Beijing, June 6-11, 2008

• Ericablair's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Beijing

Trip Start Jun 05, 2008 Trip End Ongoing Next
Entry

  Beijing, China
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

So the adventure begins... Beijing has been great!  Dave and I landed in here on Friday, June 6 from SFO.  We hopped directly onto a shuttle and the first culture shock came quickly: after leaving the airport and correctly identifying which bus to take, we realized we had neglected to buy tickets.  After searching for a ticket booth we realized that instead we had to follow the horde of people waving money in the face of one woman, who was standing in the middle of the sidewalk.  We had to push and shove our way through (leading with the cash, of course), but we managed to get our tickets and made it to city center pretty quickly--aside from the terrible traffic that seems to plague BJ!

After getting off the shuttle, we took a cab to Aga's house.  Aga is a Polish girl studying in Beijing that we connected with through the website Couchsurfing.com.  Couchsurfing is a website where people can connect with others who will let you stay at their homes for free--it's a great moneysaver when you're planning on traveling as long as Dave and I are!!  Aga lived in Wudaokou, the university area of Beijing, and allowed us to sleep on a huge queen-sized bed in her guest bedroom (more spacious than we're used to at home!).  Oh, the wonders of Couchsurfing. We stayed with her for two nights, after which she had a friend visiting from Poland, so we switched to a hostel for our remaining three nights in Beijing.

We rented bikes our first day here ($3 for the whole day... did I mention things are cheap here?) and biked all around the city, catching glimpses of all the sights.  Beijing is an ideal city for biking because it's entirely flat and has huge bike lanes (in some places they are bigger than the driving lanes).  We stopped off for some Peking duck at the most famous roast duck place in Beijing.  It was amazing--you eat it rolled up in little pancakes (think mushu style) with green onions and sauce.  After lunch we biked all around, through some of the hutongs.  Hutongs are the traditional form of housing in Beijing, simple one-story buildings built around courtyards on winding, narrow streets.  They're all over the city and provide good opportunities for wandering.  In fact, our hostel was located in a hutong directly next to Beijing's largest Buddhist temple.  We've enjoyed ducking into its tiny restaurants and convenience shops when hunger strikes.  They're more surprised to see foreigners in these areas and the menus are exclusively in Chinese, but the prices are lower than in touristy areas.  Dave and I are practically helpless in Chinese, so we mostly order dumplings (jaozi--one of the few words we're able to retain!) or point to things.

We've been stuffing ourselves with Chinese food, which has almost entirely been very tasty.  Some of it is pretty oily but there's been a wide assortment of things to try, and we've also found delicious Japanese and Korean food as well (we haven't felt the need to branch out from Asian yet).  And I'm happy to report that despite drinking lots of tea and eating lots of street food neither of us has gotten sick yet.  We've had the pleasure of drinking lots of cheap Tsingtao beer, too.  I like the way the Chinese serve beer: instead of giving you a big glass when you order one beer, they bring out big bottles with little glasses and everyone re-serves themselves as they like.  What we have NOT tried are some of the more interesting things they sell on the street--beetle, cockroach, scorpion, and starfish kebabs to name a few.  Maybe after we toughen up a bit.

On our second full day in Beijing we visited the Summer Palace, located a bit outside the city, where the emperors and such used to go during the summer.  We saw a lot of beautiful architecture and quaint gardens.  At the center of the Summer Palace is Kunming Lake--I don't remember the exact size but it takes up 3/4 of the huge palace grounds.  It's amazingly vast and gorgeous.  The next day, we saw more beautiful, old Chinese architecture at the Forbidden City, which was similarly interesting.  It was the kind of buildings you think of when you think of China and we enjoyed walking around it.

Unfortunately, Dave broke his camera, but had been thinking of getting a new one anyway, so we went to buy one.  At the electronics store we had a funny experience that really illustrated the differences between the US and China.  For one, they started bargaining with us about the price from the start, which could be expected.  What was more surprising was that the two camera sections of the same store were competing with each other for the lowest price!  We would get an offer from one section and then just walk to another and have them bid lower.  Electronics are still expensive in China, but we were able to find one for a bit cheaper than it would be in the States--and a lot cheaper than the posted price!

One of the coolest things we did in and around Beijing was our visit to the Great Wall today (June 10).  There are several places where you can easily access the wall around Beijing, and we chose to go to Simatai, which is about 110 km away from BJ.  There, the wall skirts the top of a mountain ridge around a lot of beautiful scenery.  We took a gondola part of the way up and then climbed further until we reached the wall.  The view was amazing--incredibly expansive.  We could see all the way into Mongolia.  We walked along the wall for awhile, visiting 4 different outposts along the path.  On the wall there was ancient grafitti from the Ming dynasty in early Chinese characters, which was interesting to see.

Overall, I've been very impressed by China.  It is incredibly clean here--there is less trash on the streets than in NYC.  I guess it's because it's so cheap to hire someone to clean the streets.  There are always people coming by picking up trash or sweeping.  Guys will seek you out if you have an empty bottle trying to take it to recycle it so they can get the bottle deposit, so it's easy to recycle, which helps ease my conscience about how much bottled water I'm consuming!  I think it's true what they say about pollution in Beijing though--while it doesn't seem dirty per se, there is a persistent haze to the air.  At first I was convinced it was just the weather, but evidently that is not the case.  One of the biggest differences is that you can look directly at the sun because the haze obscures it and it looks like a perfectly defined circle in the sky--something that doesn't happen often in the States (and when it does it's due to the weather).

Also, people here are also very polite and I feel very welcome and safe.  Everyone has been very helpful and friendly even though there is a significant language barrier.  I don't know what I was expecting, but I have been pleasantly surprised by their demeanour toward us.  I wish I could speak with them, because I think they would be even more friendly if I got to know them, but unfortunately Chinese is a pretty daunting language to speak even basically.  Being here has been a good lesson in what it is like to be illiterate, although things like street names and a lot of signs are printed in Latin characters.  And if they print anything in another language, it is always English (and English only).  If you did not speak English or Chinese it would likely be very difficult to get around here--fortunately we speak the lingua franca!  But compared to elsewhere, very few people speak English, even rudimentarily.  Thank god we came prepared with Lonely Planet China and a Chinese-English dictionary, both of which have been incredibly helpful resources.

Tomorrow morning we will experience our first Chinese train as we take a 6-hour express train ride to Qingdao.  It's a town further south on the coast, where the Olympic sailing events will be held.  It used to be a German colony so its famed for its beer, Tsingtao (an old-fashioned way of transcribing Qingdao in Latin characters), which they evidently sell by the bag.  We're looking forward to that, and to some beach time.  We'll see how it goes!

Photos to come soon--I haven't had a chance to load/transfer/sort/all that that entails.  I will add some of them to these posts retroactively; otherwise I'm thinking of getting a Flickr account because I don't want to post the large number of photos I have on Facebook.  I will send word when that's available.

If you would like a postcard, please send me your address by e-mail!

Print this entry Share

Next Entry