It may not look like it, but this is luxury.
First encounters in China
After 31 hours in the confines of a four berth cabin, walking out of the station at Beijing is a complete sensory overload. Your ears are hit by the sounds of traffic and shouting, your eyes are hit by Chinese symbols, colour and neon, and your lungs are hit by smog. We were immediately excited to be in a big developed city.
We had been warned that very few people in China speak English and with this in mind Christian had meticulously copied out the address of our hotel in Chinese symbols. It was a real piece of art (31 hours on the train well spent). Despite how beautiful it looked no-one seemed to know what it meant or where our hotel was. Taxi drivers just shook their heads at us baffled.
In the end we forced ourselves upon a bewildered tax driver and got him to phone the hotel for directions. From the taxi journey we began to get a better sense of the city - traffic, bikes, rich people, poor people, capitalism, noise and pollution.
Our hotel was a traditional courtyard hotel in a hutong (alleyway) away from the busy street. Every morning in the courtyard, we had breakfast with Elvis Presley and Chairman Mao!
On our first evening we walked along to the night market. They mostly sell food at this market. Food in the loosest sense of the term, a lot of the food was fried versions of what you and I might find crawling around behind the fridge.
We didn't try fried scorpion or starfish (we're watching our waists you see...if they had been steamed or poached we would have), but instead opted for some unrecognizable street food. It was very tasty and other than being scammed by a dumpling seller we felt fine for the expeience. Later that evening we had Peking duck at a fancy restaurant (Dadong) where they roast the ducks over four open fires on a stage. It was delicious – and almost as good as yours [Fiona's] dad! On the way home we got completely lost looking for our dark hutong with a restaurant on the corner (note to self: every hutong is dark with a restaurant on the corner). A very friendly couple stopped to offer us help and even walked us all the way back to our hotel. By the end of our first evening we had interacted with lots of Chinese people and had rather mixed views of them, we had been scammed three times (getting a taxi, a Sim card and some dumplings) but had also met some very friendly people. We didn't know what to think of the Chinese and I think this made us a bit suspicious from that point.
Chinese control
Back at our hotel we realized we didn't have access to websites like facebook, youtube, or even our blog. China has very tight control over the press and internet, so much so that it came 165th out of 168 countries in a survey of Freedom of Press. To highlight this point further you may have read recently about the woman who was sentenced to a year in a labour camp for sending a single tweet (Admittedly, the tweet was an anti-government message, not something mundane like 'I've just burnt my noodles').
Another symbol of Chinese Communism is Tiananmen square and that was where we headed the next day. It is of course most recently famous for the 1989 student protests that culminated in hundreds of killings, but the history of the square goes back a lot further, and it was the city's central site for meetings and free speech for many centuries. People still head to Tiananmen to make protests (a young boy headed there about a week ago with a board pleading for peace in Korea), but due to the high security and police presence there, you don't get very far (he was taken into custody). In fact you have to go through airport-type security just to walk onto the square. But when you do get past the X-ray machines and walk out onto Tiananmen, it is an immense space, which makes a nice change from all the concrete elsewhere in the city. It is the largest city square in the world (at 880m by 500m, shouldn't that make it the world's largest rectangle???), and it houses the two biggest television screens I have ever seen. Perhaps to make up for the smog that obscures your view of the square, these television screens show rippling waters, swimming fish and birds in flight... aaah the natural beauty of Beijing.
Opposite the square sits the entrance to the Forbidden city, complete with a huge portrait of Chairman Mao (no home is complete without one).Your first steps within the Forbidden city are hounded by people trying to sell you trips to the Great Wall, postcards, and pieces of “genuine Chinese art”, once you get past these the experience becomes a bit more peaceful.
The Forbidden city is thus called because it was the home of Emperors and their households for five hundred years (from Ming to Qing dynasties which ended in 1912), with no-one else allowed inside. It is absolutely immense and covers 178 acres of land.
It is a truly amazing and beautiful place to visit, and you can completely forget you are in the heart of Beijing. If you have seen any of the films shot within the Forbidden city (like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or The Last Emperor) you will be familiar with what lies within its walls, but in short, it is a warren of halls, living quarters, gardens and large open courtyards. Different sections of the city were reserved for the Emperor, his Emperess and also his concubines, of which he could have hundreds. Back in the Imperial days of China, the Forbidden City would have seemed deserted compared with the numbers of tourists that wander around it today. However, if you hang around long enough it becomes quieter towards the end of the day, and you might just catch the sun setting over the roof tiles.
Trying to capture a peaceful part of the Forbidden City, a dumb tourist got into my shot
After tramping for miles around the Forbidden City Christian and I treated ourselves to a massage. We took a taxi to a spa recommended by our hotel owner and whilst I was pummeled and prodded to within an inch of my muscle life by an angry man, Christian fell asleep in the oily hands of a gentle woman. After our massages we went (I limped) to the restaurant next door where we had an amazing and cheap dinner. Over the next few days we ate in a lots of good Chinese restaurants, and learnt the following:
Things we have learnt about eating in authentic Chinese restaurants:
1. You only ever get one menu
2. The waiter will hand you the menu and then wait impatiently for you to make your order
3. The food comes immediately (as if they knew what you wanted anyway)
4. Rice comes last if at all, and you will be considered poor or weird if you ask for it during your meal (supposedly rice is considered a poor staple, and you just use it to fill yourself up at the end)
5. Intestines are frequently in the dishes and they look like tasty pieces of fried bread
6. Intestines are not as tasty as fried bread
7. Meat always has bones in it. You should put it into your mouth eat what you can, and then spit onto the table what you can't digest (see point 9.)
8. Always think about the number of dishes you want and then half it before ordering
9. There is no such thing as table manners
10. Even after abiding by rule 8, you will never be able to eat everything!
The next day we were heading to the Great Wall of China with our Trans-sib friends for another day of “learning how things happen in China”. Read the next blog for an education!
Christian and Fiona
Location:China
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