Hanging out in Beijing

For three days before we left for Peace Corps China we had a staging meeting in Chicago, a surreal experience that had nothing to do with what came after. After Peace Corps ended, we had our Beijing staging, ten days in Beijing that had nothing whatsoever in common with what would come after...

Beijing on a clear morning

We left Chengdu on the 26th of July on a train for Beijing along with two other volunteers who had just finished service, Jim and Jen. Jen's sister is working as a nanny in Beijing and had a lovely apartment in the middle of the city, and she's not there right now. So the apartment was generously offered to us and we happily accepted. The apartment is beautiful, a nice one-bedroom place on the 11th floor of a swank new complex, with stylish furniture and great lighting. Our backpacks and piles of gear, books, and clothing looked a little out of place when piled all over the floor.

Crossing the dam to the Wall

Beijing isn't anything like the China we've been living in for the past couple of years, so there's always a bit of culture shock when we get there and there are so many westerners living and working there. We found a Sichuan-style restaurant that made authentic food and settled in there for many a meal. I fear we've become like our Chinese friends in Sichuan -- when we travel outside the region we look for food from our China hometown instead of trying new things. Of course, Sichuanese food is much better than other Chinese food, so it's understandable. Right?

Our nod to the tourist sites of Beijing was a trip out to the Great Wall in the Huanghua area, a part of the wall that is officially closed for restoration but unofficially open for exploration. We took a local bus for a couple of hours up to a town outside of Beijing, then negotiated with a driver to take us another 40 kilometers to this part of the wall. Once we got to the area, we found that there were not many tourists there at all. Local residents were selling 'tickets' for 25 cents each to do things like walk across a dam to access the wall, or to walk through someone's orchard on a trail. Those tickets were fine - supporting the local economy, after all - but once we were on the wall and walked a ways up it, we got to a point where two men had barricaded themselves inside a tower using brambles and barbed wire to block the entrances to the tower. They had a sign that said "Wall closed for restoration", but were more than willing to sell 'tickets' to continue past them. Problem is, they wanted ten times more for their tickets than the peasants lower down on the wall and they wouldn't bargain with us on the price. This seemed more like extortion than supporting the local economy. Unhappily, we decided to descend, get off the wall, and try to bypass the tower by using a trail switchbacking up the hill next to the wall. We got to a point where we could just about scale the wall, but the two gentlemen had followed us and were watching us closely. Jim, however, did his best Mongol Horde impression and scaled the wall before the guards could stop him. Once on top, he transformed from his Horde persona to his nonviolent protest persona, sat down on the wall, and wouldn't move. The following exchange took place, in Chinese.

Heather and me on the Wall

Man: Get off the wall.

Jim: I can't go down, and anyways it's not your wall.

Man: Well, it's not your country.

Can't argue with that! However, after talking about our work as volunteers for US-China friendship and all that, we managed to get a major discount on our 'tickets' and we happily continued on. Glad we did, too, because in the distance we could see parts of the wall that were truly unrestored -- trees and bushes were growing thickly upon the broad top of the wall and the tops of the towers as the wall snaked its way up the hill. By the time of the Olympics in two years, I'm sure that all the wall will be restored, tourist-friendly, not very authentic, and the local ticket sellers will have been pushed out by the official ticket sellers. It'll be expensive and packaged, but then they won't have the problem we did on our descent from the wall: a woman was selling 'tickets' to descend the last ladder off the wall. There were no other options, so we bought her ticket.

Jim scaling the Great Wall

Steep Descent

The Great Wall at Huanghua

Young tourists at the Summer Palace