Beijing and the wall
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2007
1
87
96
Trip End
Sep 10, 2008
Where I stayed
qingman youth hostel
Beijing, China
Thursday, April 17, 2008
china, as i have said, has yet to embrace the art of the queue. this is a huge cultural difference that is hard to get used to. we are taught in the states from a very young age to line up and to wait your turn. people who cut the line are tattled on as not being fair. it is ingrained in our minds for many years. when one gets into a culture that does not operate this way, it can be very difficult to get used to and very offensive to one's psyche at an inner child on the swing set level. oriental cultures are deemed to be very polite. but one must remember that polite is a relative term and is measured by the culture in question. in the states, cutting the line is considered rude. as is staring. here, these things are not considered rude and people say little to protest it if they feel upset. therefore, they are considered polite by not saying anything, not by lining up in an orderly fashion. in this instance they put up ropes and place officers to aid in making orderly lines in the arrival hall. but still, the older people try to cork the line because they feel it is their right by age. the officers will do nothing because the older people are, well, older than them. discerning looks and hand gestures do not help. you can be obviously next in line and someone will walk up past the hundred people behind you to your side and then step in at the last moment, shoving you out of the way with their arm reaching past to the service professional of choice. said service person, who is usually younger or at least Chinese, will do nothing to help you here. you must simply grin and bear it or you can do what jason and i do. we keep our eyes peeled for the sly "corkers" as we call them. these are the ones who slowly push up the side of the line with their bag, just ever so slightly behind you, then along side until they reach the opportunistic personal space. then we make an alert by saying "corker" and then we stand face to face, thus protruding our bags all the way into the space along side of each of us and stand our ground. you see, such a signal is not enough. a little old man or lady will still take the opportunity to slide past us on the pack side as it is out of our direct view. you thus must stand firmly so that said little old lady will bounce off your pack, signaling you to turn to her and shake your head. this, of course, is only to make me feel better as an older Chinese person does not understand why i have blocked her way, nor why i would shake my head at her. she is, after all, older than me and it is her right. so why don't we just let them all past if it is their culture? because, as i said, it is drilled into our heads from a young age and it is hard to fight it. and also because just about everyone in the room is older than us. if we gave in, we would be there until the last person left.
we finally get up there and the lady really stares at my passport. i mean she checks my eyes, my nose, my mouth, smiling and not along side the photo. my hair is different now you see and this is an issue for the Chinese. she then checks every detail of my visa and each and every stamp in the passport. reluctantly, she stamps me in. jason is not so lucky. he has an old passport with the actual photo laminated on it. not one of the new ones with it scanned over a hologram background. i debated on this before we left but the wait for passports was very long due to the change in the canadian and mexican border requirements. once again, they take his passport to the back room and take him from the line, leaving me legally in china and him on the other side. an hour passes. all the people file through and leave. the immigration officers start to take breaks and still i am sitting on my bag in china, and jason on his in no man's land. not good. they try to make me leave to the customs hall but don't make an issue of it when i refuse. finally they come back without a word and pass him through. so what is the deal? in one of these times that we have had to give over all our identity to the front desk of some hotel in viet nam, cambodia or china, has someone taken our stuff and made a fake? but we still know nothing as they shuffle him through. we might as well have let all the old people through anyway, right?
customs, normally a breeze, hassles me about some pills in my carry on bag but not about the enormous months long supply in my other bag. of course, all the paperwork is in order so they can search all they want. by the end of this ordeal, we are more firmly set in our stance on china. and it isn't looking positive.
it will be very interesting indeed to see what happens during the olympics.
moving on, we catch a cramped bus to beijing just outside the door of the arrivals hall. after many hours in traffic, we are sold on the rail system that has carried us around china previous to this. we arrive to our hostel late in the night and collapse into soft and clean beds.
the next day we had many things to do. beijing is currently in a complete state of ruins in an effort to spiffy up before the olympics. whole neighborhoods are shut. whole displays in museums are shut. and the air is terrible. beijing is one of the most polluted cities on earth according to statistics. add in the ever encroaching sands of the gobi, the fine pulverized powder dust of construction, the smell of paint remover or the paint itself that alone can give anyone a headache, the constant smoke, the litter, and the feces and pee and spit on the streets and you have one dirty city indeed. (children don't wear diapers, they have a split in their pants and they just go on the street when they have to). our eyes burn on leaving buildings. our heads spin from the fumes. in less than two days we already feel like we have to hawk up stuff from our lungs. it is no wonder that everyone spits. (but could they do it quieter and maybe into a napkin????) we wander around trying to find things that don't appear to be as the map rendered them due to the construction. it is a frustrating affair and we return to our room in the afternoon for a nap.
the next day we got up and went to the great wall. this was a long day but worth it all. we had a bus to jinshan gates which is in the next province. hiking up to the wall itself is a reminder of how much muscle mass we have lost on this journey. riding a bus or train is not a great way to stay in shape. i can only console myself with how bad it would be if we had not been in such good shape when we left. between huffs and puffs we have to say no thank you a million times to the thousand hawkers all along the route. these persistent little things are the only down side to the whole day. they will wait for you and walk with you, giving you all kinds of information and advice about the wall----always in an effort to sell something later. if you said "at the end", they would walk the whole 10k with you to be able to make the sale at the end. if you get rid of one, there will always be another. and if you purposefully stall so they would get the hint, they won't. other than this, the wall is amazing. the first part is restored and really magnificent. on one side is china and the other is inner mongolia. still part of china, but the marker of where the "barbarians" come from. (the country of mongolia is really referred to as "outer mongolia"). we come upon a section of unrestored wall which is interesting but difficult to climb. every 300 meters or so, there is a tower which usually has 2-3 levels, all bottle necked for defense. the wall goes along a high ridge of the hills and thus follows the terrain up and down, making a strenuous journey. after 30 towers and 10 km we come to simitan gate and another section of restored wall, finally crossing a bridge and heading up to the exit path. we head for lunch and then the long journey back to beijing, in the traffic. fortunately, we are tired and have made friends with people on the trip so we chat and rest along the way.
today is saturday, and everyone is china is in the forbidden city. so we will see it on monday. tomorrow we will go to the summer palace and mao's tomb at Tienanmen square. so that left today to get some typing done. after this we went to the silk road market. this is an experience like any other market: people clawing and pawing at you such that you don't even want to look. one lady grabbed and jerked me so hard that she left welts of scratches on my arm. good sales tactic lady. however, as luck would have it, jason finds a tech shirt that he likes and we start the bargaining process. we try to converse with each other in spanish to use as an advantage but she speaks spanish too!!! we got the price we could both agree on and then i walked around a little more while jason rested. when i came back he was surrounded by 3 Chinese kids, practicing english. as we have found, this is usually an art student scam (they pretend to practice english and then try to guide you to their professor's studio to be pressured to buy art made by the students) but they were just friendly. we went to an american franchise restaurant and i spazed on the food.
sunday was a very rainy day. mao's tomb was closed so we took a rest day. later in the day we went to a duck place to have peking duck in the source. it was pretty good.
monday we went to the forbidden city. after battling the Chinese queue, we had our tickets to enter and an auto guide. the guide was great but almost had too much information. unfortunately many of the main halls are closed for renovation. curiously there are other exhibitions to the side that cost money above and beyond the ticket we already paid. we remain everyone's favorite zoo animal. in the meantime here is what i learned. the forbidden city was started in the 14th century and continued to be built, refined and modified until 1924 when pu yi was evicted. the qing dynasty ended with him in 1911 with the revolution. he was allowed to live there until 1924 and then the city was opened to the public. empress cixi was heavily present in the city's displays. i found this of interest as i have read several historical fiction novels about china during this trip and she was in 2 of them. the city itself is pretty neat. a serious maze of old buildings, painted delicately. and the garden has trees that are several hundred years old.
at the end of the day we had met 2 people who had met alaskans traveling. we got on the overnight train to xian on hard sleepers. we were crammed into the top bunks for the duration.
our stay in beijing was hard. i think we are very road weary and things like being unable to escape smoke and the dirt and pollution are trying. plus, the cold i had in korea was giving me its all. coming here well rested for a short visit would be very interesting and informative.
funny stuff we have seen:
a vendor getting his stuff confiscated by secret police on Tienanmen square.
-we heard hotel california here too
-tall kids now a days. the short asian is now a myth.
-converse tennis shoes are all the rage
-there are head dresses here that look alot like eskimo headdresses and somewhere else we have been. it always amazes us that things can be so different and yet the same.
-there is a frizzy type of hairstyle common here that i can't figure out. too bad they don't speak english to tell me how to do it!
Comments
what the hell is going on
are you still moving where are you and are you ok we are all wondering and worried reply asap
Worried about you
Irene...please let us know if your ok!!!
Love Nat
ntaylor@scf.cc