Sept 12th, 2009
HONG KONG!
After four months of organized and charming European cities, clean fast trains, varied cuisine and way too many palaces and castles, Asia is a new world! My first stop was Hong Kong, but since I had lived years ago in Hong Kong, this was more like revisiting an old friend-- of course, many more skyscrapers tower over the bay now. To walk into the street outside my ‘hotel’ is to join the throngs of Chinese, among which flow a few Indians, Australians, Filipinos and others. Nathan Road has the crowds, the double-decker buses, the plethora of street signs jutting out from the buildings. The city still smells like people, laundry, the sea, and exhaust. Good old Hong Kong.
The flight here from Frankfurt was good in that I had two seats to myself. Air China served mediocre food and I watched 3 movies: the one about the life of Jonny Cash (I hadn’t learned that he was partially abused in childhood or that he’d spent time in the pen), Transformers (mildly entertaining but utterly ridiculous; like no one would look out the window and see a 30 foot robot in the yard), and a great movie…that I completely forgot. Once in Hong Kong and through customs, I took the train into a main hub of Kowloon: Tsim Sha Choi. Even on this busy street, on a gray, hot & humid day, I easily found my ‘hotel’, a hostel in a somewhat dilapidated building called Miradou Mansions. It’s 16 stories high, and each floor has 1 or more hostels/guesthouses. I’d taken a private room on the 14th floor, in a hostel stuck at the end of a concrete and dirty hallway. The room itself was…well, the bed itself took up three quarters of the ‘room’--and it was a little bed. The ‘bathroom did have the usual sink, toilet and shower, but a shower head that sprayed onto the floor, the sink, and the toilet. Good drainage, I have to say. I stayed one night and moved downstairs the next morning.
The USA Hostel was a tad nicer. The bed only took up half the room. The bathroom was the same. I’d get used to standing under cool water and spraying water madly about the whole bathroom. Interestingly the ‘office’ was located in an non-air conditioned hallway of concrete. Here, two rickety wooden tables (one blocking an elevator that didn’t stop on this floor anyway) made up the only furniture. Everything out here looked rather grimy, laundry hung from rafters, and the humidity was stifling because the hallways bordered an open center of the building (like a courtyard --only we’re 13 stories up). Thankfully, my room had AC.
Hong Kong is divided into 3 areas: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. In the nineteenth century, the British leased Hong Kong Island from the Chinese on a 99-year lease. Kowloon and the New Territories are on the mainland but are still part of Hong Kong proper. Altogether there are several million residents, all of whom enjoy a kind of unique democracy in Hong Kong (British ruled for so long) and didn’t want to live under Chinese rule after the lease expired in 1997. China, however, allows Hong Kong some autonomy. The city has its own currency, administration, schools, etc.
Aside from riding double-decker narrow street trams through insanely busy streets, I got to meet my ex-wife’s brother and three sisters. I’d phoned from my hotel room and arranged with Aileen to meet my ex brother-in-law, a fellow named Mannie. After a morning spent at the corner Starbucks sipping Latte (the weather outside was gray and miserable), I met Mannie in front of Miradou Mansions—in what we jokingly referred to as the “lobby”—a rather seedy-looking collection of tiny booth-like shops, hawkers, and Indian touts pestering passing tourists to buy copy watches. I suppose it wouldn’t have been so shady a place if the floor had been cleaned in the last decade or so.
Anyway, Mannie and I walked down to the harbor—which is truly magnificent. I had thought Dubai to possess an inspiring skyline, but nothing comes close to Hong Kong’s. Hundreds of skyscrapers of various heights and shapes stand alongside the water and back up into to the low green mountains of Hong Kong Island. The skyscrapers are planted at various levels of the hills themselves. We crossed the harbor via the ever-popular Star Ferry—a collection of two-deck boats that have been faithfully making the ten minute crossing between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon for decades. The gray clouds and gusty winds blew the fragrance of the sea through the open ferry, and we were one among many sea craft on a choppy sea that afternoon.
One can see pics of Hong Kong island so I won’t waste time with descriptions—except to say that the main street, Queensway Road, is alive with thousands of human beings and as many shops. This includes a 7-11 on every corner—but minus the gas pumps. And Hong Kong residents must love McDonalds, which are everywhere. Aside from these vestiges of American capitalism, everything is Chinese: signs jut out into the street; skinny colorful double-decker trams rattle past, red lanterns decorate alleyways, buses belching exhaust rumble by.
In the evening, I met the rest of the Hong Kong contingent of the Miranda family. Three sisters were here: Aileen, Rose, and “Baby”, who must have been in her late thirties. They brought along a niece named Annabelle, a 19-year old who had just been in Hong Kong for a couple months and was dreadfully missing her family back in the Philippines. All of them worked here as domestic helpers (Except Mannie, who flew over recently to look for work). They all showed up at the entrance of Miradou Mansions and I took them upstairs so we could Skype with Yoli—they hadn’t seen their sister for several years. So out in a hot and humid concrete corridor, I set up my laptop and opened Skype. For the most part it worked. Aileen was first to sit awkwardly in front of the laptop and see her sister. But one by one, they each got a chance to speak as two Chinese hostel workers and a backpacker from Australia looked on in amused and happy interest.
It was dusk by the time we walked down to the waterfront on the Kowloon side. From here you can see the bay and the stunning colorful sight of Hong Kong Island’s waterfront. We gazed and snapped pictures (with a number of others) for twenty minutes before heading to …you guessed it…a Chinese restaurant for some eats. Aileen introduced me to the Chinese style of dining: everyone orders something and it’s placed on the table for everyone to select from. I ordered something similar to Sweet and Sour chicken (my most reliable Chinese dish in the USA); it was more like sour bone-riddled chicken, but nevertheless there were several items on the table that were quite edible, even tasty. I am not an ‘experimenter’ when it comes to food.
A word about Chinese food in China: it’s altogether different from what one finds on the table in the US or Europe. As I’ve walked Chinese streets gazing at those little old ladies who prepare various dishes out in the open on a little stove of bubbling concoctions—or passed cafes with big bold posters displaying eye-catching plates of food, I am constantly reminded of Klingon food. One of the dishes that Klingons savor is Gagh: serpent worms. According to Wikipedia, “Gagh is usually served as fresh as possible. It is traditionally prepared and eaten by poisoning the worms and eating them in sauce while they are still alive.” Well, honestly, I’m sure I saw this somewhere along the road. Call me a Midwestern boy from the cornfields, but I just cannot ingest noodles in black sauce with black snail-like creatures ‘swimming’ in broth. Naturally, noodles and healthy veggies make up the bulk of Chinese food; it’s just that it doesn’t look anything like what is served in western Chinese restaurants. After dinner, I returned to my hostel room to catch up on my journal, throw on the AC, and splash some water around my bathroom once again. Then it was time to sleep.
Friday evening caught me out on Hong Kong island doing a bit of walking around. Mannie had told me that on Friday nights, most of the tens of thousands of domestic helpers (maids) were enjoying the delights of a day off from their slave labor; that meant a trip into town to meet girlfriends, shop, enjoy some food and a good yack. I was supposed to meet Mannie on a Friday evening in front of a particular department store, and by a miracle and nothing else, I stumbled upon the place on Queensway Road. I had to plow through thousands of young Filipino girls on a dark street in the midst of these towering skyscrapers—quite the scene, and quite the noise. Filipino-girls-night out is much more pleasant than Friday night in Dubai, which is Indian guy’s night out, a hectic time when thousands of Indian and Pakistani laborers stroll along the Creek and elsewhere. Anyway, after Mannie showed up during a bit of a drizzle (forgot my umbrella again), we walked along looking for something to eat. I got the feeling he didn’t want McDonalds, so again we chose a Chinese café (crowded of course). My dish, when it arrived, looked pretty good: rice, a side of some unidentifiable green veggies, and chicken. I took my knife and cut into a piece of chicken. To my consternation, my knife met bone and gristle. I said to Manny, “This chicken didn’t have much meat on its little bones.” He thought that was funny. I figured out then that Chinese chickens must go through some sort of slice and dice machine, and whatever comes out gets thrown in the pot. I sighed and enjoyed my rice and vegetables. Manny just smiled a lot while feasting.
During my days in Hong Kong, I saw two other people regularly. The first was an older security guard whose job was nothing more than watching the elevators that climbed the fourteen floors of Miradou Mansion. One elevator hit the odd numbered floors; the other stopped only at even-numbered floors. Go figure. Anyway, one morning as I came out of the elevator, and the old guy in a modest uniform was ushering a line of several waiting people into the first elevator and then watching two cameras that showed whatever was happening on the elevators. And that was his entire function in life. Somehow, it saddened me. Into my mind popped the old phrase “there but for the grace of God go I”. Even the Wal-mart greeters, I thought, probably have more free time and a more satisfying existence than this poor man. After watching the elevators for a long 12-hour shift or more, he likely went back to a pretty lean bare-bones room to shovel in some rice and bare-bones chicken, and then sleep.
The other person that I saw each day was Beverly, a sweet girl who worked at Starbucks. Her English was good and she always had a smile for everybody. And she remembered my name each day. I’d go in with my laptop, select a seat near the outlet, plug in, and logon. Each morning I enjoyed latte and made up for shelling out the money by skipping a meal. Beverly would sometimes stop by for a quick chat about my travels, always smiling. When I mentioned to her about the bony, gristle-laden chicken, she said, “We Chinese think that’s the best part! We love it.”
At any rate, as luck would have it, a typhoon was passing just north of Hong Kong. This brought gale winds, rain, and dark skies. One afternoon, the weather cleared a number of people from the streets and some shops closed. Most of the time, it didn’t do more than sprinkle. I hopped on a double-decker bus on Hong Kong Island, one that would wind along the mountain up towards the Peak—a great vantage point to see the city. But that wasn’t my mission.
A last couple of memories of my days in Hong Kong: taking a public bus in order to visit my old home: the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital. That was 1982! The bus drove through Central and then began winding its way up the verdant low mountains as the rain began falling gently, which made it troublesome to take any pictures out of the windows. By the time the bus got halfway up the hill, and by memory I was hoping I was in the right place, torrents fell from the sky just as I stepped off the bus. Thank heavens for umbrellas. Even so, I was fairly wet as I climbed the steps that led up to the hospital.
The reunion was bittersweet. At the entrance of the hospital were a dozen or more people—most wearing the face masks that a few Chinese wore while out in public; at the hospital, it was a req precaution. Visitors sat on benches or chairs just outside the main doors watching taxis go around a circular driveway. I noted the building nearby in which I’d lived with the Huttons back in 1981, a dear couple who were volunteering their time to serve God. Inside the hospital, the lobby and halls looked the same, and yet different. There were no signs of Western faces; in 1982, Aussies, Brits and Americans had been at least a quarter of the staff. I chatted briefly with a smiling, happy young woman working at the reception. She confirmed that no one from my past was currently working at the hospital, but invited me to visit the cafeteria on the 6th floor for some hot tea until the rain ended. Interestingly, while in the elevator ascending to the cafeteria, at a 4th-floor stop, two nurse’s aides wheeled a gurney into the elevator—with an old and sick-looking Chinese woman strapped to it.
The rain had pretty much stopped by the time I caught my bus back down to Central. I met Mannie and we took the subway clear out to the New Territories, where he is staying. The place, a small 2-story home connected to other homes, belonged to Aileen’s employers but they weren’t living there so had invited Mannie to stay there while he looked for work. Mannie and I shared some wine and had a nice chat before I had to get back to Miradou Mansions.
BEIJING! Capital of the ancient Middle KingdomMy last morning in Hong Kong, I hit Starbucks to do some laptop work and then wandered the streets in Kowloon. By mid-afternoon, I checked out of the USA Hostel, and with heavy backpack on my poor old back, caught the subway for the train station. I had been wondering if it would be a dark, grimy affair with old Chinese ladies serving up puppy soup, but I had a surprise in store for me. The place was more like a small, modern shopping center—complete with a McDonalds and a delightful candy store. The place positively gleamed. The train, when the hundreds of others and I boarded, was also a pleasant surprise. I’d imagined a broken-down train filled with sweating, stinky bodies, spit on the floor, old torn fabric on the berths—but what I found was a train that was cleaner than many trains in southern Europe.
In China there are various classes to choose from: hard chair, soft chair, hard sleeper, soft sleeper. The most luxurious is the soft sleeper: there are 4 comfy berths to a “room” with a door that closes for privacy. However, most tourists are perfectly happy with the hard sleeper, which is 6 berths to a ‘room’, (there’s no door); it simply fronts the corridor, where a dozen lucky people can sit in handy little pull-down seats that measure only a few inches across. Anyway, hard sleeper is actually pretty soft and I was quite happy to be relegated to this class of travel.
On the train, I met David, from Belgium. An amiable guy of thin build, we got to talking in the corridor (as the only two Caucasians would do) about train travel and Hong Kong. “I had to go all the way to Hong Kong to sign some document with a notary watching,” he explained. “I’m working on a computer game with some Chinese guys in Beijing and we’re ready to submit it to Microsoft.” As it turns out, he had hired three Chinese IT guys (stealing one from Microsoft actually) to work on this computer game—which takes a lot of planning and work, apparently. I’d had no idea of course. Anyway, we headed down to the restaurant car for a look-see, passing through what seemed to be a hundred or so cars filled with passengers either relaxing in the corridor or stretched out in bunks. We got a few stares going through the cars, being white boys.
In the restaurant car, tables were covered with mostly-clean white table cloths and the waitress, a harried-looking young woman (odd since the only customers so far seemed to be a bevy of males in uniforms smoking at the back of the car) explained in Chinese to us that we couldn’t order food yet. She said this in Chinese of course, which didn’t help us. The expression and motions made the meaning clear, though. David asked, “But the sign above the bar says 3pm to 5pm.” She shook her head and said, “No, 4pm, 4pm.” “Can we order drinks?” he asked. She nodded at this so we ordered tea and were content to let the train glide along, the gentle rocking easier on the nerves than some of Amtrak’s trains. The waitress brought over a bowl of peanuts and wandered off. The scenery was okay, nothing great: mostly flat land, some of which was farmed, some low hills too. But it was China! We’d pass villages that consisted mostly of feeble wooden structures and one or two-story red-brick buildings, all of which looked like the next quake would bring down. See my pictures.
Later that evening, we and the other passengers hung out in the car. Well, what else is there to do on a train that doesn’t have a lounge car (God bless Amtrak!)? David and I chatted on and off in the corridor. There were only about twenty fold down seats in the corridor; the lucky few get them; the others lay in their berths, some already asleep; others read. Some visited other passengers, sitting in the lower berths. And here’s a lesson for you if you’re ever planning to travel on a Chinese train in “hard sleeper”: make sure you book the middle bunk. The top bunk is too close to the ceiling and a bit cramped; besides, in the top bunk you can hear all too loudly whatever Chinese music is pouring out of the speakers set close to the ceiling. The bottom bunk , regardless of who paid for it, might become a meeting place for others. Only the middle bunk remains strictly yours AND fairly quiet though you can still hear the old guys three doors down hacking and spitting (hopefully) into their hankies.
At night in my bunk, I alternated between a fitful sleep and pulling back the curtains to gaze out the window at the wonders of night-time China. For the most part, when passing through one town or another (a “town” in China might have tens of thousands of inhabitants, of course), I saw, in the flash it takes the train to pass a highway, scattered buildings, some multi-storied, cars whose headlights poked with weak lighting through dimly lit streets. But just plain weird were the images of decrepit brick structures close to the tracks—often hidden after about a second and a half by some barrier. It was as if “someone” didn’t want this side of China to be seen. Perhaps during the day it’s just “old buildings”, but at night it’s ghostly.
The train pulled into Beijing late the following afternoon. And how do I describe Beijing? The train station at which David and I’d arrived was mammoth and only 1 of the stations in this ancient capital city. Lugging our backpacks, we followed the other passengers through security, our packs going through the X-ray machine and an official glancing at our passports and ticket. Elsewhere in the world, train stations are a haven from the kinds of security arrangements one endures at airports; but not in China. Anyway, we finished and walked with the throngs through the cavernous station until we got out front, where I just stopped to gasp. Looking up, I noted that the station was as high as a cathedral with the words “Beijing North Station” way up high. “Impressive, isn’t it?” David stated. I could only think that one could put possibly a hundred or more Omaha Amtrak stations on just the ground level of this place.
I then turned to observe a wide boulevard crowded with traffic, a sickly-looking gray and yellow sky, and people everywhere. “The sky is like this a lot,” David said. “Come on, we’ll find a taxi, I hope. I can’t remember exactly where my office is.” On the train, he’d kindly invited me to stay with him and his Chinese buddies in their office/home for a couple of nights. “It’ll be a bit busy with us working against a deadline, but at least you’ll have Internet.” The only problem for David was that he’d lost his cell phone in Hong Kong and wasn’t quite sure how to explain to the taxi driver where he lived. Meanwhile, my backpack was getting a little heavy. We crossed the street, which in Beijing is often slightly risky because taxi drivers simply do not stop—even when they should. The sky wasn’t the only thing murky in Beijing, so were the traffic rules.
Fortunately, the one word David remembered (Woo-doo-kai) was enough for the taxi driver to understand ‘approximately’ where David lived, so off we went with a driver who like all the others tended to accelerate until the taxi fender came close to that of another car, and then locate his brake with alarming ferocity. After a few minutes, once the driver had maneuvered onto a street of gridlock, I had time to notice that the sky had turned an even sicker shade of yellow/brown/green. Back home I’d think “tornado weather” but here it was simply pollution. “How do people breathe?” I asked in amazement. David shrugged. “I had breathing problems for weeks after arriving.”
The intersection where the taxi dumped us (like everything else in China—BIG) looked a bit inviting, meaning of course that I’d spotted a McDonalds on one corner. Things couldn’t be all bad. Some French café sat on another corner, and though the street was a bit dirty and the traffic was this odd blend of shiny Toyota Corollas and crappy bicycles sharing the road, the sheer alien-feeling that possessed me made me happy. I was in another world.
Well, David thought he remembered how to get home. “Probably this way, just ten minutes or so I think,” he said. It turned out to be more like fifteen to twenty, but despite the heaviness of my pack (darn lugging a computer and all those boxes of insulin—both quite necessary to my life), we got safely to his apartment, which I’d imagined as a nice, clean office with perhaps a separate guestroom where I could sleep that night. Actually, the room was half taken up by work tables and the other half by a sofa and bed. Windows and a cluttered balcony beyond looked out at some gray building fronts. Laundry hung from nylon cords among the other assortment of odds and ends packed onto the balcony, and the room, too, showed that guys were living here (though one was married to a delightful girl named Sarah).
Anyway, it was marvelous of the guys to put up with a stranger in their midst as they hovered over computers and labored over their game (which they ultimately “sold” to Microsoft). After awhile, David suggested we go find some food. “We don’t cook much,” he explained. “When restaurant food is so cheap, like a couple dollars for a mountain of food, why cook at home?” He, Luke and Sarah, and myself walked through night neighborhoods utterly alien to me: four and five story buildings, some at odd angles, weak lighting behind windows, streets busy with pedestrians, dogs, rickshaws, cars rumbling through. In a way it all had charm since traffic wasn’t thick in these neighborhoods, though Sarah pulled me out of the way of bicyclists as well as a car, all the while chatting to me in mostly good English. David and Luke lagged behind, still deep in “game” talk. At the restaurant, I allowed my hosts to do the ordering. What eventually showed up were plates of food that we would all share: tofu and green beans in some dark sauce, bits of chicken in another sauce, an unidentifiable polyglot of veggies in yet another bowl, bowls of steaming rice, and the local beer.
We feasted, and I was an instant source of humor with my pathetic attempt at handling chopsticks (forget the cutlery in China!). Still, I managed to grab onto a chunk of tofu by the time David and company had finished off half the food, thus fighting off starvation. While we ate, Sarah voiced a political view widely held in China, even by the young: Tibet’s violence was mostly the fault of westerners. I replied with a nod and another clumsy attempt to get the chopsticks to grab a piece of sauce-laden chicken and then some rice (this involves scooping, at least for unpracticed foreigners).
That night, the guys worked late on their game. They each had their own job to do. There was a lot of technical talk, fretting, toying, tweaking, and so on. I was thankful to be a low-paid English teacher with few headaches (“why can’t students in college put periods after sentences?” was less a concern than “what if Microsoft turns us down after we’ve invested thousands of hours and dollars into this darn game?). Finally, though, at around 1:30am, David called it quits for the night and I was left alone in the room with my bed. I undressed, and exhausted, lay down only to discover that the “mattress”, if we shall call it that, felt more like a soft rock. If it hadn’t been for a poor night of sleep on the train the night before, I wouldn’t have gotten a wink; fortunately, I soon fell into a fitful sleep.
The next morning, only having the great sum of two dollars in my wallet, I decided to hit the bank and test out the ATM. Believe me, I prayed that the Bank of the West wouldn’t screw things up by denying my foreign ATM requests. I’d called their customer service twice before departing Nebraska to make sure they understood that, yes, I would be in some far-off places on the other side of the good Earth, and they’d assured me that all would go well. But as I walked along the street that morning (under a predictably gray sky), passing the morning hackers and spitters, and not-too-heavy traffic, I began to really worry that I wouldn’t get any cash. Then what do you do? The other side of the world, literally, and broke. I whispered a prayer—three or four times for good measure—and walked along feeling better. After all, I was in China!
You might laugh, but David had told me to go to the Wal-Mart to use the ATM. Wal-Marts, I should mention, are as popular in China as in the USA, the main difference being, obviously, that Wal-Mart in China wasn’t importing a lot of stuff from…well…China. Must have cut costs significantly. Anyway, I enjoyed an amble about the three-story place. IT was nothing like Wal-mart back home; more like a department store but a bit grimmer. I didn’t see a lot of ‘stuff’ that Americans would buy even were it available in the USA. The selection was pretty lame, actually. And by the time I got to the ‘supermarket’ section and saw the live crabs packed into an aquarium-like home, I decided to find my ATM.
The only ATM was marked as “China Construction Bank”. I stuck my Bank of the West debit card into the slot and watched it get sucked in. Praying it would come back out, I punched in the security code—and thank heavens foreign ATM’s offer the option of English—I followed the straightforward directions and listened to the whirring little gears getting ready to pump out some Chinese banknotes. And then, like magic, a wad of red Chinese Yuan notes popped out for me to grab. After pushing the ‘Exit” key, my card was returned. With a sigh of relief and great happiness, I walked out of Wal-Mart and headed off to my first destination: the Forbidden City!
Navigating the Beijing subway system is something even wayward Americans can do. It’s actually quite clean and efficient. The stations are straightforward with maps of the lines and the machines that dispense tickets. You insert the ticket into the turnstile slot, which reads it and spits it back out. It’s important not to lose the ticket because you need it at the other end as well. I took the escalator deep into the earth, then examined the network diagram and list of stations. Unlike in other cities, in China, there’s a wall of glass lining the track so that, I suppose, some unfortunate isn’t pushed by the crowd onto the subway tracks. On the other side of the glass, along the wall, were screens playing various commercials, movie trailers, and those ultra-fast images that speak mostly to youth; I call it the shaking-camera-hand syndrome.
The Forbidden City, needless to say, is old—and was quite verboten for most of its existence--that is from the ‘common man’. Home to various emperors of the Ming, Tang, Qing dynasties (and more probably but I couldn’t possibly care less) since the early fifteenth Century, it was only opened to the public after the great commie revolution in 1949—after, of course, some general looting and destruction during Mao’s cultural revolution fervor. But it remains today an UNESCO World Heritage Site, and impressively large. It holds nearly a thousand buildings and is surrounded by a nice deep moat. The emperors liked their space (and safety), apparently. At any rate, I spent a nice few hours wandering from along with the other thousands of tourists (mostly Chinese) from the lovely gardens near the North Gate through ‘palaces’, across empty stretches of stone courtyard, and occasionally peaking into the tiny shops selling knick knacks. It’s not really a place easily described, so instead of writing a thousand words, I’ll let you check out pictures.
I’d decided to leave David and the guys to their research, having found a nice hostel called The Happy Dragon. The place was nice: the girls behind the welcome desk were attentive and efficient; the dorm room where I stayed that night slept only 4, and there was a small but cozy room with several tables and sofas where one could order food throughout the day and evening. At most hostels, this is the norm, of course. Services such as “western food”, WiFi, and laundry service are amenities demanded by today’s more discerning backpacker. It’s not like the 60’s or 70’s when a hostel was simply a place to crash. Anyway, the ‘Happy Dragon café’ had WiFi , so I accessed my email, wrote to a chosen few, enjoyed a Cola Zero, and then wandered through the alleys of Beijing. A couple of the pedestrian streets were markets, tiny shops selling everything from pots and pans to chicken claws. At the end of this street were the two places that one could easily spot in Beijing: McDonalds and KFC.
Note: KFC in China simply doesn’t have any diet drinks. They give you a glass of boiled water. Hmmm.
The next day was the #1 attraction in Beijing, the “thing” that everyone had to see: The Great Wall. I wound up going with a gang from the Happy Dragon: a nice mix of nationalities. One tall, gangly-looking German youth and his friend sat near the front of the minivan, and the guy talked during the entire two-hour drive. Not in the low voice of one conversing casually with a friend sitting in the next seat, but as if he was lecturing half the bus; of course he spoke in German so no one really understood him. Actually, he turned out to be a nice guy. I chatted with him later. Anyway, the drive was through countryside that gradually got quite hilly and into fairly green-covered low mountains. The bus driver honked his way to the Great Wall, apparently unhappy with the number of others on his road. We passed cars, vans, trucks, scooters, bicyclists, old men leading cows.
You can’t even see the Great Wall as the bus approaches. Our driver ascended a low mountain on a series of switchbacks, the road well paved. Then instead of pulling up at the wall, as I half expected, the bus lumbered into a parking lot where a number of tourist buses already sat. We got off the bus, stretched, and our tour leader, a young woman hired by the hostel, did a head count and then explained in a halting English, the procedure. “There are two ways to get up to the wall…you can climb those stairs…” she pointed to some rough looking stairs that wound around some high plants and trees and vanished, but the hill above looked like quite the climb. “or you can go by ski-lift. Cost is fifty Yuan.” Several people groaned. “Ja, and how ve coming down, zen?” asked the skinny German youth.
The guide gave a wide smile, very genuine, and replied, “You can take stairs down or can go by toboggan.” This sounded interesting, but most of the group decided to simply take the ski-lift up and then play it by ear. “You have three hours to climb on the wall,” the guide explained. “Please be back here in parking lot by 2pm. Then we have free lunch.” Thus, we climbed a dozen steps to a hut where we bought our tickets. Then a few more steps to the point where you catch the ski-lift. Everyone seemed to be paired off except me, sadly. But the guide joined me, and on the way up the mountain, she asked questions about the US and Dubai. She loved her job, she said, meeting and talking with foreign people from all over the world. We passed over treetops and just ahead appeared parts of the wall. My excitement built.
The Great Wall is one of those things—like the pyramids or the Grand Canyon—that must be experienced. Pictures help, as always, but suffice it to say that it’s magnificent. At the top, the majority of the Happy Dragon entourage headed off along the wall to the west, where, as the guide had explained on the bus, one could walk for many hours, passing twenty two towers. To the right, she’d said, the way was steeper, more difficult and shorter: tourists could only go three towers before accessed was blocked. “But it’s an older part of the wall,” she’d said without much explanation. So, a few of us headed east, first down about twenty or thirty steps, and into a nice little tower room that was just a stone room with some windows. I loved the towers because inside, one could hop up onto a ledge beside the glassless window and gaze out at the sparsely-covered mountains. I imagined the hordes of invaders from the north who must have traveled for weeks in order to come do some sacking and plundering, only to discover that a mammoth wall lay right in their path. Talk about teed off, but what could they do? The thing stretches on and on. From my vantage point, I could see it snake along the hills, up, down, off in one direction only to disappear and re-appear as a thin line further on. I wondered about the guards. What did they do for all their days, weeks, months of isolation? Cook their food and dream about women, I suppose.
Leaving the tower, I was confronted with the unpleasant task of mounting a lot of stairs. Very steep stairs. I didn’t count but there must have been more than a hundred. The Germans, and an older man with dark features and graying hair, and an English kid who looked to be all of seventeen, all were in close proximity, huffing and puffing their way up at various points. Sooner or later, we all made it to the next tower, where everyone pretended to gaze out at the hills in admiration when all they were really interested in doing is sucking in air. An old Chinese man manning his “refreshment” stall, under a big beach umbrella, grinned at the poor unfit Westerners. “Cola?” he asked. “Beer? Water? Snickers?”
It took an hour but most of us made it to the farthest tower, at which point an intimidating sign, looking very official, forbade tourists to wander further. Not that we could anyway. The top of the wall here was overgrown with thickets, small trees, and looked impassible. We turned back and once more with varying speeds, traversed the wall with its ups, downs, and through towers, until we arrived back where we’d started. Since there was plenty of time left, I just continued on my way west. This part of the trek was more popular and somewhat easier. You could go a long way before hitting a set of steeply ascending stairs; parts of the top here were flat and easily walked. In the distance were towns, though I couldn’t make out details. The sky was blue, the temperature was in the seventies, and the wall was making me happy. I even bought a cola zero from an old woman.
Going down was fun! A pair of Chinese youths instructed us at the beginning of the toboggan run. “Push the lever forward to go, pull back to stop. Keep going.” A kid explained this to me and the English teen, who was quite keen to speed down the side of the mountain. The toboggans are simply a plastic seat with room for you to stretch out your legs on either side of the lever. It’s attached to a rail, and the thing sits in what I call a “stone waterslide”. I watched the English chap sit down in his toboggan as one of the Chinese guys said, “Okay, go.” With a push forward of the lever, the English teen was on his way. He vanished around a curve when the Chinese youth ushered me into my toboggan. With a push forward of the lever, I was soon sailing around a bend, picking up speed. Being a speed-coward, I pulled back on the lever and it slowed, but too much. So again forward with the lever until I felt I was going at a comfy speed for what seemed like several minutes. Around me was brush, some trees (deciduous and pines), and at what point, my vehicle passed over a small canyon about fifty yards in width and twenty deep. Very inspiring. I slowed to admire it all, and when I made it across, a guy sitting on a chair on a large flat rock said, “Faster, faster!” He seemed a bit cross that I was taking my time.
At the bottom, I got out and was soon wandering among the requisite tourist booths. You could buy anything with Great Wall written on it. I did buy, I have to admit, a small fridge magnet. After that necessity taken care of, I walked into an open area with a few tables and chairs outside a combination gift shop and café. The Germans were there, the gangly fellow complaining that he hadn’t been able to go fast on his toboggan. “Ja, ve vere behind some dumb girl,” he said. “She was soooo afraid, almost stopping every time.” He smacked his forehead in mock frustration but smiled. “Anyway, the wall was fantastic.”
On one of my best days in Beijing, the sun came out and the sky turned blue—for the most part. There was a little haze in the distance but for the most part, this was cheerful weather. People were out and about in good spirits, so I headed out to see the type of old traditional neighborhoods of Beijing that have largely been demolished over the years in the name of progress: The Hutong.
At one tiny stone bridge, pedestrian tourists, bikers and rickshaw drivers all collided, waited, cursed, tried to pass each other. We were surrounded by overpriced bars and restaurants but there was a nice placid lake to gaze upon. Many people were in paddle boats. I snapped a picture of a teen who sported a punk haircut, large nerdy-looking glasses and who was too busily engaged with texting to note the white foreigner taking his picture. I then visited the Drum tower, a squat but five-story temple and watched how the emperor’s servants used to give the correct time—by striking a series of gargantuan drums. As expected, a gaggle of western and Chinese tourists snapped pics as the ‘emperor’s servants’ offered a demonstration by rhythmically beating the drums for five minutes.
Afterwards, I got a little lost wandering through alley after alley of Hutong land. Dozens of tiny alley-shops looking none-too clean. By the time I emerged into “civilization” (meaning tall buildings and freeways), I caught a taxi back to the Happy Dragon and enjoyed a cola zero and lunch.
I’d wanted to go to a movie. Seeing a film while in a country is always an interesting experience. I decided upon Founding of a Nation, released during this holiday time. The movie was about Moa’s revolution, taking place from 1945 to 1945—and the quality of the production surprised me, as well as the English subtitles. Sometimes English translations can be very amusing, but for Founding, despite the fact that the words appeared for all of a half second, the English was spot-on. By the end of the movie, I was rooting for Mao. Beside me, however, a young couple had chatted through the entire movie and the middle-aged man to my right had snoozed. From the audience behind us came chattering and belches. I guess they weren’t feeling very patriotic. Or perhaps they realized that Mao had destroyed a lot of culture and many millions of human beings.
