2/3s of Beijing

Here are our adventures for the first two days in Beijing:

Saturday, June 9: We left the train station and walked a couple blocks to our hotel. Since check-in time wasn’t until 1pm, we left our bags with the concierge and headed to Panjiayuan Market. This market only runs on Saturdays from dawn until 3pm. This place is insane! There is everything you could ever want there. There are whole aisles devoted to one item: beads for jewelry, silk scrolls, cloisonné, scarves, paintings, you name it. I found 3 absolutely beautiful paintings. The first one was of a large, white flower, (possibly magnolia?) the next was a field of yellow tulips with one red tulip, and the third is a great scene of the Great Wall. I can’t wait to get back and get them hung up! They are amazing. I also got a great matted picture of the Great Wall. Elizabeth bought a vase, a silk picture, and a gift for her parent’s anniversary. (They read this too so I can’t tell you what it is!) Carlson bought several pictures, a wood carving, and some jewelry for his nieces. After we all had spent WAY too much money, we caught a cab over to the Temple of Heaven. It would have been cool to take a rickshaw, but two people can hardly fit in one, let alone all three of us with our stuff! The Temple of Heaven is big. We walked around that place forever! It had many different halls for this and that, but one of them was the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. I said a little prayer for all the farmers back in North Dakota, so I expect when I get back for the 4th of July, the corn is going to be waaaay past knee-high! We also walked through a flower garden where we saw a guy painting some flowers. I got a really good picture of him, the painting he was working on, and the flowers. After the Temple of Heaven, we went back to the hotel to check in, buy our tickets for the Great Wall tour the next day, and all that. We took a shower and it was the best shower I’ve had since leaving the States. It had pressure!! And water that didn’t smell like it came out of the slough by my Grandma’s!! I thoroughly enjoyed it. We got ready and had a great supper of Peking Duck at a nearby restaurant. They bring out the duck and carve it right at your table. I wonder how many they typically sell in a night, because at any given time during our meal, we could look around and see five or six guys out carving ducks. It is the most tender, juicy duck I have ever had. It is served with onions, cucumbers, and some sort of sauce. They also give you small buns and something that looks like a tortilla for you to make sandwiches and wraps with. Plus, they had some really good fresh squeezed apple juice. It was a wonderful meal. When we were done, we walked back past our hotel to a main street nearby and walked around there. Many of the building along the street were under construction to renovate for the Olympics. I was surprised at the lack of people asking me to buy a ‘watchbagshoesdvdcheapocheapo’…it was nice to walk down a street and not be bothered! There were all sorts of shops along this street. We walked down a side street that had lots of little stands selling touristy stuff. I bought a lighter that looked like Mao’s red book. As we were walking, we saw this area that had three carnival-type rides. The big one was two pillars with a big ball in the middle attached with two bungee cords. It looked like a lot of fun. For 120RMB ($15) two people could ride it and you got a picture and a video. However, Elizabeth was too chicken to do it with me…jerk. So, instead, I went on one of the side rides. It looked like an astronaut training course. I sat in a seat in the middle and there were three circles around me. They spun me in every direction. I expected the ride to last for a minute and a half or so, but they kept going and going and going! Every time I thought they were about to stop me, they sped it up again. I drew quite a crowd. I was laughing and screaming and Elizabeth and Carlson were laughing so much that Elizabeth had a tough time taking a picture that wasn’t blurry. It was fun, but I had a tough time keeping my arms and feet where they were supposed to go. The next day my arms, legs, and feet all had lots of bruises on them. But it was definitely worth the 20RMB ($2.50). Surprisingly, I wasn’t that dizzy when I got off. After that, we were walking along the street and a guy came up to me and said, “I didn’t think they were ever going to let you off!” I laughed and agreed. He was from Chicago and he had just come to Beijing the day before. We all talked until we had to turn onto a different street. The next street we went to was the night market. This place had all sorts of crazy things on a stick: octopus, bugs, scorpions, eel, snake, pork, beef, unidentifiable objects, and my favorites, sea cucumbers and starfish. I asked one guy how you were supposed to eat the starfish. I was thinking you broke it open and ate the insides or something, but he motioned that you just eat the whole thing as is. That blew my mind. After the duck meal, I wasn’t hungry so I didn’t try anything, but I took pictures. I was looking at some fruit kabobs one vendor had with this glazed sugar on it. I was only half paying attention to what he was saying, but I heard him say something about ‘free’ and he was holding one out to me. So I walked over and asked him if it was free. He smiled and said, “for a kiss, it’s free!” I laughed, looked at the fruit, looked at him, but decided it just wasn’t quite worth it. All the other workers were laughing at him too. We walked along a bit more and stopped in a silk fabric store. Elizabeth bought some really pretty green silk fabric to get a shirt made. I debated about buying some, but just decided to wait until we went to the market in Shanghai. By the time we got back to the hotel we were more than ready for bed.

Sunday, June 10: We got up and had the breakfast buffet in the hotel. They had eggs, waffles, really good hash browns, croissants, fresh pineapple juice, and lots of other things. I miss American style breakfasts! Usually we just have toast with peanut butter or ‘Frosties’ which are the Frosted Flakes here in our room at the hotel. After that, we got ready to go on our grand adventure to the Great Wall!! We left the hotel lobby at 11am along with a man and a woman from the Washington, DC area who were here on business, a husband and wife from the Indonesia with their two sons were a bit older than us, then we stopped and picked up a furniture salesman from Atlanta, his son, and the tour guide and his assistant. We had a small tour bus/van type vehicle. We were working our way through the ring roads when the rear driver side tire started making this horrible knocking noise. I looked back and saw black stuff flying, so I was sure we had a blowout or a flat tire or something. The driver pulled over and was checking it out. I was able to look out the window and see that it wasn’t a flat, so we weren’t sure what it was. It was taking a while to fix it and every now and then the driver would get in and drive for a bit to see if it stopped, but it didn’t. The guy from Indonesia told the tour guide that we’d either have to get a new bus or cancel the trip. Elizabeth and I looked at each other and had the same thought. We didn’t care if we had to crawl there, we were going to the Great Wall and this guy can walk back! The guide called his company and they sent a new bus, but it ate up quite a bit of time. We didn’t get to the wall until 2pm. There are three sections of the Wall open to tourists: Badaling-which is the most popular and touristy one, Simatai- which has very few people because it’s a three hour drive from Beijing, and Mutianyu-which is the one we went to that doesn’t have many tourists and is only an hour drive. (or at least it is when your bus doesn’t break down!) There are two ways up: the wussy way where you ride a cable car up to Tower 14 and walk around or the real way…you walk up. The rest of the group took the easy way out, but Carlson, Elizabeth and I did it right. Just the walk up to get to the Wall was a hike. We were all huffing and puffing. We started at Tower 8 and walked to 14. I went through about 3 or 4 bottles of water. It was close to 100F that day with absolutely no shade. Yes mom, I did remember to put on sunscreen. Otherwise I would have been a lobster. Since there weren’t a lot of people there, I was able to get some really great pictures of some sections without any people on it. I’ll put more pictures up on Shutterfly soon. The view was spectacular. In every tower there was a guy selling cold water and postcards. A bottle of water was 2 yuan down at the start of the climb, but was 10 yuan up in the towers. I told one guy there was horrible inflation here and he just laughed. I willingly paid 10 for a bottle because it was so hot and we were all dying. I thought Elizabeth was going to pass out a couple times! We were going to climb down, but we ran out of time so we had to take the cable car down. At the top of the wall, Carlson and Elizabeth each bought a beer. So I got a couple pictures of them drinking a beer on the Wall. Elizabeth is mildly afraid of heights, so she asked to sit backwards in the car so she didn’t have to see the drop off. However, Carlson being how he is immediately said, “Holy crap, it goes straight down!” She made a horrible face and closed her eyes and drank her beer. We were laughing the whole way down. When we got off the car, there were all sorts of vendors selling Great Wall stuff. All three of us had to get an “I climbed the Great Wall” t-shirt because we truly did. We all loaded onto the tour bus and then stopped at a cloisonné factory. It was interesting to see how they made everything. First, they had to make a copper mold, (they demonstrated how a vase is made, but you can make all sorts of different objects) then they have to take tiny bits of wire and glue them on the vase to make the pattern. One 10 inch vase can take a worker 8 days to make…and they get paid per vase…but they don’t get paid at all if the quality isn’t good. Rough way to make a living! The next step is to paint in all of the little spaces made by the wire then they fire it. However, when they fire it, the stuff they paint with shrinks, so they have to repaint it…and this happens about 8 times! The guide said that only women workers put on the wire and paint because it is delicate work that requires a steady hand, but more importantly, it requires great patience. All the women in the group laughed at that. Then when we saw the room with the kiln, she said this is where the men work because it’s too hot in there. After it’s finally painted well enough, it goes to the sander to smooth everything out, and then gets glazed to protect it, and finally it is gold plated. They couldn’t show us the gold plating part because that was a guarded business secret. We looked around the store for a bit and then went back to the hotel where we showered before dinner because we were all drenched in sweat! After getting ready, we decided that the duck last night was so good we had it again. Then Carlson went back to his room while Elizabeth and I went out exploring. There were several interesting walkways with music notes and math equations on them…no idea what they were for, but I took a picture. We saw a guy out walking his dog and we made motions asking if it was okay to pet it. He nodded, so we were petting it and then out of nowhere it growled and tried to bite me. That’s when I walked away…don’t want rabies or anything. We went back to the room, watched ‘The Mask of Zorro’ on HBO, and went to bed.