We woke up at 6am with both a wakeup call and the alarm from
the hotel clock (which actually worked, so far I had been 0 for 2 on
that). After getting cleaned up we went
downstairs and had a quick breakfast at the Italian restaurant which serves as
their breakfast buffet which is included in the room. I had fruit, some bread,
a small Danish and some homemade yogurt.
I also had some orange juice and some of their machine made coffee. The
yogurt was interesting. I liked it. From
breakfast it was to the agency where we bought the tour in the hotel where we
met our guide and were immediately put on a van for our tour for the day.
Our tour guide was named Vicky and there were a total of 7
people on the tour. We had us and 2 from Chile (which made Daniela happy for
the chance to speak some Spanish), a couple from the US that live in Hong Kong
where the woman was actually from Sweden (that’s a mouthful, guess we’ll be
something like that someday) and a guy from Sweden also. The last 3 knew each
other because the two guys worked for the same company. The tour started with a drive of about 2hours
to the Badaling region of the Great Wall. This is a section of the wall that is
from the Ming Dynasty and as such only 400-500 years old and in decent repair.
The guide said they have not renovated it but we all think she was wrong, there
was too much that looked new. She explained a little bit about the wall but she
spoke softly for someone Chinese and her accent was kind of tough at points so
I am sure I missed some important information.
We got to the site with only a small amount of traffic which was
nice. There we all chose to pay extra
for a cable car ride to the top rather than trying to hike there
ourselves. The ride apparently was
supposed to cost 80 round trip the Swedish woman told us but we were asked for
100 so the guide took an extra cut for the purchase. The CNY or Chinese yuan is
supposed to be about 6 to 1 to USD. That
means 100 is about $16 and she took about $3 each extra. The cable car ride was
actually very short. The guide just dropped us off and we had 2 hours to run
around the wall area we were in. The wall is apparently something in the range
of 4800 miles long a had been built in various stages since the time frame of
200bc. Many sections are now
collapsed. The area we were in had a
highest point of 840 meters or so and we had to walk some steep slopes and
stairs to get that high. Without the guide it was just basically a free walk
and Daniela and I climbed up then met up with one of the Chileans (Chilenos)
named Claudio and walked around and down and in the other direction with him
for a while. We took a ton of pictures.
The weather was sunny and very hot. I was sweating almost instantly and
got a sunburn by the end of the day. The wall was very impressive to be on and
see, especially knowing we had seen other portions of it significantly far away
on the drive to and away from where we went.
It is an incredible undertaking. It is too bad it never really
worked. We managed to get a bottle of water
or two on the wall and met up with Claudio and German from Chile to head back
down the cable cars to the van. At the
bottom Daniela and I bought some coolie hats to ward off the sun. The process
is all bargaining and we were given an initial price of 220 each and Daniela
talked them down to 80 because some Mexicans we met had said that was how much
they paid.
The van then drove us on to the Peking Garden Restaurant
area. Of course the Peking Garden is not just a restaurant but also a “Jade
Museum” which means it is really a jade store only slightly disguised. We had a
guide there that told us a little about Jade but really there was only a small
amount of real information and the rest was just sales pitch. No one bought
anything at the jade store which I think made Vicky unhappy. We were all sure
she gets a cut if anyone purchases anything.
The restaurant was generic Chinese food and had rice, soup (which was
tomato based), two forms of chicken, one thing they called beef that none of us
were certain was beef, cabbage, broccoli, fried apples, jasmine tea and
eventually some sweet buns. The food was
reasonably ok though not the most exciting in the world. It was all served
family style. Anna, the Swede, is vegetarian and couldn’t eat any much food there
because even the broccoli and soup appeared to have meat based broths used.
From lunch we moved on to the Ming Tomb where we got to see
a reenactment of a special ritual that was performed during holy days in the
past. The descriptions was not great and to be sure the ritual was fairly
boring but apparently they only reenact it on weekends at 2:30pm which is when
we arrived. At the tombs we didn’t actually get to see the tombs, just the
visitor center museum and the performance.
The performance maybe too 15 minutes so with the time we had I expect
the tour is typically just that museum anyway.
The museum had some interesting information about Emperor Yongle of the
Ming Dynasty. The coolie hats helped
with this area to protect me from the sun.
This was definitely less than I was hoping for in the tour.
We were then driven on to the city of Beijing again and did
a drive by of the Olympic park from 2008. It was literally a drive by and you
couldn’t really do much but look out the window as Vicky explained a couple
things. They apparently don’t let tours inside according to her. Since we were in a moving van I didn’t take
any pictures of this part of the tour.
The van continued on to a “silk museum” which meant of
course silk store. At least Lisa explained a lot about the process this time
and made a very good demonstration about silk and silk making before the sales
pitches started. We took a long time here because Daniela bought some stuff as
well as most all of the other tourists in our group so there was a bit of
shopping to be done. They had some really nice stuff but most of it was so
expensive it wasn’t funny. Especially the silk Hello Kitty sheets ($400+ US).
They were neat but not worth that sort of money. In any event, even though this was a trap to
get us into a store it was ok by me.
The next trap was a “tea museum” where we were supposed to
do a “tea ceremony” but really we did a tea tasting of a couple types of tea
and had a bit of explanation about them and the history of tea. This museum was yet again a shop and they
wanted us to buy tea. We bought some stuff but not the full sale stuff they
wanted us to buy (a canister was about $80 US but they also added another box
of tea and a cup for that sale (plus a thing they call the pee pee boy which
tells you the water is hot enough to make tea, long story). Daniela bought some stuff but not the full
purchase but Vicky was nice enough to get her the pee pee boy though the store
didn’t want to give it to her. The teas were nice but I have a ton of it at
home and so does Daniela’s house so it was more about the cup she wanted than
anything.
That was to be it for the tour but we wanted to go the
Peking Opera in the evening. We ran so late in the various stores and in
general that where we were supposed to arrive back at around 5pm it was more
like 6:15pm. Vicky said we would arrive late to the opera if we did that
because it is very far away and she couldn’t guarantee that traffic wouldn’t
make us even more late. We talked and decided we would go to the Kung Fu show
because it was closer and we could arrive on time. But this meant no dinner and
no shower (which I desperately wanted after the hours of sweat). So we pretty much got to drop some stuff off
at the room, pay the agency for the tickets and then get back on the van.
Claudio and German were not going to the same hotel and we detoured them to the
site before they got back but they were gracious.
We got in and immediately found the snack counter. We bought
two bags of some really disgusting chips and a couple of cans of beer and
settled down for a minute or two before finding our seats and waiting for the
show to start. The title of the show was called Chun Yi: The Legend of Kung
Fu. The idea behind it was that it was
the story of a boy who was afraid to join the temple to learn Kung Fu (afraid
to leave his mother behind and the world behind) who was being told a story by
the temple’s master. The story explains how Chun Yi learned kung fu and became
a great warrior and fought with the temptations of life along the way before
becoming the temple’s new master when the old master died. Of course the old man telling the story was
Chun Yi. The demonstrations went from martial arts to dance to acrobatics and
there was some music that was nice involved. They didn’t allow pictures so I
didn’t take any. They also did some of the feats of strength and will things
like the spears in the chest and the bed of swords and nails and all that along
the way. It was very entertaining and Daniela and I enjoyed it.
After the show we had to get our own taxi back. We asked
Vicky before she left us and she told us it should be about 40 to get to the
hotel. We walked outside and the taxis waiting there were trying to charge us
100 and were only going down to 50 so we walked away from them. We crossed the
street and two different motorcycle taxis tried to offer us. We explained we
were too far. One of the said it would be 10-15 minutes which was not remotely
possible as the van took half an hour. Daniela was laughing hysterically at the
idea of the moto taxi taking us there but we didn’t take it obviously. Another
taxi wouldn’t tell us a price so we sent him away. He and one of the moto taxi
guys were saying horrible things about us in Chinese for a few moments before they
both gave up and drove away. We then
found a guy in a mini-van driving an illegal taxi (like many of the taxis in
Lima). He agreed to the 40 price and we
got in but he then picked up 2 more and offered to drive them as they were
going to place “on the way” to our hotel. This meant he drove us in a less than
direct route and right after we dropped the two guys off we got stuck in
traffic that made us take a half an hour more than it should have from that
point. It should have only been another 10 minutes and chances are if we took
the direct route we would have been back to the hotel in half an hour instead
of an hour and 15 minutes. Aside from
that he didn’t drive fast and every stall of the traffic or red light meant he
was not paying attention and huge gaps would open in front of him. That meant
that 3 other cars cut him off and we started to yell go every time he was slow.
We were getting perturbed at the process because I am sure we could have shaved
another 15 minutes off if he was just attentive and quick. When we got to the
hotel he tried to say he didn’t have enough change for my 100 and was trying to
get more than 50 off us. Daniela took the 100 back and went to get it changed
in the hotel while I waited with the guy.
We gave him the second bag of chips because we both thought the Italian
red meat flavor was disgusting. He was
miffed that he didn’t get more out of us but I pointed out he is the one that
got us stuck in traffic and Daniela definitely held her ground and beat his
tricks. She is much more a city girl than I am.
We immediately got into the Italian restaurant which was
still open. I ordered a pizza and Daniela had the last call on the buffet. I
also had a draft beer. We ate and there
was a singing group of women in the lounge next door we could hear. When we were done we finally got up to the
room to shower and I pretty much passed out instantly.
The pictures from China day 2 are here.
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