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Published: September 6th 2007
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Bathroom in our hotel
This is a very typical bathroom in hotels we stayed. This one is from Beijing's New Dragon hotel Ok, it's time to start a more chronological account of the China travel and I start with our first stop, Beijing. First steps there were like arriving to a different world. Never ending unstructured line to the immigration, people jumping all over us at the exit of the airport, and the taxi scam, all was there for our entertainment. I guess we had to go through all this so that we could get better at navigating here. The guy who grabbed us at the exit pretended to be the official taxi service and sent us through some airport maze to a car and said it's 300Y. We didn't know any better due to the lack of preparation. While in the cab, we started reading the Lonely Planet that informed us that it should be about 100Y and only losers pay 200Y for the ride. Hmmm, that didn't sound good, so when we arrived at the hotel, Tuan kicked me out of the car and demanded that we pay only 200Y. The car driver protested but gave up and left with 200.
The hotel we stayed was quite shabby but ok since we didn't really spend much inside. The first thing
Street food
A food stand near the university in Beijing. that kind of surprised me was the shower directly over the toilet with no separation. Later, we stayed in many hotels and that stopped disturbing me since it seems to be the norm in the hotels of this price range. And what's up with the dirty plastic stripes hanging over the doorways? Anyway, they had internet in the lobby which was good, though only 1 station out of 3 usually worked which was perfect for us since we could plug in our computers to the net. BTW, the local computers write Chinese so it takes a bit of memory skills to navigate through Windows menus.
And it's so nice that the girls at the reception in the hotel spoke English! It's such a rear thing here. Most of the time we were getting some single words, gestures and lots of explanations in Chinese which we did not understand of course. The only way we could get around is by pointing at our guide books with the Chinese characters in it. This is one of the things you absolutely need here - a map with names in Chinese. Even in the hotels people don't normally speak English and if they
1000-year old egg
This one is probably not 1000 year old but it can be. They are black inside. Doesn't taste bad, though definitely doesn't taste like an egg do, you should not attempt to say anything complicated. No "if" sentences are allowed. On our second day Emily took us to a Beijing train station to get tickets to Datong. She speaks Chinese so she could easily find the tickets. Without her, we would probably spend hours looking for the right window. There is absolutely no English in the station!
We were so happy that Emily could take as around on the first 2 days in the city. We went to Panjiayuan market in the morning of our second day. Because it was Monday, this was quite a pleasant experience. It was not very crowded and only few shops were opened. Though even with these few shops we could figure out what the market is about. Usually, a market in China converges to selling the same stuff in every shop. I guess this is their marketing strategy, to get together and sell the same products. These shops mostly sold arts and antique. Following the nostalgia for my Indonesian shaddow puppets I once had, I got myself a pair of Chinese puppets. Unlike Indonesian wood once, the Chinese are made of plastic and have quite intricate patterns on the
Shadow Puppets
My only purchase from the Panjiayuan markets was a pair of shadow puppets. bodies. Of course we had to employ our bargaining strategies which included leaving after the the seller didn't want to lower the price followed by the generous offer to have them for 100Y instead of initial 300Y. Not bad, the division by 3 technique really works. The seller wasn't that sad though. She happily told us that the pair is from a play from Tang Dynasty. She was a poet, he was a painter, they went to a performance dressed the same. This is how they knew they were meant for each other. I was surprised to hear that she was a poet, but Emily told us that actually there are 2 types of women on the Chinese paintings: the beauties and the poets. The poets usually hold some instrument or something "useful" because they were the scholars.
While Emily was busy getting the posters with Shanghai girls and the Revolutionary ballet, we looked around. We didn't want to buy anything postponing all the shopping till Hong Kong. Here we also saw communist posters and other propaganda items, stamps, calligraphy scrolls and paintings. All was good, the people, the products. The revolutionary ballet posters amused even me, I've never
Tea pots
I guess the tea sets are very popular among the tourists since they are sold everywhere seen anything like this even in Russia. Apparently, the ballet existed in China between 1966-76 and was one of 8 performances allowed in Beijing.
After saying good bye to Emily, we went to explore Beijing on our own. The task became a bit harder, since we now needed to talk to the cab drivers and had to abandon several cabs due to the lack of understanding or their attempts of driving without the meter. We had a lot of problems with the taxis in the evening. It seems that Beijing has lots of cabs, but it's almost impossible to get one in the evening. We almost missed our evening show because we couldn't get a cab! Some nice person came up to us and told that the cabs can not stop on major roads and we need to go about 30m away on a small road to get a cab. That works. Walking is almost impossible in Beijing, unless you have a lot of time. The blocks are huge, so mastering cab culture is very useful.
Other activities of the day included visit to the Tienanmen square and Forbidden city. The color was mostly gray, pollution is really
Players
People play games on the streets. We've seen it in many places in China bad in Beijing. Sun looks like the moon for the most part and it feels hot as if you are in a green house. We didn't find anything special on the square except for the people who constantly wanted to sell something to us. The Forbidden city was all in construction and with tons of people running around. I got the audio guide which was just ok, nothing really informative, more like plain description of what's in front of you. Well, we needed the description from time to time because some buildings were completely covered in the construction stuff.
The last activity of the day was a show in Lao She Tea House. It's just a tea house where they have variety shows with Chinese acrobats, opera, stand up comedy and singing. I was really tired so I had to sleep through the comedy parts, but the people around seemed to enjoy the show. The weird thing was that even after paying 100Y each we were seated to a table with a family of 4 and the table next to us remained unoccupied. The show was interesting as an intro, but was not satisfactory as any particular genre goes.
Wooden scrolls
You can get lots of cool art in the Panjianyuan market. Just bargain hard You really need to visit specialized opera or acrobat performances to truly see what it's about. But it was good time spent with someone else's family, drinking tea. At the exit of the place we saw a statue of Bush the first looking like he visited the place. I guess this is why they treat the whole show as tourist trap and make it feel like a assembly line.
That's all for the second day in Beijing. Each day here feels so long with so many activities cramped!
Katya
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