We last left you in Hong Kong, which was fun. We went to the train station to go back to the airport and were pleasantly surprised to find out that you can check in AT THE TRAIN STATION, which meant that not only did we not have to schlep our stuff, but we didn't have to wait in any lines at the airport, and in essence, we were free until we boarded. About 15 before we landed, they put on a clip that explained to us that if we were coughing, had fever, were nauseous, feeling faint, or otherwise not well, to let the flight attendants know so we can be put into quarantine when we land, and that when we land we'll be going through thermal detectors that can tell if we have a temperature so we can be put in quarantine if we are sick. As we previously noted, Talia was sporting a nasty cold, but that video temporarily scared the cold out of her, just long enough to get out of the airport. :-)
When we were going through passport control, we noticed that they have a ranking system where you can press a button about the service (of your passport being stamped), from Very Good to Very Bad. Of course, we pressed Very Good cause this is China and it's probably connected to our passports now, not to mention they probably have our fingerprint from the button and a retina scan as well.
Taking the train to the subway station was very comfortable, but taking the subway - wow! When they say there are a billion people in China, we can tell you it's true! We were shoved by every single one of them at the subway! As "luck" should have it, by the time we reached the subway, it was time for everyone to go home, so the subways were packed. When we say packed we mean there were probably more people in the subway than there are in the entire center of Israel. We could barely breath. It was fun (not so much). You are shoved so tightly in the train that you need to plan ahead and start shoving well before you arrive at your station. The traffic isn't just inside the trains, though, the subway itself is so crowded that it's like a bunch of sardines crawling towards the trains. It's like there's NO respect for personal space here, though in a city of 18 million people, we can understand that there isn't much space to be had.
We have to say that Chinese culture seems very similar to Israeli culture in that people push and shove and aren't aware of such inventions as lines. Rather, they form lines, but the moment that the time has come to use them (e.g. board the train), they all start shoving to get on. However, more than once, people stopped to see if we needed help, and whenever we asked people for help, they were very forthcoming, even if they had no idea what we were saying.
We got to our hotel in the Forbidden City area, which is very central (about 5 minutes walk to Tiananmen Square), found out when we were being picked up for our tour (7:30 am!) and pretty much went to sleep. In the morning, we were picked up by our tour guide and we joined the rest of the group (8 of us in total). They switched around the plans on us and we ended up going up the Great Wall of China! We weren't emotionally prepared for that, but then again, when the weather is between -2 and -17 degrees, emotional preparation is probably not important.
We started out at the Ming Tombs, which is gigantic, but we only went to the main one, Changling (no relation to the Angelina Jolie movie), both because that's the one that's always visited, and because no one knows where the other tombs are. :-)
We had lunch at a restaurant above a factory where they make cloisonnes (more about that later) and it was absolutely delicious. Some of the other people in our group were really cool, so we had a lot of fun conversations during the day. We also tasted a local liquor whose name we didn't catch cause it was written in Chinese, but it's 56% (!!!) proof. It tasted OK, kinda sweet, but we only had a tiny bit because this was just before we went to the Great Wall of China.
Our next stop, therefore, was the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China. The Badaling section is the most well-preserved, and it's also the most popular section of the Wall. During tourist seasons, you know - when it's warmer than -10 degrees in the hills - apparently Badaling isn't much fun. There are too many people there, and tons of vendors trying to sell you their Useless Crap. We have already run into many of these Vendors of Useless Crap, so we can tell you from experience that this would have definitely marred the experience.
Since we were so busy learning how they make other Useless Crap that they were trying to sell us in other places (more about this later), we only had 2 hours at the Wall. At -10 degrees, however, 2 hours turns out to be enough. Were we to climb the entire thing, it would have taken us at least 3 hours in each direction. Instead, we took the cable car up (and back down). The cable car dropped us off far enough from the top. The climb was crazy steep, as in, you're walking at like an 45 degree angle. Later, when we walked it down, most people had to hold the handrail because it was so steep.
We made it to the top, took some pics, marveled at the beauty, and decided to climb down to another part of the wall that Rony really wanted to see. When we say "we" we mean Rony went to the part he wanted to see, and Talia walked 1/4 of the way and then made friends with a really nice Chilean couple who is supposed to come to Israel in March and they exchanged email addresses. We saw them again later on the way down and walked part of the way together, gave them advice about Hong Kong (they were going after China, and Rony happened to have the map in his pocket, so he gave it to them with some advice), and we hope to see them in Israel.
Finally, after a couple of hours in bad traffic, we were dropped off at our hotel and told we were being picked up the following morning at 8:30 - and that we would be alone. There will be no other people on our tour, so in essence, we would have a private tour for the next 2 days.
While the thought of a private tour is nice, we like meeting new people and being with others, because we always learn something new. So not only would we be alone with the guide, but our guide is very... special. Her English is good - she is 87% understandable. But the problem is that it seems like she works from a script, and if you ask her questions that aren't on the script, she doesn't know how to answer. It's not that she doesn't know the answer, just she doesn't necessarily know how to say it in English.
Also, Rony noted that she seems like one of those teachers on TV who can't control her class and that her student keep doing whatever they want. She's this tiny little thing who kept yelling "My friends! My friends!" to get our attention all the time. It was really funny.
Day 2 in Beijing started at 8:30 - late wake up! Woo hoo! But our guide and driver (how rich do we sound now?) arrived 10 (!!!) minutes early! We were whisked away in a big black car, not quite a limo like we deserve, but it's OK. We started out in Tian'anmen Square. Please excuse the spelling if it is supposed to be Tian'anman - we can't check here in China because the the search term is blocked. (We hope we don't get arrested in the lobby now.)
Anyway, we were a 5-minute walk from Tian'anmen Square, so our guide "picked us up" and we just walked over to the square. If yesterday she seemed lacking control of her group, today it was just the two of us, and the experience was completely different.
By different we mean we felt like we were in a communist country or something. She kept telling us "Later we go here!" (meaning now) and "Now I take a picture if you two here" so we obliged. This IS China, and it's entirely possible that disregarding your tour guide's orders is punishable by a weekend in jail and exposure to bird flu. So when you look at the pics from today, keep in mind that every single one of them was staged by our tour guide. Those are smiles of fear, people. Also, today we noticed that she sings to herself. A lot. Like all the time. We're pretty sure she was getting annoyed with us every time we stepped away to take a pic, but hey, we were the only people on the tour and beggars can't be choosers, right?
We then walked through the underground tunnel to the other side of the street to the Tiananmen tower and the Forbidden City, which is beautiful. For those of you who don't know, the Forbidden City is where the emperors used to live during the year, and no commoners were allowed to enter the area, hence Forbidden City. It's very large with 7800 rooms (to house his 3000 concubines and their offspring), but most of it is still closed to the public.
Some of the buildings in the Forbidden City look better than others because they have been recently repainted, several specifically for the 2008 Olympics. Our favorite "Now I take picture of you" moment was in front of a special tree that looks like two lovers hugging. "Now I take picture of you, this tree is for lovers, I will take a picture for you so you will always be lovers" or something along those lines. Yes, ma'am, her highness your majesty emperess tour guide lady person sir, yes sir!
Next we went to the Temple of Heaven. The parks are open to everyone and there is a lot going on - people are singing, dancing, sword fighting (practicing), and probably a host of other things that we probably missed. At this point, we started really running into all of the vendors trying to sell us Useless Crap and not giving up. Like ever. Like one of them followed Rony for 5 minutes trying to get him to buy something he would never be interested. He probably continued talking to the guy just to see how long until he would give up. To show you how much you can bargain prices down here, when he hit up Rony the first time, he wanted to sell his Useless Crap for 80 RMB. When he was done, it went down to 15 RMB. (It doesn't matter what the exchange rate is, you can see the difference yourself.)
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| Summer Palace, but it didn't warm us up |
From there we moved on to the Summer Palace, which was also beautiful and also full of rooms for worship and various purposes such as changing clothes (we kid you not). The Summer Palace is so named because this is where the emperors would spend their summers (you're welcome for the explanation). Here we had the extreme pleasure of finding out that China has its own brand of "arsim" (sorry, non-Israelis, this is non-translatable). Just check out this picture. This guy actually caught Talia taking a picture of him, so she smoothly moved her camera and pretended to take a picture of something else, but he probably thinks that white girls think he's hot.
We were then taking to a pearl factory where they tried to sell us stuff, but it wasn't Useless Crap! We didn't really know where we were going, and suddenly we saw the Olympic Stadiums, and we were going into the parking lots. It turns out that the pearl place is actually IN the stadium where all the soccer/football matches took place! We didn't go into the actual stadium, but through a side door. When we entered the building, the lady there had Rony choose a live oyster to open, and she proceeded to open it - and there were about 30 pearls in there! We even got to keep a few. Of course, we knew that this whole show was to get us to buy pearls, but luckily Talia isn't a fan of big stuff, so they weren't going to make a lot of money off of us. However, she did find a bracelet and necklace set that she absolutely adored so she did buy them.
The funny part is that even though they made a sale, while they were running the credit card, they kept trying to sell MORE. This is a part of the country that we both hated. They are very pushy, even when you ARE buying something. There's a difference between up-selling (how about this ring? it would look great with the necklace) and being pushy (these necklaces are buy two get one free! You can buy them for your family! They're good presents! How about these rings? They're beautiful! Look! You should buy one! Half price for you because you're the first customers of the day!) They just take it too far, in our opinion, and it's a shame because it ruins the experience.
This was our last stop for the day and we were dropped off at the hotel after this. Rony went upstairs and Talia went over to the mall that is close buy to get some stuff (e.g. water and food for later).
We mentioned Useless Crap a couple of times during this post. Every day on the tour, they made 2-3 detours to various factories to try to sell us Useless Crap. Other than the pearl factory, where we actually made a small purchase, here are the Useless Crap stops we made on the first two days:
* A jade factory to "show us how jade is carved and prepared"
* A factory where they make cloisonnes, those special vases that you see everywhere that's related to Chinese "to show us how cloisonnes are made." This was especially fun for Rony because he loves buying Useless Crap. We mean, because it reminded him of his childhood at his aunt and uncle's store.
* A tea factory place caulld Dr. Tea (haha) where they taught us about the tea drinking ceremony and let us try a few teas. In all honesty, they were incredibly delicious, and we probably would have bought some if they weren't more expensive than this trip.
* A silk factory "to show us how silk was made." We pretended to be interested because it was a good way to get warm after a walk in -10 degrees.
The funniest part was that it was really feeling like an industry to us at this point, taking us places to see if we'll buy Useless Crap. This silk factory was the winner, in our books, not because what they were selling was useless - it was actually nice, for the most part, just really expensive. The issue is that we really felt like they were putting on a show for us. We would go through the stages of making the silk into a blanket, and the people at each station weren't working until we started walking towards them. I was fully expecting someone in the background to say "Ohhh, ahhh..." so we'd know what to say.
So here's our tip about crossing the road in Beijing, in 3 easy steps:
1) Locate the street you would ultimately like to cross (don't take this step for granted. If you can't pronounce it 100% like the Chinese, they won't understand you when you are looking for it)
2) Locate a Chinese person who would like to cross the same street
3) Stick to said person like glue. Don't worry about getting too close: There is no such thing as personal space in China.
We have already written the rest of the posts from China and will be posting them over the next few days before we start writing about Japan, so stay tuned!
Pics from Beijing:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=604480&id=906005363&l=288aeb1539
You needed to teach the tour guide "My turn" That is what I say sometimes in honor of Mr. Gaines!
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