Beijing Weekend

If I wanted to put a positive spin on the past three days of high fever and general body-purging, I could say that this time has allowed me to both cleanse myself of Beijing excesses (wine, cheese, Western food in general, two nights in a four-star hotel), and to absorb everything that I saw and experienced, in order to present it all in a cohesive tale. In any case, the past three days have definitely cleansed my body and caused me to take up another notch in my watchband (since I don’t wear a belt). I can’t guarantee cohesiveness but then, that hasn’t stopped me in the past.

We took a night train to Beijing Friday night. It’s an eleven hour train ride so we got soft sleeper tickets. “Soft” is basically first class, meaning there are four bunks to a room with a door onto the hallway, and the toilet at the end of the train car is Western-style, meaning you can sit down. This is different from hard sleeper, which has six bunks in the same space as four, no door onto the hallway, and the toilet is the porcelain-hole-in-the-ground variety. We could only get hard sleeper back to Hohhot. Lots of people ride on either soft seats (maybe they have a cushion?) or hard seats (self-explanatory), so despite the next statement, we were really traveling in high style. Whatever the distinctions between “hard” and “soft”, neither are very comfortable (at least to me, who thinks every bed should be covered in down mattresses, something along the lines of The Princess and the Pea, without the pea), and as we didn’t get Grace a ticket (being under the 1.2 meter height limit, she doesn’t count as a person in terms of buying entry to anything), she slept with me. Translation: Mom didn’t get a heck of a lot of sleep. Next time we are going to lie about her height and buy her a ticket.

A sleeper train is definitely the way to go, though, because we pulled into Beijing about 7:30 in the morning, basically bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. After a rather heated discussion with the cab driver, punctuated by stabs at the piece of paper with the hotel name in Chinese, and at the map, he finally figured out where we wanted to go. So now here I have to give full disclosure, despite our extreme embarrassment in admitting this: using the Lonely Planet Guide to China as our guide (for lack of a better word and hang repetition), Dave chose a hotel from the “mid-range” section of hotels, and with Clyde’s (aka Mr. Song) help, he was able to get a room for us. Mid-range got us a four-star hotel at an unmentionable price, because Dave ended up pushing us up to an “executive” room in order to take advantage of the breakfast buffet. In the end, embarrassed as we are, we are very glad we stayed there for the following reasons: awesome bathroom with huge walk-in shower; 17^th floor view of downtown Beijing; breakfast buffet and evening snacks on the 19^th floor overlooking the Forbidden City, traditional courtyard homes, and St. Joseph’s church; it’s a French-based hotel so guess who got to speak French (also meant croissants, pain au chocolat and brie for breakfast); it’s very close to Wangfujing Street, the big shopping street with Starbucks and the foreign language bookstore, and the Forbidden City; and last but certainly not least, it had a pool. I guess in the end, if you can do it, it’s nice to live the high life for a short weekend, after being in such close quarters at home, always having to think about what to get at the grocery store for dinner. Since life in Hohhot is relatively inexpensive, it worked out okay. Of course, we haven’t seen the Visa bill yet.

We checked-in and headed out to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Or rather, we started walking there and then got side-tracked looking for the Starbucks that was supposed to be across the street from St. Joseph’s church (terrible, aren’t we? and unabashedly so, too). We found the church, complete with bride and groom posing on the front steps, but couldn’t go in because all the doors were locked. Whoever heard of locked doors on a church??

But we didn’t find Starbucks. [We later found two buried in the basements of mondo-sized super malls on Wangfujing.] By this time we were hungry and thinking food would be a good way to keep the kids happy while tourist-ing. After a short stop in the incredibly expensive foreign language bookstore (200 yuan for a Tintin comic and a unicorn book), we went to the Wangfujing Food Court (not to be confused with the Wangfujing Snack Street, which is outside and offers among a dizzying array of fare, such delicacies as deep-fried seahorses, bugs of many sorts, and octopi) recommended in Lonely Planet. The Food Court is an amazing place, underneath one of the many high-end malls on Wangfujing Street.

One of many restaurants

You pay money to get a debit card of sorts, then wander around a bazillion restaurants (not much different from a food court at any US mall, except for the fare) and choose something. Eyeballs completely glazed over from looking at all the choices, the kids and I staked out a place to sit and Dave found us some really excellent food.

Re-fueled and feeling good

Back on track, we made it to the top of Tiananmen Square but were so overwhelmed with the vastness of it, presided over by a gigantic portrait of Mao, that we decided to look from afar, then head through the gate under Mao, and into the Forbidden City.


As we got closer, Samuel progressively dissolved into a quivering, shaking, crying little boy who absolutely did not want to go in. I never was able to get from him exactly what he was afraid of, since this is generally how he acts when frightened (is it because of the name? because of the size? because of all the people trying to be our “guides”?), or if he was just really exhausted, but he basically clung to me through the first part of the F.C., sobbing and wanting to spend the day in the hotel. This of course caused Grace to go into anti-Samuel mode (something I think sisters can do very well, at least this one) and she became super-trooper number one, not a complaint or a whine to be heard. Maybe Samuel has been permanently scarred by my seeming insensitivity, but we really felt he needed to see that we wouldn’t take him somewhere scary, and that we hadn’t come all the way to Beijing to sit in a four-star hotel that didn’t look any different from one in any other big city. All this to say that we didn’t go into the museum, or any other side building, as we felt we had to make some kind of concession to him—it isn’t fun being eight and not having a say in what happens to oneself.

Inside the Forbidden City

Samuel started feeling better about this point.

Super-trooper and Dad

A lot of the F.C. is undergoing a giant face lift, probably for the Olympics (whose logo is pasted on absolutely everything from milk to buses to hats and shirts) so much was unavailable to us anyway. I think if we ever go back, I’d probably spend most of my time in the gardens that surround the buildings. It is definitely very impressive, though, and it was easy to imagine a whole world existing there, completely insulated from the city outside its gigantic walls and moat.

The second day we got smart and rented bikes—easier to get around, and it kept the kids from complaining of being tired (they found other things to complain about). Again using the Lonely Planet (I love this book, did you get that idea yet?) we took a bike tour around the Forbidden City and then into the hutongs, which are quickly falling under the demolition ball to make room for more skyscrapers. These are narrow alleyways with one-story homes and businesses on either side that used to pepper all of Beijing and housed many Beijingers.

We bought great pastries from this guy.

Because of the Olympics, and because I guess the government doesn’t think they are that charming, the hutongs are disappearing and the families who lived in them are being shuttled to the outskirts of town to live in newly-built huge “family buildings”—giant skyscrapers reminiscent of the co-ops on the outskirts of Manhattan. The hutongs we saw ranged from extremely narrow and crowded to much more spacious with shops and even a youth hostel clearly intended for a Western crowd.

Dave went deep into one alley to get this beautiful picture.

A particularly harrowing alleyway--Grace perched on back.

They are really quite wonderful and have to be explored on bike (even when you are afraid your knees and elbows might scrape on either side of the alleyway). Part way through our ride we stopped at Bei Hai Park for lunch. We didn’t go through it very far, but I just had to include this picture of the lake and the White Dagoba in the background, built in 1651 to honor the visit of the Dalai Lama.

The last day in Beijing we hired a private taxi (you have two choices: private taxi or big tour bus) to take us to the Great Wall. It was quite a long ride out, about 1 ½ hours, which gave us a great sense of the incredible immensity of Beijing. The city is comprised of 6 circles, each one with its ring road going around it. With over 12 million inhabitants it spreads out very far, but despite its size, Beijing traffic, while thick in parts, is much tamer than in Hohhot. Once there, our driver didn’t give us any other choice to get to the wall than take the gondola ride up (it wasn’t until we were on the Wall that we found the hiking trail, but I guess with kids it was better the way we did it) so with great reservations, not purely aesthetic, we did so. Grace and I went in the front car and you can tell from this picture how I felt about it: ramrod straight with my arms around Grace. I actually spent the whole ride with my eyes either focused on the Wall or on the trees in the distance. There was just not enough between us and the ground, which seemed very far away.

Gondola ride, with the toboggan route below.

I don’t know how to describe the Wall, it has been described so many times, we’ve all seen pictures of it, it seems like it should just be a big tourist trap. But really, it was absolutely awesome to be on it. I mean awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring.

These worn bricks remind me of the 300-some steps up to the top of Notre Dame in Paris.

Samuel said we should write to the lady who writes the kids’ history books (Susan Wise Bauer) and tell her we visited the wall, since Samuel studied about ancient China in first grade. I just might send her an email, because, I think, thanks to her descriptions and the extra reading we did about it, not to mention the Wall itself, Samuel really enjoyed himself in a way he hadn’t on the other two days (possibly due to the fact that we couldn’t just go right back and hop in the pool, but maybe I’m being cynical). It is something to be able to stand on one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Except for the occasional person selling water, beer and pop on the Wall, you couldn’t see much around you other than the Wall and the landscape around it. Very moving. Oh yes, and to get down, we had the choice of the gondola (NO) or the toboggan ride. Even the Great Wall is part theme park now. The kids loved it and I went so slowly down (did I mention that besides heights I am not terribly fond of going downhill fast?) that I think I irked the gentleman behind me who was looking for a fast ride, and caused Dave, Samuel and Grace to think I had fallen off. Hey, I’ve done my thrill-seeking in the past, survived it, and am not about to resume it in China.

We made it home fine, hard sleeper and all. Even having gotten so ill, I’m glad we went and I know we’ll go back again for a one-night stay sometime in November. Memories of the Visa bill will probably have faded by then.