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Published: January 11th 2010
Patsy in Beijing We flew from Hong Kong to Beijing. The flight was easy; the airports are very nice.
We spent 10 days in Beijing. Here are some thoughts about our time there.
What I liked best. Ice scoobering. It was so cold in Beijing that all of the lakes were frozen over, and there were a good many big lakes. There was one big lake near the place where we were staying.
On the lakes you could rent ice skates, ice bikes, and ice chairs. We got the ice chairs.
They were two chairs, one in front of the other, with runners on the bottom that slid over the ice. There were also these metal poles that you used to push the ice chair along the ice. We named this ice scoobering.
It had snowed a lot, so there were piles of snow on the ice. We did ice scoobering two days in a row.
The first day, piles of snow were everywhere, and we bumped into them a lot, so we ended up very snowy. It was fun to make the ice chair go very fast and then run into a pile
of snow.
The second day there was a big section of ice that was completely cleared of snow. Workers had been working hard to clear the ice of all the snow. The cleared ice was crowded, and the ice was slick, so nobody could steer. There was a lot of bumping into each other and skidding on the ice.
Ice scoobering was really fun because it was the first time that I had ever been able to go out on a frozen lake. It was way bigger and more fun than an artificial ice rink. There were also things like snack stands and a carnival set up on the ice, and these added a festive mood to it.
I was not much help pushing the ice chairs, because I am such a little purple cow. I am not in the picture of ice scoobering, because I got cold and had to warm up in a backpack.
What I liked least. I pretty much liked it all. The first day we went to these Drum and Bell Towers near the place that we were staying. You climbed a lot of stairs and then got to look out
at a view, but it was not that great.
I didn’t not like it, but it wasn’t as fun as everything else we did.
The most fun I had. Ice scoobering. See above.
The most like home. Probably the cold, really. It was the first place we’ve been that was cold like home. Most days had highs between 15 and 35 F and lows between 0 and 15 F.
It was fun, but that’s probably just because we had the clothes for it. As you can see in the pictures, we were very bundled up.
The cutest thing I saw. Puppies in boots, easily. After it snowed, all the dogs had little boots on, because the sidewalks had been salted, and the salt must have stung their paws, so they had boots on.
It was very cute. They were mostly poodles. In addition to their boots, they also had on little sweaters.
The best food I ate. Churros. Churros are these stick-shaped donuts, sort of - only they taste more like fried dough. They are delicious. The humans in the group know them from eating them in Mexico - I haven’t been to
Mexico yet, but I still liked them.
The churros were served with these “Kyrgyzstan fruit things,” whatever that is. They were also served with ice cream and chocolate. Ella and me got them with powdered sugar sprinkled over them; Paul got them with chocolate sauce. They were very yummy.
Churros are really good when they’re hot, and these ones were always hot and fresh. The churros stall was a few doors down from our hostel.
It was so much fun. They were so good.
The weirdest food I ate. Baozi. Baozi (bow-zzuh) are Chinese steamed buns with various stuff inside them. They are very good.
We got them on our last day in Beijing. We had been looking for a restaurant serving baozi or jaozi (Chinese dumplings), but we couldn’t find one. We got them stuffed with different things, some with greens and some with pork.
They taste sort of like spongy sandwiches with somewhat funny-tasting filling with soy-sauce-like sauce. You pick them up with chopsticks and dip them in the sauce and put them in your mouth.
The most interesting thing I did. The people in the parks. This was also the
craziest thing I did.
There were a lot of parks with people in them doing things like dancing and opera-singing and hacky-sack and ribbon-twirling-dancing.
The weirdest was probably the park around the Temple of Heaven, a famous Beijing building.
We walked into the park, and there was a huge open space filled with people doing something like ballroom dancing. They were dancing in couples, but it was sort of faster and more lively than ballroom dancing. They were all doing similar things, but slightly different.
It was like someone had cut on some music, and a bunch of people had gone and danced - in the zero degree weather. There were a ton of couples dancing, like a hundred maybe. You stood there and watched them, and there was people dancing almost as far as you could see, forever. It was so strange. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
There’s a video of it on May and Paul’s blog.
There was also a sing-a-long, in the same park. That was odd. Probably 50 people in a circle. There were a few people kind of in the middle with the songbooks,
and they were going around to different people and showing them the words and singing. Pretty much everybody was singing really loud, all together.
It was very festive and happy. We saw them sing two songs. One was a Chinese song we didn’t know, and one was “Oh My Darling, Clementine” in Chinese.
There were also things more like performances, sort of. One person had a microphone and amplifier, and they were singing Chinese opera songs. There was a huge crowd of people watching. It sounded like slightly screechy, very loud singing in Chinese.
Where we slept. We slept in a youth hostel, which is an affordable and basic hotel for young people. Our room had four beds and a table with a chair and a bathroom.
The hostel was very nice. It had a restaurant next door that served a good breakfast to us; the breakfast was included with the price.
Our hostel was in a hutong. A hutong is a little street that is usually pedestrian, or mostly pedestrian.
Our hutong was re-done so that it looked new. It had lots of coffee shops and cafes and things on it.
There
were lots of hutongs in Beijing. You could wander from hutong to hutong and get lost in them. It’s like a maze of little alleys. Some have been re-done, so they look fancy and new, and others haven’t been re-done, and they look old and very basic.
In most of the shops on our hutong, they had plastic flaps instead of doors. It did keep the cold air out, though.
Hutongs are only in Beijing. They’re fun to wander around.
When it snowed, we went out into the hutongs in the morning before the snow got all tramped on, and it was really pretty. Snow covered every surface and the ground.
Where we ate. Mostly at a Chinese restaurant near our hostel and Amigos, a Mexican restaurant.
The Chinese restaurant was very big. When you first walked in, there was a big room full of tables. Then you could go back down this little hallway, and there would be tables off to the side that were almost in little rooms.
The menu was very big, and had pictures on it. Nobody who worked there spoke English. You ordered by pointing at the pictures on
the menu. You only got chopsticks - no fork or spoon or knife. It was the only place that we’ve been so far that people didn’t always get rice with their meal; sometimes they just ate the Chinese food without rice, and sometimes they got rice. Some of the dishes came on a fire. There would be this little mini-stove that the dishes got put on, and it would keep the food hot.
We ate mostly vegetables. Ella’s favorite was broccoli. It was my favorite too. May and Paul got different things. They would get a combination of eggplant and cabbage and mushroom.
When Chinese people eat, they get a number of dishes, and put it all in the middle, and share it all, so everyone gets a little of everything. They even share like this with Western food, because in Hong Kong we saw them sharing pizza and salad and soup at California Pizza Kitchen.
Amigos, the Mexican restaurant, was just like any Mexican restaurant at home. Except that all of the workers spoke Chinese (and no English or Spanish).
How we got around. The subway. Beijing has a nice subway, that goes pretty much
anywhere you need to go.
Our hostel was near a lot of stuff that we did, so about half the days we didn’t even need to take the metro.
To get to the Great Wall, we hired a taxi to take us there and bring us back.
Chinese money. Chinese money is called Yuan. It’s also called renminbi, which is abbreviated RMB. It’s also called kuai. Around 7 Yuan = 1 US dollar. Drinks cost 3 Yuan, about 40 cents. A lunch special double cheeseburger meal at McDonald’s costs 15 Yuan, a little over $2.
Beijing’s imperial sights. Beijing has a lot of imperial sights. Imperial sights are places that were around when China had an emperor. And they all had something to do with the emperor or his court.
The Forbidden City. The first one we went to was the Forbidden City. It is called the Forbidden City because until the 1920s, when China no longer had an emperor, regular people were not allowed to go in. It was the emperor’s palace.
It was huge. It had a lot of big buildings with carvings and pretty paint and whatnot.
I liked the
roofs of them. The roofs were tiles, but pretty tiles. They were slanty and they had a curve up at the end. The color of the roofs was a pretty yellow. Most of the buildings were painted dark red, almost like a brick color but darker and prettier.
You could look in some of the buildings and see what they looked like. They all had big thrones with a lot of staircases up to the throne.
The buildings in the Forbidden City had goofy names, such as: Gate of Supreme Harmony, Hall of Complete Harmony, Hall of Central Harmony, Hall of Preserving Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity, and Palace of Earthly Tranquility.
The Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is a lot smaller than the Forbidden City, but really, really neat. It’s really just one building.
It’s round and painted with very colorful paint. It had a roof on top, and then two more circles of roof around it. It’s hard to describe, but you can look at the pictures.
It was where the emperor came, four times a year, to pray for good harvests.
The Temple of Heaven was neat because it
had just been repainted, and the sun was shining on it in a really pretty way. And the colors that it was painted in were really pretty. Also, the building is really neat. The shape of the building.
Prince Gongy-Wongy’s. It’s actually called Prince Gong’s Mansion, but hey, what’s the fun in that?
It’s a house where a prince used to live. It’s half buildings and half garden. The garden had artificial piles of rocks - they called them artificial mountains, but they were made up of rocks. There were stairs that went up to the top of them, and you could walk along a pathway that went across the top.
The buildings were also neat. The whole place was almost empty. Wandering around the half where the buildings were was fun, because you couldn’t really see where you were - you weren’t lost, exactly, but you couldn’t tell where you were. It was a house, but it was very big and you could sort of get lost in it. And it was pretty from the snow.
We went to lots of other imperial sights, but these were my favorites.
The Great Wall. One day
we went to the Great Wall. It’s a giant wall that went across China a long time ago, but now most of it is crumbled and only some parts are redone. They built to keep out intruders.
We took a cable car up, because it would have been a ton of steps if we hadn’t. It runs along the top of mountains. They looked about the size of our mountains, in Western NC.
We walked along the wall, and it was very hilly, with lots of steps and hills. Every 5 to 10 minute’s walk there was a guard-tower. There were a couple that you could go up in and look out over the Great Wall, which went as far as you could see.
There was a ton of steps at one point. A ton. It was a long staircase going up a steep mountain.
The Great Wall was like a hike in the mountains, except on a wall as opposed to a path. It was also really neat to look out to a really, really far-away mountain and see another guard-tower sticking up. It twisted and curved, and went up and down to, and so
it looked like it stopped and came back a while later - because it went downhill and curved.
I really liked Beijing. I liked the hutongs, and the sights. And the cold was a nice change of pace. None of the sights were terribly crowded, so you could see them. And all the sights had been redone for the Olympics in Beijing (in 2008). It was really the perfect time to come.
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Louisa Goebel
non-member comment
snow
Ice scoobering really sounds fun! I like the people dancing in the park without music also! We like churros! I do believe I would like Beijing! We still have cold and snow here also! Happy Birthday May! Love, Louisa and Paul