Beijing
Great Wall: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2053203&l=f5d6c&id=1101094
In every conversation I’d had about
Apparently, train rides in China can be rather uncomfortable. Even if you’re lucky enough to secure a ticket for a sleeper car, you can rest assured that people who weren’t so lucky will come sit on your bed for the majority of the trip. Yes, that’s right. No shame whatsoever. And if you don’t get a ticket for a sleeper car, well, that’s even worse, because you’ll be sitting on a hard seat for longer than you care to imagine. And the worst part is the cigarette smoke. Throughout the entire journey, Chinese men will be blowing it directly into your face. You’ll secondhand smoke the equivalent of 20 packs of cigarettes over the course of your day-long trip, and if you try to sleep you’ll wake up coughing. Sound like fun? Then sign up for a long Chinese train ride!
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a choice, because there are no longer flights between Huangshan and Beijing, my final destination in China. I guess I could have flown back to Shanghai and then from Shanghai to Beijing, but that seemed a little excessive. So I decided to suck it up (the cigarette smoke, that is) and take the 23-hour train ride from Huangshan to Beijing.
I attempted to purchase a ticket for the sleeper car—I even learned the Chinese word for it—but the lady behind the counter shook her head. All she would sell me was a “hard seat.” Uh oh.
As it turned out, I couldn’t buy a sleeper ticket because my train didn’t have a sleeper section. Who ever heard of a 23-hour train ride that didn’t include a sleeper section? I found this rather strange.
In any case, I boarded the train and sat down on my hard seat with fear in my heart. Was this going to be the worst day of my life?
No, as it turned out. I had forgotten about my absurd ability to snooze in moving vehicles. Even sitting straight up, I managed to sleep for sixteen of the 23 hours.
But the real gift was that sometime in the past few months, smoking had been outlawed on Chinese trains. I’m assuming this is in preparation for the Olympics—the government is trying to get its population to smoke and spit less before the games. But, ironically, the government seems to be battling smoking on trains by encouraging people to spit more—as long as they’re spitting sunflower seeds. Each row of seats had its own metal box for people to spit their sunflower seeds. And that wasn’t excessive—by the end of the trip, just about every box was filled to the brim with the slimy, partially-masticated shells. I think a couple even had to be emptied halfway through the trip.
But I didn’t care in the least. I was just grateful to have avoided the cigarette smoke.
I spent the majority of my waking hours on the train reading and listening to music, but a few hours before we reached Beijing a Chinese girl started taking an interest in me, and I ended up getting a couple hours of free Chinese tutoring. She would point to a word and pronounce it, and then I’d repeat her, and then she’d say, “No!” and say the word again, though I couldn’t tell the difference between our pronunciations. We kept this up until we had exhausted the entire Lonely Planet glossary of terms. The Chinese families seated around us watched the exercise, chuckling as I attempted to say things like “Please, can you tell me the way to the hospital?”
We finally arrived in Beijing, and I made my way toward Emily’s hotel. Though she had given me the address in Chinese characters and I could have just shown it to a cab driver, I was determined to try to find the place on my own, so I took two subways and made it to her neighborhood. From there, I wandered around for half an hour staring at Chinese street signs until I was sufficiently lost. I hung my head and flagged down a cab.
I spent my first day in Beijing hitting the major tourist attractions-- Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Lama Temple, and Temple of Heaven Park. Nothing was spectacular, but maybe that’s because I’d seen so many temples and historic buildings in this trip that everything was starting to blur together. Also, I was cold. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, and I still had the same wardrobe I had brought along for the deserts of India. Midway through the day, I broke down and bought some long underwear.
That night Emily and I ate Peking duck at Qianmen Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant, a famous joint in the trendy section of town known as Wangfujing. The food was fantastic, although I get the feeling it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to eat more than once every few weeks.
The next morning I left early for the bus station, where I would catch a northbound bus to the Great Wall. There were plenty of organized trips to the Badaling section of the wall, but I’d heard that section was packed with tourists and was totally reconstructed, so I decided to check out a part of the wall known as Huanghua. Just before I got on the bus, three Polish kids approached me and asked if I knew how to get to Badaling. I gave them my Huanghua sales pitch, and thirty seconds later they were climbing on the bus with me.
Huanghua did not disappoint: we were the only tourists in sight, and much of the wall was still in its original form. We trekked up the hill toward some steps that would take us up onto the wall, but as we neared the steps a woman came running out of her hillside home waving her arms.
“This is private section of wall! You must pay admission!” she told us.
“Private?” I said. “I don’t think so. Nobody owns the wall. We don’t have to pay any admission.”
“Yes, private,” she continued, producing an obviously fake document that was written in broken English. “You must pay or you can’t see wall.”
I ignored her and walked by, but she grabbed my arm, pulled me to the ground, and let out a scream. A few seconds later, people from other houses on the hill came running outside to see what the commotion was, and before long we had at least ten ornery Chinese men approaching us.
“Ok, ok,” I said. “We’ll pay.”
“No, too late, you have to leave,” she said.
I pulled a ¥10 note from my money belt and stuffed it into her hand. “Ok, we pay,” I said, once again pushing by her. This time she didn’t grab me. Whew.
We spent the next couple hours climbing around on the wall. We reached the local peak and got a tremendous view of the surrounding hills. The whole experience was quite exhilarating, not least because we were the only foreigners around. It’s rare in China to feel like you have something all to yourself.
That night Emily and I ate hotpot, another Chinese staple. The food was good, but I don’t think anything could have matched the duck from the night before.
Emily and I spent our Saturday touring the Summer Palace. Set on a picturesque lake just north of the city, the palace is striking, and was the highlight of Beijing for me. We strolled around the many buildings and temples for a few hours before heading back into Beijing on one of the most crowded city buses I’ve ever seen.
The following morning we ventured back down to Tiananmen Square to see the memorial to Chairman Mao. The line to get in stretched around the corner, and was filled mostly with Chinese peasants. It’s free to enter the memorial, but to get in you must first check your bag, which is not free. Strangely enough, the bag deposit charges not only by the bag, but also by the camera. Although they don’t take the cameras out of the bags, you still must pay for each camera that is in your bag. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Viewing Chairman Mao, who is preserved in formaldehyde in much the same way that Lenin is, was spooky, to say the least. Judging by the Chinese people’s behavior, Mao still commands a lot of respect in China, though according to Emily if you really question people they’ll admit that he might have done a few bad things as well. In any case, the image of Mao lying there with a red flag draped over his lower body is not an image I’ll soon forget.
As we walked through Tiananmen Square back to the subway, Emily and I joked about what might happen if I whipped out my FREE TIBET shirt and started running around the square, making a scene. Apparently, Tiananmen Square is under constant surveillance by closed circuit camera, so we decided that within thirty seconds I’d be caught and dragged away. The only debate was whether I’d be thrown into prison or whether I’d simply be reprimanded. In the end, I decided not to find out.
A few hours later, I was aboard an Air China flight, San Francisco bound. But before I leave you, I’ll try to summarize my impressions of China and of Chinese people. Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but I thought it would be helpful to at least present my initial impressions:
1) Chinese men smoke. A lot. This one isn't controversial. Anyway, I find it rather gross. In China there's no such thing as a no-smoking restaurant, or bar, or public space. It's painful.
2) Chinese people spit. This isn't restricted to the men. Chinese people will spit on the sidewalk, on the restaurant floor, and in your hair—I saw all the above happen in my two days in Shanghai. I even saw one guy spit on the floor of an airplane—but he got scolded by the stewardess.
3) Chinese people are direct, bold, and even a bit pushy. Walking through the streets of Shanghai, I probably had seven or eight people approach me, introduce themselves, and then say, “You come with me to get tea, we make friends, we practice English….” Now, I understand why these folks want to practice their English, but never have I seen people so willing to approach strangers and ask favors of them. The same thing goes for street hawkers—these folks are possibly more incessant than most of the hawkers I met in India. But for some reason I find them less annoying, and less sleazy. Maybe I appreciate the directness in China—it doesn't feel like someone is trying to screw you, even though they probably are.
4) Chinese people are savvy. In short, they “get it.” They get little things like where to stand on the metro platform so as to be right in front of a door when the train stops, and they get bigger things like how to give you the perfect sales pitch to get you to visit some art show that you have no desire to see. Basically, I get the feeling that these people know they're capable and intelligent, and they know they're on the brink of taking over the world. It's somewhat exciting, and somewhat scary.
5) Chinese people are rude. Well, maybe not compared to most Indians I met, but after spending a couple months in Indonesia and Thailand, where people speak softly and are painfully careful not to offend, the Chinese seem like barnyard animals. But they're efficient. Mostly.
6) Chinese people are competitive, sometimes in situations where it’s unclear what the goal of the competitiveness is. For instance, when the doors of a subway train open, Chinese people fight to get on board like you’ve never seen. There’s simply no such thing as waiting for people to exit the train before trying to get on. Instead, the scene when the doors open looks something like a goal line stand in the NFL—the people in the train push to get off, the people outside the train push to get on, and in the end nobody really moves. Now, what’s the obsession with being the first one on the subway? In most cases all the seats are full, so you’re not going to be sitting down anyway, and only on rare occasions do people not make it onto the train at all, so why are people so concerned with being the first one on? The competitiveness on above-ground trains is even more perplexing, as people already have tickets and assigned seats. Everyone is getting on the train, and everyone will sit in his or her assigned seat regardless of boarding order. But still people push and shove and jockey for position. I just don’t get it.
These are obviously only a few of the things I observed about China—in short, this place is so different from the West that I can’t begin to really detail the many things that I find foreign. But I should close by saying that despite the Chinese tendency to be rude, loud, and competitive, I actually really liked the place. I liked learning the language, I loved the food, and I even liked the majority of the people I met. If all goes to plan, I’ll return soon and continue butchering the Mandarin orange as best I can.
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