Day two: Forbidden City

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Suffice it to say that today went much better than yesterday on any number of levels, and we learned one very important thing - it would be almost impossible to make the most out of a trip to Beijing without having some local friends with you. The generosity and friendliness of the people here is astounding and the people we have met have universally contributed to making this an amazing trip

Our day began with arranging transportation into the city from the compound, where we were going to meet some students from Beijing Foreign Studies who would show us some of the sights. Unfortunately, because Daxing is so far on the outskirts of town, there are no legitimate taxis outside the compound. This meant that we had to take a “black cab” which is an unregistered cab that does not run off a meter but rather you have to negotiate a fare for wherever you want to go. Luckily, our friend Chen (I have no idea if that spelling is right) negotiated a couple cabs for us and we were dropped off at Tiananmen Square. We had half an hour before we had to meet the BFS folks, so Girouard, Mark and I took a quick spin around the square to check out Mao’s mausoleum and the wall around the Forbidden City. Girouard did not bring a watch because he usually uses his cell phone, but he found a sweet watch from one of the vendors in the square. It features a picture of Mao and his waving arm is also the second hand. This was our first negotiation without a Chinese friend, and he ended up paying 50 RMB ($7). Our friends later thought he could have done better, but that was down from the original price of 120 RMB.



We booked it to KFC which was where the first sweet thing of the day happened. My ATM card worked, so now I have money to get me around Beijing. It was also a real experience to see KFC serving things like shrimp tacos for breakfast. It seems to be the most popular fast food chain around here. We made our connection with five folks from BFS, which turned out to be the most important move of the day, and headed back out for the square.



This was also where we began to be exposed to some of the major cultural differences from the US. For one, I learned that if a man wears a green hat (even a totally sweet seed corn hat like mine) it announces that he believes his wife is cheating on him. So Courtney, we may have some things to talk about when I get home. And thanks for the hat, Uncle Dave. After all the giggling was explained to me, I took the hat off for a while, but gave up and put it back on after it started raining. Check me out, rocking the hat in front of the Mao portrait on the wall where he proclaimed the People's Republic.



Also, we learned that Girouard is a major oddity here as well as in the US. Tiananmen is one of the major tourist attractions for Chinese folks as well as foreigners here, and many of them seemed to want to take pictures with Chris. He ended up having a picture with a nice old lady and this guy.




Mark, Chris and I then headed out to see a new museum that has just been constructed called “the egg” because it looks like a huge mirrored egg floating in the middle of a giant pond. Our new friends Helen, Antonio, Daisy, and Nina took us over there while the rest of the part went to rest by the Forbidden City. We hiked back over there, taking a tunnel under one of the widest streets in Beijing and trekked into the Forbidden City. It is impossible to adequately describe the scale of that place. Huge lines of people perpetually flow through immense tunnels in the three outer walls, but despite that we still found secluded alleys and museums without anybody else in them, as well as some amazing architecture. Daisy had just completed a semester on historical architecture so was very helpful in explaining the intricacies of building design and symbology to me.





After a couple hours in the Forbidden City, it was time for lunch, se we decided to head into the Wangfuching shopping district for Peking duck. Unfortunately, it is illegal for cabs to stop behind the Forbidden City, so the only members of our group that made it into a cab were Kevin and Elizabeth and their escort. The rest of us searched for a cab for a while, and Mark and I even got into one, but the driver apparently didn’t know where the place we wanted to go was, so seemed to get frustrated during negotiations and kicked us out. We ended up making what turned out to be the dubious choice of getting into the back of bicycle cabs. The girls negotiated a price of 10 RMB per person and we went on a whirlwind tour of Beijing backstreets on these bicycles. Mark and I had one to ourselves, which was the only point that we separated from our guides, and I assume will be the only point that happens. When we were dropped off, I gave the driver a 100 RMB note (the smallest ATMs distribute) and appeared to be getting change, then dove onto his bike and sped off. Our friends couldn’t help because they were involved in a heated discussion in Mandarin with their drivers who wanted more money than the negotiated price. Overall, it could have been much worse, and we did get an amazing tour of some off-the-beaten-path parts of Beijing en route to Wangfuching. This picture is one I was taking of us when we ran a red light through an intersection, which seems to be par for the course here.



Wangfuching is a pedestrian street, so he had a bit of a walk to find the restaurant. This is often called China’s Times Square, because it is the major upscale shopping district and is absolutely plastered with giant billboards and some of the largest outdoor TV’s I’ve ever seen. Some of them rival the HuskerVision screen in Memorial Stadium. We made it to Quan Ju De, which is one of the oldest Peking Duck restaurants in the world, and since Kevin had a head start on us, our group had two ducks and some side dishes waiting for us. It was a delicious traditional meal with lotus leaf pancakes and hoisin sauce for the duck.



We decided to close our day out with a couple hours of shopping in the Silk Market, which is just a short subway ride from Wangfuching. Beijing subways are an adventure unto themselves. Nobody waits for folks to get off in an orderly fashion before boarding, and the stops are so short that if you do, you get left behind. The general system seems to be to get a running start at the door, wedge yourself in, and get over your concept of personal space. The Silk Market is five stories tall, filled with stalls of vendors of everything you could possible want from silk, pearls, and jade, to an enormous selection of knock-off designer goods. The shopkeepers are pretty aggressive, as well - they try to pull you into their booths as you walk by. Each of us paired off with a Chinese guide and entered the fray. As with the black cabs, this is a process of negotiation, where sellers give you an initial price and then you negotiate, usually from a starting offer about 10% of asking. Our guides were invaluable here, as they are well versed in the melodrama of negotiations. I picked up excellent presents for Mom and Dad, but whiffed on a really beautiful gift for Courtney when negotiations did not go well. Hopefully I will rectify that at another market.

After a very long day, our new friends found us cabs and bundled us back to Daxing, where we ran into our host, Vincent, and the newly-arrived contingent from Willamette. We all had dinner in the same private dining room as last night, but the food multiplied exponentially with the additions to our party. We had the privilege of trying some new exotic dishes like white jelly fungus, all of which were excellent, before heading back to our rooms. We thought we would write the blog together, but instead Mark, Chris, and I all passed out pretty quickly in my room, which basically put an end to our day.

Today, everything hangs in the balance. We are trying to make contact with Cecily, one of our friends from yesterday, who said she would help us get to the Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven today. That failing, I have no idea how we will manage.

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