Mainland China

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Last Thursday I left after my last class for the airport to squeeze in a weekend tour of mainland China's two biggest cities, Shanghai and Beijing. I went with my friend Matt, a Canadian also studying business at HKUST and a guy who shares my interest in traveling as much as possible for as long as our bank accounts can keep us above water.

SHANGHAI

We arrived in Shanghai Thursday night and checked into our hostel close to midnight which gave us limited time to get ready for a night out (Shanghai's nightlife is some of the best in Asia and we only had two nights here so rest wasn't an option). After a rushed night at Bar Rouge, a rooftop bar that had promise as a venue but was just dead on this particular night, we headed back to our hostel. The next day on our way to the Shanghai Museum we met a couple 'art students' who coaxed us into coming to their 'festival' because 'it was the last day and we could get a good deal'. We should have seen through this but nevertheless we were able to use our bargaining skills from our Negotiation class to whittle down the price so we werent' getting COMPLETELY hosed. These kids were pros. So genuine and so nice, they took down our emails to be in touch and it wasn't until we were looking at our Lonely Planet guidebook later that we were warned of locals claiming to be 'art students' that entice tourists to overpay for Chinese art. Someone in my family will reap the benefits of my naive purchase come Christmas time. It was amazing to me how many different strategies people employed to gain our attention and get closer to our wallets. It was almost impossible to tell if people where just genuinely nice or genuinely honed at the craft of con. We asked a seemingly harmless couple for directions and they peppered us with questions about where we were from and what we were doing in China and would we like to join them for coffee and a chat.... arrggghhh. We thanked them for the offer and moved on, luckily because we learned later at the hostel that this is yet another scam.

After the museum we walked through Old Town, dodging sparks and construction barriers underneath a bamboo canopy of scaffolding on just about every building, towards the Yayuan Gardens. This was marked as one of Shanghai's 'must-see' attractions but Matt and I were a little disappointed. I uploaded the best photo I have of the gardens. After the gardens, we wanted to rest our feet and headed to Cloud Nine bar atop the Jinmao Tower. The tower is located across the river from the Bund, the area where our hostel was and where the most of the nightlife in Shanghai is. The view from up here is pretty spectacular but the prices are steep (we ordered the cheapest bottle of wine and split it --> probably the best deal depending on your budget/objective.) We spent Friday night at a place called Attica where we basically closed the bar down (a difficult task considering bars in Asia stay open till 4am at the earliest). Attica was another rooftop club in the Bund but a little bigger than Bar Rouge with a wider variety of damn good tunes.

On Saturday, after our long night at Attica, we only had time for one sight before our evening flight to Beijing. We headed to the French Concession, established by one of the many settlers of Shanghai's past.... for those of you who need a little more explanation (kenny), it's France. The homes here were neatly tucked away in quaint little back streets from the busy Parisian-like streets of the main strip. An interesting thing we spotted throughout the city were these multi-colored workout machines (I assume put in by the government). Matt got on one of them for a photo and a kid in pyjamas came out to show him up. He tried to keep up as the kid swung back and forth on the machine like he was made of gumby. Matt got completely schooled and the kid walked away as if he was Michael Jordan hitting that jumper in Game 6 against the Jazz to win his sixth NBA championship and finish off his career (so we thought). Sorry I'm a big MJ fan I realize that reference was completely out of left field but the kid didn't break a smile once.










BEIJING

When we arrived in Beijing we were too exhausted for yet another night out and decided instead to get some sleep and catch the first bus to the Great Wall at 6:30 the next morning. We were some of the first tourists to arrive at the Wall and most likely the youngest so we decided to beat the oldies up the hill to be the first ones on top. We had the wall to ourselves for a solid 10 mins which was well worth the exhaustion of getting up there so fast. The pictures we were able to get and the sense of solidarity we felt were unreal. We were also foolish enough to bring up a backpack (the temperature in Beijing drops as soon as the sun goes down and vice versa as soon as its up so it was nice to have somewhere to store our sweaters), but since we were the first up there we were able to find a spot were we could actually climb down the wall, entering the land of those pesky Mongorrrrians to put our bag behind a bush and climb back up. It was pretty cool to actually climb up the wall but god knows what would have happened if security had spotted us. It's almost impossible to explain this massive structure, you really have to go and I would definitely recommend going at sun-up (less touristy) or sundown (tourist packed). It really does just keep going for as far as you can see and it seems almost ridiculous that anyone would commission something like this. We spent most of the exhausting hike trying to estimate how many people died making it (our book said one of the main building blocks/tools used was the bones of the slaves who had died in its construction). After spending a solid three hours walking to both sides of the Mutianyu wall section and befriending the suspicious security guards we took a taboggan down and headed back to the city (the wall's about 1hr 1/2 to 2 hrs outside the city).

In the afternoon we rented bikes and rode through the city towards Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. 20 yuan (about $3 US) bought us a brief introduction from a local guide about the Forbidden City which was basically the home of the Emperor and his two empresses (the Empress of the West Wing and the East Wing). Matt was impressed that the emperor was able to pull off two wives and flabbergasted when he learned what the definition of a concubine was. Basically the Emperor had a squadron of guys who went through most of the villages in China and chose the most attractive 13-16yr old girl to bring to live in the Forbidden City (called such because no locals were allowed inside). The Emperor had over 9000 of these concubines, so naturally we tried to figure out how the Emperor could possibly get to all of them and still run one of the greatest dynasties of human civilization. The man had some imperial stamina. The bike ride back to our hostel was pretty unnerving as we swerved through lanes of traffic which didn't seem to cater to most conventional rules of driving (i.e. people blatantly running red lights and driving in the bike lane for no reason whatsoever). Luckily I had some experience with awful drivers living in LA for three years so we were able to manage. My experiences in Mexico also helped me deal with some of the smells of Beijing. Porta-poddies seemed to sit out in the sun in the most exposed locations and pretty much everything is kosher in the streets (i.e. cooking, spitting, little girl peeing...). So much talk about the Olympics centers around the pollution in Beijing but the smell is definitely something they need to take care of.

Sunday night we caught an acrobatics show which was basically Cirque de Soleil without all the theatrics and for a quarter of the price. Anyone planning to head to China should seriously consider going to one of these. I failed to capture the grand finale on video where a bunch of boys jumped between two poles that stood up perpendicular to the ground about four feet apart. The catch here is that they were jumping from one pole to the other literally by their crotch (i.e. they would have their legs wrapped around the first pole and would push off and land on the other pole in the same position, facing the pole they had just jumped from. Then they'd slide down the pole, stopping themselves inches from the ground, again with their legs/crotch, all within seconds). Like I said, should have gotten it on video but my jaw was on the ground so it was a little hard to think about that.

The next day we headed out early in the morning for the Summer Palace (the Emperor's escape from the blistering heat of the Forbidden City in the summer). This place was ridiculous. There's no way we would have been able to see it all in a day, much less in an afternoon, but it was just as overwhelming as everything else we'd seen in Beijing. The various temples and residence houses scattered across the massive property encircled a gorgeous lake, where tourists are ferried across the palacial grounds. We headed back to the city in the afternoon and joined a group from Dallas that was doing a tour of China. I got to catch up with some family friends including the Riggs family, the Denigers, and Trisha Wilson who accommodated our family at her game park in South Africa on our safari trip this summer. We joined the EAGLES, as they called themselves (don't ask me what the acronym stands for), for a tour through the hutong on rickshaws. The hutong is the basic name for the back alleys and side street neighborhoods of Beijing. We got to see various homes which didn't seem like much but given their location in the city and the fact that they'd been passed down through generations of a single family were quite expensive and an honor for the family to have. We also got the chance to meet the proud owners of the homes and hear their stories.

If you're as exhausted in reading all this as I am after writing it, imagine how we felt when we got on our plane back to Hong Kong that Monday night. All in all, we'd done Shanghai and Beijing in four days and four nights covering 85% of what we wanted to see and 120% of what was reasonably possible. Since I've gotten back people keep asking me which I liked better but both are completely different enjoyable experiences. Shanghai, as the financial growth capital of China, is immersed in change and renovation and the nightlife is something to experience (especially the Bund). Beijing is beyond words. You could live in Beijing for years and not see everything, it's just absolutely massive. A lot of pressure has been placed on the city as it gears up for the summer Olympics, which, if it proves to be a success, will be a huge step forward in China's quest to become an international player on par with the US, UK, and Europe (although God knows what that means). They gotta do something about that smell though and the air pollution is supposed to be some of the worst in the world (Matt said he heard living in Beijing is equivalent to smoking 70 cigarretes a day, it seemed like most of the locals did both).

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