Off to Beijing

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Trip Start Sep 19, 2006 Trip End Oct 14, 2006

  Beijing, China
Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Thanks to Chicago's location as a hub, we were able to book our own international air package with a non stop flight to Beijing vs. the cumbersome and more expensive route the tour agents would have given us. A smooth and direct flight, a last minute upgrade to business class, and arriving three days before our group tour started meant we had a chance to recover from jet lag and explore Beijing some on our own before our group arrived on Sat. P.M.. We were almost overwhelmed by the scale and density of Beijing, but we found that using the bus and subway helped us avoid the gridlock. Everywhere there were construction cranes as the old sections continue to be torn down to make way for modern high rises. A new subway line is in the works for the 2008 Olympics which will help. On our own with no language skills, we managed pretty well. Be sure to have someone write your destination down in Chinese for you. We grabbed lunch one day in a KFC, which have incredible market penetration throughout China from what we saw, but our best meal with a genuine Peking Duck dinner. We came out of the restaurant on a Friday night to find ourselves on a pedestrian mall of shops and stores and a local crowd wandering around, taking pictures of the neon signs advertising Western brands and the old traditional stalls of skewered meats and zillions of trinkets.

We did do a one day package tour which sort of overlapped what we did later with our group--to the Forbidden City twice! But it gave us a chance to compare the more in depth commentary by our Road Scholar guides with that of the regular Gray line tour given by a charming young woman whose English name was Prudence.

About those English names, as we found out, virtually everyone under 30 who works in the tourism industry, guides, hotel staff, the crew on the Yangtze River ship, used so called English names, which seem to have been given them by the companies they worked for to make it easier for the tourists to talk to them. And it was easier to say "Maria" or "James" or "Carol" than their real names. It's like when you call the customer service call centers in southeast Asia. "Hello, my name is Sean. How may I help you today?"

The big exception was our national guide Shi. His agency's policy was not to use his English name, David, but his family name "Shi." It is pronounced sort of like "Shri" with a very short "i". Like if you were saying shrift, but cut off before the "ft." Well, three weeks later our group was still coming up with "Shree" and "Shu" and "Shrew." Fortunately, Shi, who was in his early 30's, had the patience of Job and a calm and soothing manner and a dry wit. He was the perfect companion for our 19 day group tour.

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