Day 14
(Beijing, China)
For the past 2 weeks, we've had the luxury of traveling to places where English - both spoken and written - is readily available. We've been spoiled so far and we know it. That, my friends is about to end - enter the dragon: China!
Another way we have been spoiled until this point is with the weather. It's pretty much been hovering around the mid-80 degree mark everywhere we've been, but now we're headed to the capital of the People's Republic of China - Beijing - and evidently they just had a massive temperature drop and record snowfall a week ago. Lucky us.
Scene: Our plane taxiing on the runway to the arrival gate just after landing in Beijing (local time: 7am)
me: "Babe, why does everybody on the plane all of a sudden have gigantic puffy coats
on? " (keep in mind we are arriving from 88-degree Bali and everyone - us included -
got ON the plane with tank tops and shorts...) "I thought the weather here was
going to be in the 60s - I packed 1 sweater."
mikie: "hmmm... The ground crews all seem to be really bundled up. Is that snow on
the ground?"
me: "ugggggghhhhhhhh."
End scene.
I grew up with a girl named Amanda. We met when I was like 5 years old - a bit later we were on the same "co-ed" pitching-machine baseball team and we were the only 2 girls. We were also in "Indian Princesses" (wow - apparently now they're called "Adventure Guides" - have we taken political correctness too far? I mean, seriously - we used to be awarded with "BEAR CLAWS" as marks of success. What do they call them now - "FRIENDSHIP LEAVES"?!?!?!? When will the madness stop?! Sorry, I digress...) together and by the time I was 12 or so, we'd play on the Nintendo power pad (the "original" Wii-Fit for those of you who may have grown up after the 1980s) at her house at least 5 nights a week during the summer. Amanda was always an adventurer and I loved hanging out with her. After she graduated college, she began travelling around the globe and ended up settling in Beijing. I am sad to say that we lost touch for a while, but about once a year, we'd somehow manage to get a quick email to each other to touch base.
Then came July of 2009 when Michael began planning our trip and said "Hey - we have to go to northern China for this trip - would you want to make a pit stop and see the Great Wall while we're in the neighborhood?" After googling the location of the Great Wall (kidding!), I thought - hey that's near Amanda! Fast forward to our last day in Bali and I emailed her again and told her we'd be there in the morning. She gave me her cell, some of the best "local" travel tips, and directions to a place we could meet up after she and her g/f got off work, and we were set. I was so excited - we hadn't seen each other in a decade - a decade!
The first tip Amanda gave us was that we might have a hard time communicating to get a cab from the airport to our hotel, so we should print the hotel name off the internet before arriving so we could easily just hand it to the cabbie, sit back, and enjoy the ride. Great tip - GREAT. My comprehension skills - not so much...
Scene: Us walking - bags in tow - to the taxi area outside the airport, me with scrap of paper in hand - both of us shivering...
me: (hands paper to first taxi driver who looks at it, hands it back to me, stares blankly
and says something to me in Chinese) "Holiday Inn Beijing Downtown, yes?" stupid
American.
cabbie #1: "something in Chinese..."
mikie: (nervous laughter) "maybe we should try another one..."
me: "hmmm... maybe they can't read English?"
mikie: "honey, didn't you print out the hotel name in Chinese characters so they could
read it?"
me: "...... um......... yeeeeaaaahhhh... apparently that would have been a better idea."
End scene.
Darwin awards here I come.
Amanda tip #2: Take a MULTI-LINGUAL (check.) card from the hotel with the phone number, etc on it (they have little language guides on the back that translate things like "take me here (point to a place on the map)", "I'd like to get out now" or "that fare is too high". All very helpful suggestions - but a little foreboding...) and hop a cab to HoHai which is a historic neighborhood (she knows what we like!) around a lake.
HoHai was very pretty. But it was
24 degrees. The lake was partially frozen over and one poor
lonesome little mallard was still trying to keep the dream alive and stay on his lake - frozen or not. (click on the pic &
it'll elarge so you can see him)
We found a place for lunch and were VERY proud of
ourselves for ordering chicken & cashews, rice and beer in Chinese! Okay, so we also enlisted the aid of the picture-heavy menu and pointed a lot but the fact was that we got what we ordered and it was delicious. We steered clear of the sheeps head, which I thought was a fish, until Mikie pointed to the picture of a sheep's head. (Ahh the importance of a well-placed apostrophe.) You know - the thing at the end of a lamb's neck. On a plate. Yeah. Yummy.
Beijing is home to over 17 million people and is respected as China's political, educational and cultural center. (Amanda says there are 1,000 more cars on the road per day.) They hosted the 2008 Olympics too. So LOTS of folks are moving in LOTS of different directions at nearly every hour of the day. Luckily they have a really modern mass-transit subway system the likes of which I haven't seen since living just outside - and working in - Washington, D.C. And, since the Olympics were here, almost everything in the subway system has English subtitles: heeellllooo, freedom to travel on our own!
Amanda tip #3: Take said
subway to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. A 1-way ticket cost $2 yiyuan which is like $0.30 cents. (Notice the sun at Tiananmen? It's like 3pm. Beijing also has a bit of an air-quality issue. I mentioned there are over 17 million people living there, right?)
New masters of the subway, we headed to the east side of downtown to the area where the restaurant was that Amanda and Georgie had made special reservations for us. We weren't going to meet until 6pm, so Mikie and I began exploring the area. We found a coffee shop (that I swore was a house of ill repute based on the dim lighting and swagged fabric
that was draped over EVERYTHING) and, after some intense study, were extremely impressed with
ourselves for figuring out what the Chinese characters were for "coffee" and "whiskey" - with NO help from pictures might I add!
Amanda, Georgie and their friend Huongwai treated us to a feast. I've never sat at a table where more varieties of dishes were served. Chinese cabbage, Peking duck, all kinds of Chinese beer, peanuts, naked oats, fried apple gremlin - and a ton of other stuff I forgot.
It was also 2 days before Thanksgiving and we knew we'd be on a long plane ride for turkey day, so we figured there wasn't any better time to celebrate early than right then. It was just like Ralphie Parker's family Christmas dinner in "A Christmas Story", except without the singing...
We headed back to the subway with full tummies, but when we got there we realized that we didn't have exact change for the ticket machine, and it being like 10:30pm, there were no human tellers on duty. We went back above ground in search of change, happened upon a place we thought was a restaurant but ended up being a burlesque show where all the girls were dressed as Princess Jasmine, were personally invited in by the English-speaking manager who was gracious enough to make change for us, and we were back in business.
Tomorrow we'd be off to see the Great Wall!
