Beijing, China - Yonghe Lama Temple, Hutong, pandas, and the amazing 798 Art District

Our third day in Beijing was the shortest and probably least interesting day of our tour. We started at 9 am, which pretty much told us it would be a shorter day (as opposed to the first day when we were picked up at 7:30 am). It's important to note here that while the Metro is jam packed and crazy, traffic on the roads is even worse. It's insane. We can't compare it to ANYTHING. There are no hours, that we can tell, that aren't full of traffic jams. It's not just rush hour. It's so bad, that Talia won't even complain about Tel Aviv traffic when she gets back. The first 2 traffic jams, that is.

Our first stop was the largest Lama temple in Beijing, the Yonghe Temple, which had many visitors who came to worship, despite the early hour (we arrived at about 9:20 am, and the place opened at 9 am). Like other places of worship, people burned many incense, which smells nice, but when there's a LOT (you can see in the pictures that there is a lot of smoke), it gets into your lungs, and made Talia cough a lot, especially since she still had a cold.

Here we saw how the Tibetans practice their Buddhism, and we actually saw a many monks in prayer, which was probably the highlight of that visit. The Temple also boasts a very large Buddha status, which is gorgeous. You aren't supposed to take pictures inside, but our guide saw that the guy who is supposed to make sure no one takes pictures wasn't looking so she told Talia to take a picture quickly. So she did, you know to make sure she wasn't arrested or anything for not breaking the rules. :-)

Our next stop was a tour of a Hutong, a typical Beijing neighborhood. We were first taken to a porcelain factory where they tried to sell us Useless Crap. We mean, they showed us what we learned in ceramics class in third grade. We mean, they didn't make an effort to show us how things were made there. This time, they didn't even have actors, we mean workers, at the different stations, showing us how stuff was made. After our obligatory 2-minute walk around the store, we went back outside.

We were then placed on rickshaw bicycles, which was freezing, but they gave us a blanket to cover our knees, which didn't help, but it was a nice gesture. We felt really bad for the old guy who had to get us from one place to another, and tried to make ourselves lighter for him, but if we knew how to do that, we would probably do it all the time and be millionaires when we shared the secret with the world.

But we digress.

The hutong was kind of interesting, but the truth is that we didn't really see a lot. We learned that most of these houses are a few hundred years old and no one has bathrooms or showers in their homes. Instead, there are public showers in each area where people can go to take a shower and go to the bathroom, which costs money, of course.

One thing we DID learn is that in the older times, you could tell by looking at a house who lived in it, what they did, and what their status was. The best part of the tour was this guide's reaction when she asked us where we're from.

Before we continue, we need to explain this part. Since we are both mixes, that is, the two of us come from 3 different countries that are all disliked by people in various parts of the world, every time we reach a new country/area, we decide "what we are" - if we are French and American or Israeli, or all three. In this case, after weighing the pros and cons of "will they hate American Talia more than Israeli Talia" the decision was made that we would be completely Israeli, which of course lead to funny conversations:

Someone: Where are you from?
Us: Israel
Someone: Wow, you have really good English

So when the guide asked us where we're from, we said Israel. Her reaction? "Wow! You are really smart! Israelis are very very smart people!" Talia thought it was awesome. Rony less. He just dones't like stereotypes.

Anyway, after being driven around on the rickshaws for a while, we were taken into someone's home. At this point, we were told that the rickshaw drivers were going to be leaving us so we should give them a tip if we feel like it. There are two issues here:

1) They drove us for like 10 minutes up and down the same 3 streets
2) We have NO idea what is customary to tip.

We gave them a bit (we just kinda guessed), and went inside to eat, after commenting to each other on the absurdity of the situation.

The lady who lives in the house made us a homemade lunch, which was delicious. It had a lot of typical Chinese foods, the first of which are very similar to ours - meatballs and rice. We tried to compliment the woman several times, but apparently she was unable to see us as our skin apparently clashes with her white walls, which brings up two interesting points:

1) What happened to our hard-earned tans from Thailand, New Caledonia, and Oz?
2) If we weren't there, who was eating the food?

After taking a picture at the house, because our tour guide told us to, we walked back to the center of the Hutong to be picked up. On the way, we saw an ADORABLE dog who was wearing SHOES, who, of course, gravitated towards Rony.

At this point, we were once again told to give the guide from the Hutong a tip if we so deemed necessary, and again we asked what is customary and we were told whatever we think is appropriate, which of course we have no idea, especially since all she did was tell us about the bathrooms and the door to the houses.

Our next visit was a really fun one - we went to the Beijing Zoo to see the pandas! While we are both pretty much against zoos in general, we know that there are only several hundred pandas left in the WORLD, and the zoo is participating in breeding the pandas to hopefully get enough to reintroduce them into the wild.

The pandas are so cute! We wish we could get closer, but they apparently can be very mean if they have to be. Anyway, we saw large pandas and a few smaller pandas, all of which were adorable.

Our next and final stop was to a Chinese medicine doctor. To our surprise, we were once again taken to Olympic Park, which is where this clinic is located. In this case, however, it makes more sense: This location was used during the Olympics for the athletes.

While in general the topic is interesting to Talia (Rony would have preferred to pull out his toe nails), the people there really took it too far. We were offered free foot massages, which we both declined, but after the explanation about pressure points in the feet and hands that are supposed to help with various ailments such as insomnia, Talia gave in and had the foot massage. Which was EXCELLENT.

The masseuse came in with an older scary lady who kept looking at us the entire time like we were going to steal a chair or pee on the floor, and then a very dignified-looking man walked in with a translator. He is apparently the medical dude who can diagnose you and your health problems by looking at your hands.

He looked at Talia's hand and diagnosed that she has poor blood circulation (duh, her hands were cold) and menstrual pain (duh, she's female) and recommended a $120 a bottle treatment that will help her. When she politely said no, he left. For all we know, he was the janitor who was dressed up as a doctor and had to go clean the toilets. :-)

The people who were left in the room tried to convince us to purchase other stuff and we kept saying thank you, but no, we can't carry it with us, and we really felt like we were being attacked. When everyone but the masseuse was gone, and the door was closed, the masseuse looked at us and said, "Tip? Tip?" Which is apparently the only word in English she knows. Super annoying. Luckily, this was the last stop for the tour so we knew it would soon be over. But we have to say that all of these stops were just insane.

When we got back into the car, our guide said we're going back to the hotel, but we're all, the website said we get to take pics outside the olympic stadiums, the famous Birds Nest and Water Cube, and she was all, no, we can't go there, but luckily the driver knew a way to see go in without going in, and we took pics from outside, which is all we wanted. We wouldn't have done it on our own, but we WERE there and it WAS written on the tour explanation, and we ARE Israelis and want to get what we paid for. :-)

Our fourth day was much calmer and it was probably our favorite day in Beijing. A friend of Talia's said that we MUST go to the art district. She said she was only there 2 hours and completely regretted not having more time, and when we looked it up on Trip Advisor, other people said the same. So we decided to go, even though Talia was a bit worried since we had to take a bus and we don't speak Chinese.

Talia knew what subway line to take to what station, and what bus needed to be taken to the art district. Fortunately for us, Rony can read Chinese and was able to decipher what station we were at and which one we needed to get off the bus at - no small feat in a country where 99.99% of the population cannot understand a word you understand, other than, perhaps, the word "tip."

Talia and a random chinese girl posing

Superfoetus

OMG! Transformers do exist!

The 798 Art District is basically the Beijing version of SoHo, full of art galleries. Even though Talia is not an art person by any means, both of us had a marvelous time. We saw some incredible expositions (all free), and one in particular had us both mesmerized. We wanted to buy a picture of his (that's how much we LOVED his exposition), but there weren't any for sale. Fortunately for us, they had a really cool catalogue that has all of his paintings in it, so we have a next-best-thing and we may be able to find something online later on.

One of the picture we'd love to buy as poster

We left when we had no choice, and also it was minus a bazillion degrees outside, so we took the bus back to the subway station and went back to the hotel. We turned in fairly early because (we feel a recurring theme coming on), we had to get up at 4:20 am to catch the subway to the airport to catch our flight to Shanghai. Our next update will be about Shanghai. Talk to you then!

Pics from Beijing (same as yesterday):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=604480&id=906005363&l=288aeb1539

Beijing, China - The Great Wall of China, Tian'anmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, and Useless Crap

Welcome to China! Land of the Great Wall! Land of great food! Land of great censorship! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for the past 10 days we have been completely censored from the outside world. We have been unable to access Facebook and Blogger (and a host of other sites) and were thus unable to let you know how we've been. But now we're in Japan, land of the free, home of the anime, where we can do as we please!

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.)

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

Preparing for the big trip to Asia

So this is our first post. From this here blog, we will update you about what we're doing and where we are.

Side note to thieves: We have friends staying at our apartment and we've taken out all of our valuables anyway, so nothing to see here, moving right along.

Back to the trip.

Rony and I will be leaving on Monday, November 1, 2010 for an almost-4-month long trip. We start in Thailand for 3 weeks, then 2 weeks in New Caledonia (a magical island by Fiji), a month in Australia,  a few days in Hong Kong, then Beijing and Shanghai, and finally an entire month in Japan.

It all started out with a trip to New Caledonia that Rony had been tentatively planning, to see a friend of his who lives there. The following is an exact replica of the conversation we had back in March (more or less):

Rony: Would you like to take a long trip? Like 2 or 3 months long?
Me: Yes
Rony: Really?

So we started out looking for a flight to New Caledonia. Of course, nobody in Israel has ever heard of New Caledonia. So we figured we need to take a flight to Australia and then go to New Caledonia, since New Caledonia is near Australia. We found this awesome deal to Sydney with Royal Jordanian, with a stop by Bangkok on the way to Sydney and a stop in Hong Kong on the way back.

And come on, we're not going to stop there just to visit the airports. We want to see those places, too! So now it started becoming a long trip, and we knew we'd need to leave our jobs to be able to take it. Or at least ask for a leave without pay for 2.5 months. Thankfully, both of us had jobs that wanted us back after the trip.

So then we thought, Hong Kong is so close to mainland China, won't we see it? Plus we both have a friend there who we used to work with. And it's all so close to Rony's dream destination Japan, why not add it, too?

So now it's a 4-month trip to 5 countries (6 if we count Hong Kong as a separate country from China), tropical weather as well as freezing winter, and so many different cultures. A once in a lifetime journey. And so much to prepare!

Mainly, deciding what to bring is a big issue, especially since it will be lodged on our backs for most of the trip. Over the past 2 weeks, we have been furiously preparing everything we (think we) will need for the trip. Here is what we are taking: A week or so of summer clothes, 3 pairs of pants, a toothbrush, soap (just enough for the first few days), my hair cream, thermal shirt and pants for me, and one warm jacket or sweater for the snowy winter...until we buy a heavy coat in China or Hong Kong. We really don't want to schlep a winter coat through summery Thailand and Australia.

Oh! And our passports and tickets of course!

Today we packed our bags, just to test what can fit in and that we don't pack too much.

And then we unpacked them - we're only leaving in 2 days!

But we did need to make room in the closets for our friends' stuff, and make sure our bags didn't weigh too much. I was positive I would fall backwards once that bag was on my back! (I didn't, or we would have taken a picture).

We are the epitome of nerves and excitement with respect to our upcoming trip. We assume that once we land in Bangkok, we will lose the nerve part and just have the excitement left. I am personally hoping not to talk Rony's ear off the whole way there :-)

To be precise, he's probably the one hoping I don't talk his ear off...

Fortunately, he knew me for years before we started dating, it's not like he can get mad about something he knew about before. I mean, hey - you can't get angry that the sky is blue! It can't help it!

The day we fly, we will post our basic itinerary, in case any of you decide to join us during the trip (looks like we have company for 1 week in Japan already!) and let you know what kind of money-saving opportunities we've decided to take advantage of, which lead to our ability to extend our vacation by an entire month.

Talk to y'all soon!