Friday, October 5, 2012

Friday, October 5, 2012: Beijing

I slept until 4:30 AM, when I got up to bring my blog up to date (in longhand; maybe tonight or tomorrow morning I can type it and post it, which is what I’m now doing).
Breakfast in the hotel (at 6:00AM) was a huge buffet with both American and Chinese dishes. I had a perfect omelet (ham and cheese) and some bread that looked appetizing in its presentation and turned out to be similar to American fruit cake. All of this was accompanied by little air conditioning but plenty of American hard jazz, a little incongruous for a Chinese breakfast. I missed the, “Good morning, Mr. Cooper” from my breakfasts on the Siver Shadow, but the personnel here at the Shangri La (now called the China World Hotel) are polite and mostly helpful. I’ve come back to my room now to rest my back until 8:30 when today’s events – read bus and guide – continue. Our guide has said the wait for tickets to the cable car to the Wall can be as long as two hours. If the line looks long, she said, our bus will take us to another entrance for a long walk to the Wall. She volunteered wheelchairs for the handicapped and I happily raised my hand.
Angela and Jessica, our guide and her helper, herded us into our tour bus at 8:30 sharp and as we headed north from Beijing to the Great Wall, Angela pointed out the many high rise building, both residential and commercial, and quoted us prices like $1000 to $1300 per square meter for rent. The buildings are impressive mostly by size but can’t compare for architectural audacity with those in Shanghai. She also explained that in the 1970’s the government would pay all the expenses for continuing education in a university and then would assign a graduate to a job – whether trained for it or not, whether one liked it or not – for life. Now, the government pays only half; the family pays the other half, and one has to find one’s own job. The job market is tight and finding a job is often difficult. There was also then – and still the custom now – a law that said “one couple, one kid.” But life is now so expensive that some couples, including Angela and her husband, have no children. In the isolation of the 1950’s, Chairman Mao was considered a god and is still revered, but this led to a lot of corruption – one had to pay a bribe for anything – and this unrest let directly to the student uprising in 1989. Now everyone learns English as a second language and while many can read English, they find it hard to participate in and understand conversation. Like some other places in the world that I have been fortunate to visit – Bangkok and Delhi, for instance – traffic here in Beijing is horrendous. Drivers pay little attention to lane designations and just go where there’s an opening, ignoring the lanes, passing on the right and going straight through an intersection from the left turn only lane. It’s a little scary if you’re sitting right behind the bus driver, as I often was.
It has been reported that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure on earth that is visible from space. Built on the northern border of China by one of the first emperors of the Ming Dynasty, it was meant to protect the kingdom from the Mongols in the north. It was started in the 7th Century BC and largely completed about 221 BC by an emperor, cruel though he was, who also unified the many separate tribes in China, standardized many things like Chinese characters and weights and measures. But if you crossed him, you were sent to work on the Wall and many died there. That’s why the Wall is called “the longest cemetery on Earth.”
The Wall originally extended over 1,000 kilometers from east to west and was strengthened and lengthened by emperors of the Ching, Hun, Tan and Ming Dynasties so that by about 800 AD, it extended over 3000 kilometers.
Getting to that portion of the Wall we were to visit was not easy. Because of the continuing national holiday, the roads were very crowded, almost bumper to bumper, moving at about 40 miles an hour. The wait for tickets and standing in line for the cable car up to the Wall took about 45 minutes. Once at the top, where that fragment of the Wall can be visited, we encountered a thick crowd, covering the Wall like ants at a jam sandwich. And sandwiched we were, fully 6 or 8 abreast and moving up a ramp of about 40 degrees and then many steps over uneven rocks. All I could do was hang onto a railing at the side and watch my steps so I didn’t fall. Well, if I fell, I couldn’t actually fall; there were too many people crowded together for that. The whole experience was very scary and certainly not recommended for anyone with new knees. Still, with some help from Angela, who was tuned in to my difficulty, I made it up to the first tower, took a few photographs and almost slid back down. Most of the other seven in this Silver Sea extension didn’t make it even as far as I did. I was very happy to take the cable car down, although loading and unloading went very rapidly and even with the loader’s help, I got caught in a closing door and was dragged a few feet by the car until the loaded was able to extract me. Although seeing the Great Wall was one of my prime ambitions, I was happy for the experience to be over. I bought a “Great Wall” baseball cap for 30 yuan to memorialize the occasion.
On the way back to Beijing, I noticed that severely rugged mountains looked terraced. Angela said they were terraced and planted with fruit trees – apples, pears, and apricots.
We stopped at the largest jade workshop in China for lunch – the usual things, all delicious, served on the giant lazy Susan. I was the only one using chopsticks and finding it very difficult to lift peanuts and bok choy with my utensils. After lunch we visited (of course) the factory showroom where everything sold was made of jade or jadite (even more expensive). I bought only a couple of things but Daniel’s parents bought a huge horse so big it had to be shipped back to Dallas (where else?).
On my way out of the dining room, I was the subject of much curiosity by a group of Chinese tourists at another table. I could tell by the way they were all looking at me. So as I passed the table, I bowed and said, “Ne hao,” or hello in Chinese. They all laughed and wished me “ne hao,” in return.
Our final stop of the day was for a pedicab ride through the Hu Tong district where the houses from “old China” still stand. And people are actually living in 200 square feet. Inside one such house, we visited a woman who makes her living by painting scenes on the inside of snuff bottles. Very delicate and difficult work. She told us her grandfather bought the whole house and courtyard in about 1908 and she and her aunt have lived there all their lives, in a space about 10% of the original grandfather’s property, the balance confiscated during the Cultural Revolution and assigned to 10 other families. She  lamented the tiled floor, wishing it were still dirt so she could be anchored to the world and feel the chi (or energy) from the earth.
We drove by the “bird’s nest,” constructed for the 2008 Olympics, and stopped long enough for photographs but we were all tired and soon headed back to our hotel for a rest before our farewell Peiking Duck dinner at Da Dong, famous for the dish. Each small piece of duck is cut so as to contain a little meat and a little fat. You drag the duck pieces through some plum sauce and fold them into a very thin pancake with a choice of other tastes – garlic, celery, cantaloupe, hot peppers, sugar – and eat the package, like Moo Shoo pork, with your fingers. I thought it all quite bland and hardly worth the fuss. Julie wouldn’t even taste it.
Tomorrow is home again.
Stay tuned.

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