicapped, physically or mentally, you can apply to have another. The first generation of this law, is now between 20 and 30. They've all gotta be spoiled brats. What does this mean for the country economically? Socially? Everything? No one has brothers and sisters. I wonder if it has any impact on society...

Anyways, back to Beijing.

We're in Beijing Hotel, a 5 star hotel right now, so they have "Western style toilets". We paid the 20 bucks extra to have a room overlooking Tinamen Square, the Forbidden City and the first street in China. Yes, that's right. The first street in China. It’s thousands of years old, but no worries, it has been paved since then. It’s wicked wide, 9 lanes accross, and has several underground bridges cascading underneath it to keep pedestrians off the surface. Also, just because you want to turn left, doesn't mean the left hand turn lane is the leftern-most lane. Sometimes the leftest two lanes go straight and the third leftest lane is the left-hand turn lane.

There is smog here everyday, it’s disgusting. The sun burns through to the point where you can just see where the sun is for about 30 minutes a day. The population and its creations are growing so fast the environment can’t handle the pollution. Usually you’d think that would mean they have really good sunsets here. Not the case. If you can’t see the sun, then you can’t see its colors. The main modes of transportation are still bikes and cars. There are bikes for hire and bike taxis where one person can squeeze on the back facing backwards of a covered wagon attached to a bike. A lot of the people on bikes wear facemasks to shield them from the pollution and everything has a tinge of brown on it: the buildings, signs, everything.

On Tuesday I went on a tour with a tour group to all the major places to see in Beijing, which, as I’ve been told, are the places to see in China overall as well. It was Meggie, the tour guide with her little yellow waving flag and 10 of us tourists in tow. There was Vanina and Derek (Uruguay and Puerto Rico), an older couple from Brisbane, Australia who had sim card issues, Bernard from Australia, Illela from Texas, and 3 others from Australia and me. We had a grand ole’ time. The tour bus brought us through the 6 rings of the city of Beijing (2-6, there’s no first ring), past where they’re building the Olympic stadium (The bird’s nest) and where the Olympic village will be. Then we drove to the Summer Palace where Empress Tsu Xi, The Dragon Lady resided in the summer. The original palace burned down some umpteen years ago, so she took money from the Navy to build her new summer palace with a bigger lake in it. She said she needed a bigger lake to train the Navy, but she never trained anyone. It was flippin’ freezing, but it was calm and quite because the weather was keeping a lot of tourists at home, so that was nice. She was quite the Empress. She had 100 dishes made for every meal just to show her power. Didn’t like incense, just had huge dishes of fruit that were never eaten everywhere for their smell. The next Emperor was born and technically became Emperor at 4 years old, so The Dragon Lady sealed off his room exit to her area of the castle and kept him a prisoner so that she would keep power. She lived till she was 73 and then, knowing she couldn’t live any longer, poisoned the last Emperor so that he would die before her and he wouldn’t become Emperor.

Next we went to the Pearl Market where they had a tank with clams in it. The guy fished one out and opened it for us to show us the pearls inside. There were almost 15 in there!! Ilella guessed 13, so she got a little handful of pearls straight from the shell! She gave one to me 😊. Really beautiful. He then taught us how to tell a real pearl from a fake pearl. It's hysterical, some of the things these clever Chinese say. They get their expressions all mixed up and every once in a while, they'll ask "My English is good? Your understand?" You always have to apply in the affirmative, of course.

We broke for lunch and the 10 of us crammed around a large round table and kept the lazy Susan spinning in the middle. We all got a bit better acquainted with each other. I shared my Tapioca pudding story with Ilella to my left and she one-upped me! Apparently there is a delicacy in China, what we know as Blowfish, which is very very delicate. If the cook makes one mistake, one slip of the knife, he could cut a part of the insides of the fish that leaks into the part that is served. It’s invisible to the naked eye and odorless and LETHAL. Hundreds of people die per year in Japan and China because of this volatile delicacy.

From there we got back in the bus to go to the Temple of Harmony. Huge Temple with no cross beams. It was a really spectacle. From there we went to the Silk Museum where they showed us the process of making silk things starting from the moth. Apparently, some silk worms cocoon themselves alone and some go in together. The single ones make a cocoon that can be taken apart by a single thread. The ones that go in together make a cocoon with a double string, so they use these cocoons for making blankets. We helped put on one layer of a blanket by pulling a collection of said double cocoons over a table. These layers add up till they can be put in a covering and then again in another covering of silk or cotton. It never bunches up or gets dirty and it was so light. I was delighted to find that the blankets on our beds at the Beijing Hotel are these very same blankets!

After that we went to Tinamen Square, which is a huge square in front of Beijing (the capital of China) ’s Parliament. An underground bridge brought us to the other side of the busy street to the Forbidden City, which didn’t let any people, who weren’t royalty or ministers in until after the death of the last Emperor in the 1920s. HUGE place. We spent an hour and a half in there and had only covered a third of it. 1 of the Australians got lost too. Got too far behind, so our tour guide left ‘im. Eek.

After that it was high time for hot bath and some tea in bed watching sumo wrestling.

Jack took us out to dinner that night to the famous Beijing Duck place. It was as good, if not better, than that hot bath after 5 hours of walking around Beijing underdressed for 35-degree weather. They had a giant sign up that said how many ducks they had served since the restaurant opened. We ate Duck # 115,279,779. Instead of ordering Qing Dao
Beer, which is the famous beer everywhere else besides China, we ordered 3 large bottles of Beijing beer, which was delicious. Every time our glasses got half empty, Jack filled them right back up, so we all lost track of how much we had to drink! By the end of the dinner, we were all a little bit buzzed and got into telling jokes and stories. Jack shared a Chinese saying that if you turn red after drinking beer or wine, which means you are an easy person to be friends with. We all had quite a chuckle when we looked around at each other and we were all BRIGHT red.

Thursday morning (Happy Thanksgiving) I ventured out to the pedestrian shopping street behind the Beijing Hotel. At first I thought it was just gonna be a mall area, but I found some nooks and crannies where they were selling the good cheap stuff that tourists love. Mhuahaha. I found a really great alley that was very decorated and had corn on the cob and lots of meat and peanuts for sale. I might go back there for lunch. (If you can’t tell by my change of tense, this is Thursday.

I went back for lunch. Got me some good American KFC. That was an experience within itself. I walked up to a counter with no lines where everyone cuts and no one minds standing right next to you or walking up and standing directly in front of you. I chose the slowest two little old ladies, who appeared never to have been inside an American Fast Food chain restaurant. They may as well have asked what was included in every combo and what was in each sandwich or wrap and I didn’t even have to speak any Chinese to determine that. Walking back to a grocery store, I discovered that this was the best kind of grocery store there could ever be. Rows and rows and rows of candy. Every kind, every color and every shape. I left out size in that list because they were all pretty much the same size. I decided that it would be fun to include a piece of candy to my Chinese Christmas Extravaganza plans, so I purchased some candy you could see through the wrapper and some you couldn’t. I think the candy you can’t see and feels quit mushy will be the most entertaining.

Sitting around with Jack while dad went up to brush his teeth after breakfast, Jack asked me what I was interested in doing after I went to Australia. I explained why I why I was going to Australia and concluded that I was seeing where January through August brought me to determine what happened next. Right now, I want to instruct sailing for a while, considering I will have trained to do as much. Grad school later on, which depends on Sabrina and my schedule. He started to laugh in a condescending way. He was so surprised that I would do something so “low”. I was a bit offended, to say the least. He went on to explain that this course in life was so strange for a Chinese person, but seemingly not for an American. I asked what I would do if I was a Chinese girl. He said that with a high power father like mine, he would be training me for the business world and, like a princess, would live off my father’s money and go into the same business. I started to laugh condescendingly in response to that. Ha! I said. I can’t even sit through ten minutes of your business talk. I have no interest in that part of my father’s world. I am fortunate enough, however, to have been introduced to other parts of my father’s life, including music an sailing. This is the area that I will carry on a legacy of my father. He is a man who is fortunate enough to have may loves and many strengths. This is the biggest thing I can learn from him.

One of our last stops on the Beijing scene was a Peking Opera. I'd learned about such style of theater in my undergrad institute of my chosing, but I wa not prepared for what ensued there that night. I'd seen boring clips of people talking in high voices and two people battling with swords as if both parties were blind. This theater offered quite an entertaining side to this ancient form of theater. First off, they let you go into the makeup room and watch all of them change from actors to characters. They had so much stylized makeup on, it looked like they were wearing masks. Second of all, we got a seat in the second row conveniently placed behind a table full of tea and oranges. As the curtain openned, we discoverd two giant screens, one on each side of the stage that had the translation of what was going on on stage. The words weren't poetic or complicated as I once thought. It was simple speech such as "I must disguise myself to protect the king" and "this looks like a nice inn to rest my head." Granted these are translations, but at least the storyline was simple.

The first act included a guest in an inn and an innkeeper. I didn't really pick up why the inn keeper wanted his paying costumer dead, but he did and slowly crouched into the guests room at night. The room was dark! That's why they couldn't see! Not because they were blind! It was a fight in the dark! Masterfully choreographed as well. One mistake and those acrobats could have ended up with a fist to the face or a blunt blade to the leg. Moving quickly between slow movement and quick passed flying and tumbling, the characters spent time searching in the dark for each other, getting within centimeters of each other and "not knowing it", then "accidentally" touching an arm or a sword with their hand or foot, then they'd explode into a duel without even looking at each other to fully persuade the audience they couldn't see each other. Masterful.

The second act included more characters, more duels, more tricks and more singing. The lead woman was incredible. At one point, she was juggling battons ("weapons") with 5 men around her using her hands AND legs. The audience was totally blown away by her. She had the ability to do it over and over again in a slightly different way for about 30 minutes too, but I loved every minute of it.

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Photos

Bikes
Bikes are the #1 prefered transportation. Just make sure you wear a mask for the pollution :-/

The Pearl Guy
Wonderful example of broken english: "you my like English?"

Temple of Harmony
The Highest Temple in Beijing

Famous Duck Place
We ate Duck #115,274,090

The Street around behind my hotel
You never know what's around the next corner.

Bag booth
she said she'd give me a good price because it was her first store. I deemed that a lie

Make up!
Make up room at the Peking Opera

The Guest
The guest in the hotel scene. The classic "fight in the dark."

The two head guards
These were the guards in charge of arresting the nymph!