Beijing in May

  Beijing, China
Saturday, May 3, 2008

Well we have arrived in China!  The flight was long and rather boring (12 hours) but uneventful. The new airport at Beijing is incredible.  It is shaped like a dragon and is about 1.5km long. We had to board a train to go to the baggage collection, but it all went like clockwork and nothing was lost. You seem to walk forever once out of the plane, but there are moving walkways everywhere.

Chinese taxi

We took the airport shuttle bus into the Beijing Central Railway Station which is about 33km away and someone(?) suggested we get off the bus one stop too early, so there we were, about 11pm Brisbane time (9pm local) on a footpath surrounded by rickshaw drivers wanting to take us and all our luggage piled up at our feet.  Also 2 big western bottoms (or should I say one and H's) would have difficulty fitting in the narrow seat.  The first two taxis we hailed didn't want to take us, still not sure why, but the third did and luckily we had a map in Chinese, as none of them speak English. The rickshaw drivers wanted to charge us 100 yuan, but the taxi only cost 18!!!  There's a lesson! Another lesson is not to change money in Brisbane.  We only got 5.5 yuan to the Aussie dollar and here (at the airport) it was 6.7! And, we discovered that one of the notes we were given in Sydney was a forgery.  Luckily it was only about $10, but not a nice feeling.
 
When we finally got to the hotel c.11.30pm Beijing time we were very pleasantly surprised to find they were booked out and we had been upgraded to a suite!  It was lovely, but we will have to move tomorrow. Still, a good introduction to China! I woke early, about 6am and was amazed that it was so quiet, AND I could hear birds. So different from the rest of Asia!  No self respecting bird would hang around Jakarta; they know they would be eaten! We went out for a walk and there were plenty of people around but they were cycling or walking along the street quietly, or doing Tai Chi in the park. The only negative thing is the smog, or is it mist.  Anyway, you can't see very far.  Our hotel is just around the corner from the Forbidden City so we are off for a big walk today.

Rain in Forbidden City

May 6, 2008
Leaving China already, where did the time go?  I had intended to write earlier but each day has been so full we would come home at night and flop into bed.
Yesterday was the highlight! We met up with a younger couple (one Aussie, one Kiwi) and hired a bus to take us to a very old part of the Great Wall.  This area is crumbling and quite perilous in parts and we could see why there were various signs saying "This part of the Great Wall is not open to the Public".  However we had the whole place to ourselves without the ubiquitous tour groups all wearing the same colour cap with the leader holding up a flag at the head of the group. The whole countryside is amazingly mountainous (just like those Chinese paintings you see on bamboo scrolls) and I cannot understand why they wanted to build a wall here anyway as I can't see how the Mongolian horses could have made it up over these rocky mountains. In fact "rocky" is probably why they did it.  The Chinese just seem to like building walls.  All around the countryside there were tiny walls, around trees, in fields, on the side of bridges, in dry river beds. This wall was actually a failure anyway.  It didn't stop the invading hordes from the north, as when Genghis Khan arrived he sent some men to cross one part where the wall was crumbling and doubled back to Beijing inside the wall, and later when the Manchurians were outside the wall, the commander of one section let them through the gates anyway as they had threatened to kill his favourite concubine if he didn't.  He is not one of the Chinese's favourite personalities!!!

closed for reconstruction

In fact it is not one wall, but an elaborate jigsaw puzzle of many walls all built in different periods.  It is in fact the longest cemetery in the world, a total of about 35,000 miles, and millions of people died building it and all because they refused to trade with the outside world ("barbarians" from the north)!  When a convict died his family had to send another member to take his place until his sentence was up.
However it apparently did have a big effect on world history as it created the Silk Road as a trade route between East and West, and because the northern nomadic tribes could not penetrate China easily they swept west and Attila the Hun even got to threaten Rome, where the Pope came out to beg him to spare the Vatican city. Story goes that he did because the Pope's name meant Lion (...Go Lions!!!!! I knew there was a reason we had to change from the Brisbane Bears to the Lions!) However they (the nomadic tribes) looted and burned all through the west and heralded the end of the Roman Empire and caused the dark ages for about 1000 years according to one documentary we saw.
We were impressed with the effort it must have taken to build it.  Each block was much heavier than I could lift, and they had to be brought all the way up here over steep, muddy tracks! We climbed up a very steep path about 500m to reach the wall and then climbed up another 100m or so over the wall with many broken bricks to one of the towers.  However the views were worth it I will try to attach one! The part of the wall that you see all the time where most of the tourists go is actually very new, only a few decades old, and is being renovated all the time. The part we saw was built in the Ming Dynasty in the late 14th century. However as I write this, the next day my poor aching bones feel about that old too!
By the way, the Great Wall cannot be seen from space that is an urban myth!

H & Sue on the wall

 
We also visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City (which the Chinese now call the Palace Museum) on a cold rainy day.  There were young Red Guards everywhere and I felt so sorry for them just standing there, stiff as a board, while tourists like us snapped photos of and around them. One poor young chap's hands had turned purple!  The weather was strange as it had been 29 when we arrived the night before, and the following days were t shirt weather.

Rain in Forbidden City

The Forbidden City covers 180 acres surrounded by a moat and walls with 9999 rooms in 1000 buildings.  It is immense! The emperors, their wives, concubines & eunuchs lived here, and in some parts no "whole" male, except the emperor himself was allowed. Apparently in 1937 when the Japanese invaded, they took all the precious objects out and packed them into 37,000 crates and trucked them all over the country for 5 years so the Japanese wouldn't get them.  When they were finally returned, a quarter had "gone missing" The rest are on display now.
The Summer Palace covers a huge area and was built for a bored Empress who tired of staying in the Forbidden City, and has this immense garden, filled with various temples and theatres surrounding a huge lake.  Here she sat with her entourage and ordered people around dressed in magnificent, gold embroidered gowns, with immensely long fingernails (to show she didn't do any manual work). When you see how the aristocracy lived it is no wonder the Cultural Revolution occurred! Now all these beautiful places have been restored and returned to the people, who flock here in the thousands, especially on weekends. In places they set up radios and sing along loudly, play musical instruments, or play badminton, chess or a game where they kick a shuttlecock to each other. They are a very cultured people, and the gardens around the city are always filled with people enjoying them and doing some form of exercise or enjoying music or just camaraderie.  I think Australians could learn a lot here!
 
We didn't really have time to do any shopping but did go to the night markets (food) where H tried Starfish, which he found dry and unappetising.  They also had scorpions, centipedes, sea urchins, snake and various other things, mostly on satay sticks. I whimped out and had chicken dumplings (nice) and corn (dreadful - cold and gluey)
On the way to the airport this morning, the driver told us that Beijing has 25million people and 4million cars.  Guess that is why the pollution is so bad!
 
Must stop rambling on!  We are waiting for our flight to Munich in this fabulous airport. By the time the Olympics are on, the floral gardens will be even more expansive than they are now.  We saw lots in the making.  I was amazed that there are rose bushes planted up the middle of the freeways, all flowering happily while soaking in the carbon monoxide, and I have trouble keeping one alive!  Oh I'm not sure if I mentioned the peonies in Jinshang Park.  There were thousands of them, many had finished flowering but there were still heaps there.  We took one or two photos!