Beijing

LESSONS FROM OUR FIRST NIGHT TRAIN
Our first night train experience proved to be a good one. We began to experience and learn several important philosophies held by the Chinese culture.

1. Lines: What's the point in queing? You get where you are going much faster by pushing and jumping people in line. While the gate entrance looks like it can only fit one person through at a time, if you push hard enough, you can get at least 6 people through at once. Wave your ticket wildly up in the air as you squeeze through the gate. You may not have been able to get your ticket punched, but I am sure that the sweaty, exasperated ticket attendant saw yours through the 10 tickets in her face.

2. Time: Although you have plenty of time to walk to get on the train from when the ticket attendant begins to let people through, you should still run like hell and fantically push people out of the way until you get safely on the train. You never know if the train will decide to leave early. On later trains, we learn more....

3. Although the signs say "no smoking", you can still smoke in the doorways and blow smoke into the cabin areas.

4. Spitting: Hoking lugies can be done anywhere, even on the floors of trains. If you want to be more polite and spit in the toilet, just open the bathroom door and let one fly. I am sure you will get close enough.

We also found that people we always more than happy to help us out. Not only did we get help finding our sleepers or seats (usually this consisted of 10 people passing around our tickets and talking to each other for a few minutes before more people came over to see what was going on and then we would find our place), but fellow travellers also deemed it their responsibility to tell us when it was our time to get off the train. Most of the time we had no idea when we should be getting off, since one stop looked like another and we were never at our destination on time. So when we would arrive at our stop, our non-english speaking travellers would point excitedly to the exit and would help pull our bags down from the rack in order to get off the train.

ARRIVE IN BEIJING
So, after a night on the train and a ride on the metro, Tommy and I set out to find the Leo Hostel in Beijing. We quickly found the road that the hostel was off of and proceeded to walk around for hours trying to find the actual road the hostel was on. We began to wander down side streets and finally found the Leo Hostel tucked away in a busy market street. We soon realized that our maps of China would not be very reliable since, not only were the street names different in our book, but there was so much construction throughout every city, things just changed so quickly. Despite this, we still persistantly tried to find locations (hostels, banks, restaurants, etc) that seemed to have vanished.

TIANANMEN SQUARE AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY

We arrived around 10am at the hostel and used our first day in Beijing to explore Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square, very impressive in size, can hold up to a million people. Bags are searched upon entry into the square, while soldiers patrol on foot throughout. In order to get to the Forbidden City, Tommy and I had to cross through the square first. Once at the Forbidden City, we walked around the grounds for hours. The Forbidden City is very expansive and it would take a whole day to read all of the information provided. This city is where the emperors once lived with all of their wives, family, children, concubines, administrators, etc. We meandered through rooms that had been turned into museums, courtyards and alleys, many different halls, quarters, etc. All of the architecture was beautiful. Some areas we were unable to see do to extensive remodeling.

A REALLY REALLY BIG DINNER

From Bejing and Pi...

Exhausted and hungry after a full day, Tommy and I sat down in a restaurant across the street from our hostel. Not learning from previous experiences, we ordered many different dishes - corn, spring rolls, soup, pork, and peanuts with greens. With all the dishes being a good size dish, we could have done well with just the soup! The amazement of just how cheap the food was blinded us to the fact we were ordering, once again, a large amount of food! We rolled back to the hostel to get to bed early.

THE GREAT WALL

Up at 7am, we head out with 7 others on a tour hosted by Leo Hostel of the Great Wall. We drive for about 1 hr, stopping about 10 minutes before we get there to pick up a little old lady from the local village that was maybe four and a half feet tall and spoke no english. Our minivan driver drops us off in the middle of nowhere and tells us that our guide (the lady from the village) will walk us to the wall. He hops back in the van and takes off. Everyone looks at each other with a look of confusion and amusement. After pointing to her "No Smoking" sign our little lady waves us on and takes off up a path with her walking stick in hand. We hike for about 30 minutes, stopping at times when our guide needs to sit down for a minute, until we finally see the wall. We climb up to it and look in amazement at the remenants of this remarkable structure. Our group continues for about 2 1/2 hours on the wall, only passing one other local man who is out for a stroll. We pass through watchtowers, where we climbed up and could see the Great Wall weaving in and out of small valleys, extending for miles. The whole experience was incredible.

The section of the wall we were walking on was more remote and much, much less visited by tourists than some other more well known sections. Nothing had been restored (we don't think), so some areas were still intact, while others were not. Our guide lead us 30 minutes down another path that brought us to our driver. We headed into a restaurant in a tiny village where the 9 members of our group ate a wonderful local family-style meal of all different meats, veggies, rice, and noodles.

CHINESE ACROBATIC SHOW
Once back in town, we decide to find an acrobatic show recommended by our L.P. book. It takes us more than an hour to find the theatre (eventhough it should have taken 15 minutes. The map in the book showed it over a block away from its actual location) and we buy tickets for the show that night. We figure it must be good since there is a picture outside of the theatre with Mr. Bean and the troupe of acrobats. The show was a lot of fun with some very amazing tricks. There were about 7 or 8 acts, all of which were impressive and used a large spectrum of props, ranging from hats to drums to playing cards to ribbons to hoops, etc. That night at the hostel, Tommy and I got our train tickets for a night train to Pingyao for the following day. We also have Leo Hostel call and get us reservations at their sister hostel in Pingyao, which means they will pick us up from the train station for free!

SHOPPING AND BOMB SHELTERS
The next day, with our bags safely stored at Leo, we set out to explore more of the town. We first head to find some warmer clothes that we have been lacking since getting to China. I find a nice, cheap down jacket and Tommy finds a warm vest. Next we head to the pearl market, where there are more vendors selling the same products than I have ever seen. We have good fun looking around and seeing the different qualities of pearls, but are soon ready to move on. We stumble upon the entrance of Beijing's underground tunnel, which we were looking for, but thought it was somewhere else. We take a quick, but interesting tour beneath the streets of Beijing and through some of the tunnel system. It was built in the Cold War Era as a network of bomb shelters that would hold 300,000 people. After the tour, we headed back to get our bags at the hostel and on to the train station for the night train to Pingyao.