Beijing and the Great Wall

I didn’t have too much of a problem in the Dubai airport, though a few things did stick out in my mind. The first of which was that once I landed and went through customs, I had some frantic messages, emails, and facebook posts from my parents asking me if I was alright and to contact them immediately. Turns out I’d left my Rwandan cell phone in the airport in Kigali and my parents had tried to call it. A Rwandan man picked it up and while some things were lost in translation I think he was trying to tell them the phone was in the airport but they thought he was saying I was detained in the airport (thinking it was Dubai). They thought for some reason I’d been detained/arrested in Dubai and were flipping out. Woops.

Anyway, I eventually made it to Beijing and had no problems in customs and security. All that worrying the day before for nothing! I took the subway (about 30 cents) into town and found my hostel. I immediately took a liking to Beijing. The city was huge, vibrant, and alive. Street food was everywhere and cheap, people loved joking and helping me even though most people spoke almost no English. It was almost the polar opposite of Rwanda and I was more than ready for it.

I walked around the city for a bit and grabbed some fried rice and then explored the neighborhood I was staying in which was pretty close to the center of the city. I took a short nap in the afternoon and then found a night market about a 20 minute walk away. I had some won tons, chicken skewers, and battered and deep fried strawberries, the later of which was my favorite. Some stalls had some pretty bizarre things like sea urchins or starfish on a stick, presumably waiting to be deep fried. I wasn’t feeling quite brave enough to try any of those, though. After I ate a bit I decided to try to find a bar to grab a beer and maybe meet some people. I strolled around that neighborhood for about an hour to no avail. While I didn’t find any bars, I had a good time exploring the city and even walking down some of the small streets through the neighborhoods and catching a little glimpse into the lives of the people through the windows and open doors.

The next day I got up early and went to the Forbidden City. I was told to get there by 8 to avoid the crowds. Well, I arrived at 8:15 and the place was already swimming with people from every continent. Audio guides were available in probably 30 different languages including more than one African language. I spent a couple hours there looking around at various exhibits and then left because I felt I couldn't really appreciate the place with the crowds there. I wandered back towards Tiananmen Square and stopped along the way to have some excellent dumping soup. I ordered it by going into a small restaurant and simply point at what a woman at another table had ordered and it was great. Tiananmen Square was filled with tourists, police, and hawkers selling trinkets. It was huge and meant to be a big grandiose statement. When it came down to it, though, it was just a really big open space of concrete with a few flags and sculptures in the middle of Beijing.

That night I met up with a friend of one of my dad’s colleagues who lived in Beijing and a couple of his friends. We went to a restaurant about an hour subway ride from my hostel and had some good Western Chinese food. It was a lot of beef shish kabobs and other things I don’t normally associate as Chinese food but it was delicious nonetheless. We hung out for a few hours and then somebody mentioned that I might want to catch the subway home soon before it stopped running. As it was only 10 PM, I thought they were joking but evidently some lines stop running at 11 and I didn’t want to have to snag a taxi back.

The next day I again woke up early because I’d signed up for a trip to the Great Wall the day before. I’d done a lot of research on the locations of the Great Wall near Beijing and it just so happened that my hostel could hook me up with a group heading out an area between Jinshaling and Simatai, supposedly the least touristy and most rugged part of the Wall near Beijing. I slept a bit on the two hour trip out there and then started out on the 8 km hike from our drop off point to where the bus would pick us up again. There was probably about 20 of us and I was in front making some pretty good time and walking and talking with a Danish woman in her mid 40’s. The first half of the hike was relatively easy as that part of the wall had been renovated and fixed up in a lot of places. The second half, though, was a bit rough and some places were at a 45 degree angle. It did feel lucky that I’d found somebody to hike with at the same pace, not merely just for the comfort of having somebody to talk to but also that in case I twisted my ankle or something I would’ve had somebody to help me out. The hike was a lot of fun and I sure felt that I earned the beer I had at the end when we got back down to the main road. One German guy had finished before us but I think he took a short cut and missed the most difficult part of the hike because we had caught up and passed the few people who had passed us along the way. We kept up a good pace and though it wasn’t entirely exhausting I did sleep really good that night. After a shower and another trip to the night market, that is.

The next day would be my last in China, which was something I felt very conflicted about. China turned my preconceptions about travelling and foreign countries on its head. On one hand it was what I’d expected: modern, busy, polluted (oh was it polluted!). But on the other hand, so much of it wasn’t what I'd expected: the food was great, accommodations were cheap, and the people were incredibly friendly and loved to joke around with me, even when we the only phrase we both knew was “Ni hao” (hello). Even before this last day I was trying to plan when and how I’d be back, I knew that four days was far to short a time to spend there, even if I was really just passing through on my way to South Korea.

Anyway, on my last day I went to Lama Temple, which was one of the few still functioning Buddhist temples I saw in Beijing. What’s more is that it’s a Tibetan Buddhist Temple. I bought some incense and before entering each building of the huge complex I’d light a few sticks, hold it above my head and bow a few times. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I was just mimicking the people around me as they prayed and made offerings of incense. I spent quite a bit of time here and it was probably my favorite sight I saw in Beijing proper. After I left, I wandered around and found a little roadside café. I sat down, ordered a soda, and then pointed at what a couple Chinese guys were eating at the next table It was some sort of salted beef with a pita-like bread and some garlic dipping sauce. The guys were loving that I just ordered the same thing as them and they tried to talk with me a bit but even though communication was a bit limited, they had enormous smiles on their faces as they kept giving me the thumbs up. They wanted to buy me a beer but I was hot and dehydrated so I stuck with another soda.

I wandered around for a little while and tried to find a Confucian temple. I wasn’t terribly motivated to do more sight seeing so I eventually stopped by a little café and had some traditional Tibetan butter tea. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever drank but I’d been curious to try some for a while and if you can’t go to Tibet, Beijing is probably one of the next best places to try it. I met some travellers--two Austrailians, a German and an Irish woman--that night at my hostel and grabbed some dinner with them before we went to a bar district surrounding a lake that they knew about. It seemed so strange to me how few bars were around in Beijing but the Australians I was hanging with explained that a huge goal of many Chinese is to save up enough money to buy an apartment in one of the many high rises around and so activities such as drinking which cut into savings and income aren’t too popular. This was one of the few districts that did have bars and live music, so we had a good time hanging out and taking it in. We ended up at a hookah bar and as the subways stopped running at 11, we had to take a taxi back to the hostel.