The East Coast Swing

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Most girls have a tendency for running late, not I. If you know me, you know how much I value punctuality. If you’re on time, you’re late. That’s my motto. Mad dashes to the train station are out of the question. No sir. No way would we arrive at the train station (nay, just be getting off the subway) at 9:29 knowing full well that our train will promptly depart (as most trains do in China) at 9:34 on the dot.

Never would station attendants look at our tickets, look at their watches, and tell us in English, “Hurry, Quickly, Quickly.” Never would such attendants cheer us on as we run full speed up the escalator, banging up our luggage in the process as it hits every step. (I should spend some time working on my biceps to prepare for such occasions)
You would be insane if you could picture Nancy and I weaving, squeezing, and downright shoving our way through a crowded hallway full of Chinese, in no apparent hurry, just to make it to the right platform.

I know you're probably thinking that this could never happen to me, but I regret to inform you that these events did in fact occur. Shock! But it gets better…or worse. We make our way past the crowd and run to the end of the long hallway and down the stairs. We get on the first train we see. We’re on “A” train. We consider this a victory. Now, to find out if it’s the right train. We show our tickets to an attendant and ask, “Suzhou?” She nods. We miraculously end up on the right train…but wrong car. Way wrong. We were in car 15 and our seats were in car 3…at the opposite end of the train. Turns out, the crowd we encountered in the hallway was going to Suzhou, too. And we could’ve just followed them instead of having to double back to car three. So, out of breath, faces flush, sweat glistening, we embark on what will forever be known as the slowest walk of shame ever. We make our way through the train and pass by some of the same people we had just pushed our way through. For some unknown reason, they seemed a lot less willing to move their feet and belongings out of our way. We hear people in the train giggling as we walk by. We know they’re staring. We finally make it to our seats, still huffing, and just 'plop'. I look at Nancy, and smile. That was fun.

Poor Nancy, we ran her to death. Probably could've planned a little more leisure in her trip.

That was my little tidbit. Now off to Aaron

So......we decided to take Nancy to Beijing. Beijing Part II if you will. If you read our earlier entry, we took a guided 5 star tour of Beijing with auntie and uncle back in May. This time around it was bound to be a different type of travel. One of confusion, dirty hotel rooms, more confusion, and a lot of map usage. As strange as it sounds, we find the latter mode of travel more interesting---call it the spontaneity of it all.

Once again, we took the night train, hard sleeper. It was as convenient as the first time. Once we got there, we needed to buy a return ticket to Shanghai. This wasn't as slick as it should have been. It took us 4 lines and 2 hours to get to the right place. Unfortunately, we could only buy soft seats. One would think this would be like a Laz-Y-Boy, since the price was only marginally cheaper than the hard sleeper. Ones intuition would be proven wrong. If you guessed it would be worse than an airport seat, you would be correct. Oh well, this doesn't come into the story until later.

For a city of 15-20 million, I am forced to complain about the rail, metro, and airport stations in Beijing. I guess if we want to hit all the infrastructure bases, we should mention road traffic too. The rail station is tiny, old, and confusing for foreigners. The metro line is extremely simple right now. It fails to reach the outer parts of the city. Greater Beijing is over 40 million people. Many people are forced to take buses to and from work. Our friend Linda, who has a reputable job at Motorola, must ride the bus each way 1.5 hours everyday. Combine this with the doubling of housing prices in many parts of China over the several years. "Life isn't too easy in Beijing," she often said.

The airport's quality is much nicer than the rail station, but it isn't reachable by metro and is a good hour away from the city center. Also, the traffic is horrid. It is so bad that people actually get out of their cars during rush hour to have a smoke. We are talking 1 mile in 45 minutes bad!!!

The reason I am throwing out these complaints is because it will be interesting to see how Beijing prepares for next years games. They have the manpower, the obsession to succeed, and money to fix things, but right now it is pretty messy!

Beijing has soooo many things to see. Tons of parks, temples, lakes, palaces, shopping areas. There are special things to see everywhere. We again visited the Temple of Heaven Park, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, a Tibetan Temple, etc. In Tiananmen Square, you see many old people. It is easy to see that in the city, they feel out of place. Many have dark skin, are hunched over, and are dressed poorly. We think these people are probably from other less affluent provinces in China who are on vacation. To them, this is a pilgrimage to Mecca. They sit on a bench in the square, look around, take a deep breath, and probably feel happiness like they have never felt before. To them, this is where it all started. To foreigners like us, it is just another tourist stop; we snap a couple pics, make a couple 360 turns, and get on our way. I really wish we could have felt stronger about our surroundings, let alone our own cultural relics. To make an analogy, maybe we sort of felt like a foreigner does when they visit George Washington's house at Mount Vernon. I guess we just don't have the depth to truly appreciate things sometimes. We still try our best!

Good/Bad tour experience. After we finished the tour of Forbidden City, we were handed a flier about Great Wall Tours. We wanted to visit a more desolate area of the wall, Simatai. Fortunately, the flier had this tour listed as an option for 150 RMB, $20 per person. It explicitly stated, this price includes all transport costs and an English Speaking Guide. However, it didn't cover the entry fee cost. After retiring to our hotel for the night, we made a phone call to set up the tour for the next day. The operator told me that the tour had been canceled, but a car could be hired with a driver and guide for 600 RMB ($80). I agreed.

The next day, our tour guide showed up to our hotel. I noticed she was wearing open-toed sandals, something that would be a definite no-no for scaling a formidable section of the Great Wall. People have actually died on the Simatai section (probably for being idiots, but nonetheless), according to our guide, and many parts of it required the use of all 4 extremities. So, we packed our things up into the 1990 Dodge Grand Voyager. Before we started the adventure, our guide told us we wouldn't have time to go to Simatai, so they would take us to another spot, Mutianyu, which was a bit closer to the city We thought it was a little bit strange that they didn't tell us this the night before, but we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. I tried my best to bargain a cheaper price, which I ended up getting down to 450 RMB. So we were off. After about an hour, (lets' just call our guide Ethyl) Ethyl told us that we would need to pay a 20 RMB toll fee each way. We told her on the flier it stated all these things were included. So...she dialed up her boss a couple times. After the convo, she told us that we would have to pay for the fee. What else could we do? So we paid up.

Then, we got to the entry gate. Ethyl took us to the gate and told us that we need to decide how long we want to stay at the wall, so that she and the driver could know when to meet us when we were finished. We were a bit confused that she was implicitly telling us that she was not hiking up the wall with us. So we discussed this with her. She said she had forgotten her tour guide free pass at home. We thought it was also bit strange for her to forget a free pass card on a day when she was supposed to take tourists up the wall. So, we asked her to pay the entry fee so she could inform us of the history surrounding this area of the wall. We paid for a tour guide and fully expected to get our money's worth. She called her boss again. After hanging up the phone, she said she would go up the wall with us if we paid the entry fee. We told her no. She said that her job was to act as a translator, a person who communicated with the driver to get us to the right place. "I am not a tour guide," she repeatedly said. So, we gave her two choices, the first was that she could pay the entry fee, be our tour guide, and earn the 450 RMB we agreed upon earlier. The second option was for her to go back to the van and wait, and we would pay less than 450 RMB when we finished our agreement. Ethyl was distraught. She called bossman again and chatted another 5. We told her the options again and started the trek. At this point, I was thoroughly disgusted with this tour company. She argued with me that she was a translator, not a tour guide. "You have got to be kidding me, only in China," I thought.

We started the trek. It was definitely a great experience. Though it was also heavily rebuilt, it was much less touristy than the Badaling section. To say we have conquered our first of the Great Wonders of the World feels great. You really just need to sit down on the wall to appreciate the magnificence of its vastness. The Chinese didn't choose convenient valleys and passes in between mountains to build the wall. They purposely chose the tallest parts of the mountain stretches, knowing that the extra work involved in the tumultuous building task would be outweighed by the greater protection it afforded them from outside rogue forces. The wall stretches from our trekking point to the horizon. Incredible.

After a few hours of endless stairs, we walked to the exit point and decided to take a toboggan ride down. Definately worth the $5 price. The rickety set up had "law suit" written all over it. Once again, I had to remind myself that we were in China.

So we got back to the van and set off back to the train station. Ethyl didn't seem too displeased, though she asked us to pay another 5 RMB for the parking fee. I was done arguing with her. She assured me that we were held accountable for the 450 RMB fee we previously agreed upon. We decided to ignore her until it was time to settle the bill at the train station.

We arrived back in the city center at about rush hour. We were stuck in one of those traffic jams I talked about earlier; the ones were drivers get out of their cars to smoke half a pack of cigarettes. 1 mile and an hour later, we decided we could get off then and take the metro. So they pulled over into a hotel parking lot. She then asked for the 450 RMB. I remind her that she chose option two, the one where we would pay less if she didn't accompany us up the wall. Another phone call to bossman. Ethyl then explained again that she was just a translator, not a tour guide. We told her that 400 RMB was an acceptable rate. Another call to bossman. Before hanging up the phone, I threw the 400 on the passenger side seat, took our luggage, and headed to the metro. Ethyl seemed to almost be in tears. I do regret being so forceful for that reason...no, no, actually I don't. Where is the Better Business Bureau complaint number when you need it? Just another experience in mother China!

Beijing is probably a really great city. However, I promise we are done with our research to support this conclusion.

Something interesting thing that the government does in Beijing is set a goal for "blue sky days"--days with low smog and clear skies. Actually, with instruction from the government, the official term is fog. Before coming to China, I hadn't heard of yellow, dirty looking fog that appeared at all times of the day. A meteorological wonder!

So, last year the government shot for 241 blue sky days, which they hit with a buffer of several days. This year, they will go for 245 days. An upper government official stated, "This target will be extremely difficult to hit, but it is imperative that we clean up the sky before the Olympics next year." I discussed this figure with a local expat. He laughed at me, and joked that the government probably hires blind meteorologists, or at least color blind, to judge the color of the sky. "What color is the sky today, blue or gray?" "It is gray, sir." "Let me ask you one more time; is the color of the sky today blue or blue?"

My last observation involves the famous Pearl Market. This is a 6 story building in central Beijing where foreigners come to buy any and every type of souvenir. For those of you who lobby the Chinese government to enforce more strict intellectual property infringements, please stay away from this place! The shear sight of copies, duplications, and pirateds could cause a mild heart attack. Nonetheless, for us lowly teachers, it was the best place to get our souvenirs.

The Pearl Market is a well oiled machine. It is set up to look like there are hundreds of little shops in 1 big building. Actually, it is all just tied together. The salespeople were predominately younger, more attractive, Chinese girls. They would pull at my arm, tell me how handsome I was, and do just about anything to get me to buy something. They are also very well trained. For a fake silk scarf we eventually bought for 15 RMB, their starting price was 680 RMB. It really does take some time to get good deals, but if time is something you have, feel free to go there and bargain your heart out.

When Ely and I bargain, we usually discuss our strategy in Spanish so that the salesperson doesn't know how low or high we are willing to go. This didn't work so well in the Pearl Market. Each of these girls received language training in a variety of languages. They could bargain with you in Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Incredible! So...our strategy to discuss things in Spanish proved to be less effective.

There is a joke we heard while being here: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Tri-lingual. What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? Bi-lingual. What do you call a person who speaks 1 language? American. We are really poor at languages aren’t we? Coming to the Pearl Market just reiterates my feeling of uni-lingualism. Ugg!

It has to be a terrible job, to try all day to rip off foreigners. It has to be a worse job when the foreigners live in China and have a better idea of what they should be paying. So, they would offer me a price of 680, and I would say 10. They got really angry with me, basically wanting to kick me out of their store. They would pout and yell at me, "you waste me time." I would smile back at them and say, "YOU waste me time." I definitely left the Pearl Market with no more friends than I went in with. What a pity.

Well, this is a real mountain of an entry. I could have probably been shorter if I kept a minute by minute summary of our vacation, but hey, my mind wonders. Next entry…Bali!

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Photos

We rode the maglev
it's like you're flying...but you're on a train

her first meal in china
not so bad with the sticks...impressed!!

HuangPu River Cruise
shanghai scenery 3 here we come

New Heaven and Earth
ultra cool shanghai

veiw from our hotel
must be laundry day in the neighborhood!

baozi breakfast
press and hold... a little to the right....steady...hold...hold...ooo...it's ok
taking a picture sure was difficult for this staff member but she finally got it.

the beckoning cat
come on in prosperity

outdoor market in shanghai
the real shanghai