Beijing Hotels
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two millers, two bikes, and a city.
Entry 12 of 42 | show all | print this entry |
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Contrary to popular belief, I am in fact not dead. So no more need to worry and send out concerned emails because this kid is safe and rocking in the P.R.C. My life has been insanely busy with misadventures, broken puppies, Lithuanian Vikings, American archaeologists, an 84-year-old Cosmopolitan woman and classes (these stories, all true, will be coming later). Not to mention a computer that seems to be on its last legs and is infuriatingly dead set on not cooperating with anything I want it to do. So bear with me for the next couple of weeks while I may or may not be hunting for a new computer in China. But even though there are technical and scheduling difficulties in my life, that didn't stop me last Wednesday from boarding my first Chinese train that was bound for Beijing and a visit from my brother.
Every couchsurfer we've hosted in Kaifeng has repeatedly told us that Kaifeng has one of the smaller train stations they've ever been to in China. I was envisioning waiting for my overnight train in a small, smoky and bare train station not much unlike all of the American train stations where I've spent time. I was completely wrong.
The fact that it was late on a Wednesday night doesn't seem to mean anything to Chinese travelers as the station was packed. There were no available seats anywhere as people with their giant cloth packs that had been converted from rice and produce containers into suitcases and now a convenient seat wedged their way into the rectangular waiting room the size of a football field.
Dumbly, I squeezed around farm workers and their luggage, flashing my ticket to train officials with megaphones as I tried to find my train. Every time I showed them my little pink slip, they would forget that they had their mouth to the megaphone and shout "Dui!" or "Bo Dui!" (correct and not correct) into my face. Finally, after being carted to a line outside of the train station that was led by a train official holding a giant sign, I found my carriage and my sleeper and settled into a relatively comfortable bed. It would have been great if I wasn't really paranoid about contracting lice from the pillows.
I arrived in Beijing the following morning and easily found my way to Gulou Dajie, the subway station at the end of hutong where Ben and I would be staying. Our host for the weekend was the delightful Anais. A true hybrid, Anais is both British and French and moved to Beijing two years ago when her then-husband relocated to the 'Jing for business. As I was walking along the hutong looking for Anais' address, I noticed an extremely French looking building up ahead. When I started to near it, my suspicion that it had been picked up from a classy Paris neighborhood and plopped in the middle of a Beijing hutong grew. And then I realized that was where we were staying. The apartment building even had statuaries and a fountain in front of it to boot. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of the place because Ben took them, but it was insanely nice yet still really homey and comfortable. The apartment inside seemed like the type of apartment that my Belgian host family, the d'Oultremonts, would have if they lived in Beijing. I felt right at home. Drastically different than my apartment in Kaifeng, it was spacious, well-lit and featured a wall of windows overlooking the statues and the fountain in the kitchen, as well as a giant window in the living room that overlooked the slopes and slanted tiles of the hutong, giving the place lots and lots of light. It was beautiful.
Beijing overall was not what I was expecting. My impression of the city before I arrived there had been molded by the information I got from reading too much Peter Hessler and the New York Times, as well as from other people's experiences in the city. I thought it was going to be noisy, dirtied by tons of pollution, confusing and overwhelming. I was expecting it to be a little ugly and overall not very pleasant. I didn't really find any of this to be true. Of course, I can't tell you that Beijing is always like this. It wasn't cold so people weren't heating their homes with coal yet, so a lot of the dark smudgy grime I've heard about probably hasn't started to accumulate in the skies yet. The city has probably done a massive overhaul on the trash and litter system because of the Olympics and who says what will happen after the games have come and gone after 2008?
The main reason why I found Beijing to be in fact beautiful was because of the trees. I didn't realize how much I missed trees until I decided to lie on a bench underneath a tree after wandering through the parks that lined the Second Ring Road near Anais' apartment. My apartment in Kaifeng is surrounded by trees, but it seems to be the only part of the city that has any sort of plant life.
Beijing is covered in trees. Trees swoop down and cover cars on the streets and trees protect walkers in the park from the sound of the honks, screeches and fumes from traffic. It instantly makes Beijing a much more livable city.
After picking Ben up from the airport, we spent the next couple of days renting bikes and bicycling through the hutongs. The hutongs, or narrow alleyways, are quickly disappearing throughout the city and I suspect also becoming more sterilized. As the city implements projects to make Beijing more "cosmopolitan" and Olympic-crowd friendly, the hutongs are being razed in order to build bigger and better roads, Olympic stadiums that will only be used for two weeks, and to clear out the "urban trash" that might give foreigners a bad opinion of the city. Hutongs in most Chinese cities are inhabited by poorer people but make up an integral part of city life. That's where you go to get street food. That's where you go to find a strong neighborhood spirit. That's where you go to get lost, wander around and fully immerse yourself in the "traditional" life. In the rush to prepare for the Olympics, the number of Beijing hutongs has dwindled from 6000 to 2000. That's 4000 less alleyways for people to live in and makes me wonder where all of those displaced people have been shuttled off to.
Of the hutongs that still exist, the hanging laundry still whips above your head as you pass under the narrow space between houses. Electrical wires are still jumbled together in the form of a giant electrical hazard wad hoisted on a stick nailed to a wooden post. Groups of old men still crowd together to fight and bet over the heated game of Chinese chess or mah johng that is happening in the center of their huddle. But I suspect that the other elements that are so integral to Kaifeng's hutong life have been whitewashed away in Beijing by officials. Gone are the rickety roads plagued by gaping holes in the street, they seem to have been replaced by wider alleyways and a fresh layer of asphalt. Large piles of bricks and chunks of coal aren't piled roof high by courtyard doors for easy convenience. Most distressingly, the cheap street food that is sold off the end of somebody's makeshift trolley and usually a sign of vibrant neighborhood ties in a Chinese city doesn't seem to exist.
I'm really interested to go back to Beijing a couple of years after the Olympics have come and gone to see what becomes of the city's honored and somewhat mythical hutongs. I wonder if these differences are going to become the norm or if locals are just putting up with the "reforms" for now because of the Olympics and the lure of the money it will bring in.
Another noticeable difference between Kaifeng and Beijing is the amount of police and military force. Kaifeng doesn't have a lot of crime, but I hardly ever see policemen. The only time and place I see people in uniform is on the corner of the Gulou nightmarket, and that's just mainly to control the motor traffic going through the area. In Beijing, military and police personnel were everywhere. Especially on Tiananmen Square. You couldn't walk ten feet without having at least fifteen soldiers in your view. The whole time we were on the square, I kept thinking about what happened in 1989 and how amazing it is that none of the people on the square seemed to care.
People were more interested in looking at the miniature Great Wall or the topiaries cut to resemble the Olympic sports that the Chinese are good at instead of walking around the Monument to the People's Heroes and thinking about the democracy encampments that sprouted up around the obelisk in 1989. It made me think of how I first became interested in China. I was taking a politics class my sophomore year on the events that happened all throughout the world during 1989 and I read about Zhao Ziyeng and the democracy movements, which made me want to go Tiananmen Square to see where everything happened. Now that I was there, it was all a little overwhelming. And still, the only people who seemed to care about what happened was myself and the people who were in charge of placing the soldiers on the square.
Next to Tiananmen is the Forbidden City, which is something I wasn't quite prepared for. I was expecting a lot of people to be there and for it to be a standard Chinese tourist place with lots of vendors and large swarming crowds. While the crowds were present, the city is so massive and beyond comprehension that there was more than enough space for everyone to sprawl out and saunter through the city (And it was vendor free!) I can tell you the Forbidden City is awesome, I could describe it for you, but I know that no matter what I say or do, it will not do the place justice. The fact that a place as cool and as large as the Forbidden City is in the center of Beijing and is across the street from the People's Assembly and Mao's tomb and managed to avoid destruction during all of Mao's initiatives is mind blowing. The buildings are beautiful with their sloping yellow tiled roofs and smooth red walls the color of bricks. Everything is accentuated by snarly golden lions outside doorways or on golden cauldrons that once served as water pots in case of fires. Moonrocks are piled high to hoist up small temples where Emperors once worshipped or rise out of the ground in the gardens sanctified by the practices of feng shui.
Stone terraces and bridges wrap around temples, palaces and the Emperor's old resting places, allowing you to circle around the former epicenter of Chinese politics and the heart and soul of the Qing Dynasty's life supply. It was the most fantastic afternoon walking around and absorbing the feel of the Forbidden City. The city is one of the best places I have ever been.
We also checked out the imperial digs to the north of the city - the places where the former leaders of China went to escape the heat of the city in the summer time. On Saturday, Anais invited us to come to the Fragrant Hills with her and her friend to see the mountain foliage. Every autumn, Beijingers flock to the Fragrant Hills during the two week period where the leaves on the trees turn colors. Getting up early on Saturday morning in attempt to beat the crowd, we trekked out of the city and to the foot of the Fragrant Hills. We decided to take a cable car up the mountain to save time and to also avoid the crowd of people that were hiking up the narrow mountain pathway.
It was nine in the morning and already I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of people climbing up the mountain. Once we got to the top, there was barely any room to move around. People were fighting and rubbing elbows to find space on the mountain top to look around and see the vistas of Beijing, which were barely visible through the cloud of smog now present above the city.
After spending about an hour on top of the mountain and trying to find a space to breathe, we decided to head back down. This time, we all opted to walk down the mountain path. Bad idea. We thought that it was crowded when we were going up, but it was nothing compared to the amount of people now. On the small steps going up the mountain, there were essentially three lines of people heading up and half a line of people going down. I say half a line of people because we would take a step and then wait a few minutes while we fought for some space from the oncoming foot traffic to get to the next step. Meanwhile, there was a constant stream of people heading up the mountain on the cable cars that were swinging above our heads. I honestly no idea where all of those people went once they got on the mountain because the top of the mountain wasn't very big and was already too crowded when we were up there. Nobody was coming down except for us it seemed and since Chinese mountains don't have safety railings I was really confused as to how nobody was falling off.
After the battle to get down the mountain and checking out the Azure Clouds Temple at the base, Ben and I headed off to the Summer Palace. It was incredibly relaxing after the mountain experience because by the time we got there it was evening so it was relatively empty by Chinese standards.
We spent the rest of the afternoon taking a boat tour around the lake (where I saw a boat full of white people! Old white people! I was stunned! Ben, not so much.) walking around Kunming Lake, walking up into the trees to check out the temples and watching the sunset on the shore of the lake. It was really beautiful and makes me want to earn enough money to be able to have a really sweet summer home set up like the Dowager Empress.
The reason why I made the above comment about the boat full of white people is because I've realized in the past couple of weeks that I have become just as bad as the Chinese when I see a foreigner. Literally, the only other non-Asians I see on a daily basis are Erin, Max, Ben, and Alex. That's it. When I got off the train at Beijing West, I saw more white people in the first twenty minutes off of that train than I have since I left the US. Now, whenever we see a white person walking around Kaifeng, we always stop and stare without meaning to. It just happens because we're curious as to what the person is doing in the city. So for the first day or two I was in Beijing, I was walking around in awe at seeing other ethnicities besides Asians. But now I totally understand why the Chinese stop and stare at me - I'm a walking novelty. I knew that before, but now I understand.
After a delicious dinner of Peking duck, some good and then not so good desserts and a roundabout farewell bike ride to the city of Beijing, Ben and I headed back to Anais' gorgeous apartment one last time. After I said goodbye to her and grabbed my backpack, Ben and I walked along the hutong to Gulou Dajie to say our goodbyes. I felt happy and content because I saw him and it made me feel a bit calmer. He was talking about how he much he just fell in love with China and how excited he is to come back in May with Becky. It made me really happy that he enjoyed China so much on his first go-around. But as I made my way towards the end of the hutong to hop in a taxi for the train station, I realized that even though I love Kaifeng, I didn't really want to leave Beijing. I realized I just fell in love with a new city.
Latest Comments (2)
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Re: Laowai vs. Waiguoren (reply)
Oct 23, 2007 07:19 EST by guavamama
Jess, you have no idea how excited i am to see you. it will be amazing beyond reason. plus, we get to eat mexican food. the thought of you and mexican food makes this kid extremely happy.
thanks for the chinese pointer. by the way, my grandpa just sent me 'chinese for dummies.' i'm going to bring it to show you, you'll get a kick out of it.
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Laowai vs. Waiguoren (reply)
Oct 23, 2007 06:23 EST by jess.joy
My dear Emily,
First things first, I am continually amazed at our parallel experiences in this land. As I was in Shanghai this weekend I could not help but make verbal notice of every foreigner I laid my eyes on. Caucasian's are few and far between over here (although I am sure they are by far less prevalent in Henan sheng than over here).
Also, just for your personal knowled... show all
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| 12. | two millers, two bikes, and a city. - Beijing, China Oct 23, 2007 (  25 ) (  2 ) |
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