Great Leap Northward V – Fireworks

“Hell is other people” is incomplete. It should read “Hell is other people in an airport when you’re going home.”

1. You’re only allowed to bring one carry-on bag, guys!
2. You can’t move the flight attendant’s bag to put your own in, guys.
3. Your carry-on bag has to fit, guys.
4. When your plane is a half-hour late already, you’ve got to put your shit away and sit your ass down, guys.
5. Two hours in an airport should be more than enough time to get through customs and get to your connection, unless something is wrong with your system, YVR.
6. Going paperless isn’t that impressive when the tag that your computer spits out is the same size and weight of the form you used to use, Canadian Immigration.
7. The baggage carousel works well only if everyone stays a step back and then steps up to the carousel to grab their luggage, guys. Also, your luggage cart doesn’t need the space right beside you. You can carry your stuff an extra four feet.
8. You only go up to the counter when they call your zone guys. And repeated attempts will not help.

I’d much rather be back in Beijing. Sure people are a little loud (okay, very loud), and queing up for things is a recent idea (and subscribed to sparingly). But it’s also a wonderful place. For instance, you can pay like $60 Canadian and get picked up from your hostel and bussed to the Great Wall for four hours of hiking around, get a free all-you-can-eat Chinese lunch, and get dropped off back at your doorstep.

We chose JinShanLing as our section of the wall. Badaling is the closer and more popular, but its also the –ick- closer and more popular. Besides, it was mostly reconstructed in the 1980s and there’s a KFC next to it. Today’s hipster prefers a mostly imagined air of authenticity! JinShanLing is the oldest, most rugged section of the wall (that is still easily served back package tours!). So of course of all the people on our first bus, it was 7 other white people who joined us in the van to our hipster section of the wall. Three Americans living in China teaching English, their recently arrived American guest, and three Germans. All pleasant enough companions for lunch, but on the wall we kept to ourselves.

Words are lacking when it comes to this experience, and pictures tell a better tale.

Weird thing about the wall 1: There are little speakers disguised as rocks, so you get a soundtrack of classical music while you walk about. 

  Some sections are more rebuilt than others…

Four hours and about four kilometres, but according to my partner’s magic phone, we climbed the equivalent of 129 floors. 

An unbirthday breathlessly spent, and complemented by a pub crawl of some more of Beijing’s craft breweries. Pure goddamn heaven.

Slighly woozy the next morning, we tried to fit everything in to the last day and a half before departure. A Chinese acrobatic show was very impressive. A feast of Peking Duck very pleasant.  An outdoor sundries market was miles more fun than an indoor pearl market. The Beijing Police Museum was a propaganda-filled delight.

Wistfully, we made our way to a restaurant near the hostel for a lunch feast of noodles, spinach, fried mushrooms, and potato balls to fortify us for a 15 hour journey homeward where the more you can avoid airline food the better.

One amusing last adventure. I had purchased a bone sheath with a knife and chopsticks in Xi’an as my souvenir, you may recall. I certainly didn’t recall. It was in my backpack for the subway trip to the train after its purchase. The train back to Beijing. The subway from the train station to our hostel. All these sections had the requisite metal detectors and bored looking teenagers in uniforms waving beeping wands at you in a perfunctory manner before waving you on.

So you’ll forgive this foolish traveller when the last metal detector in the last subway station on our way out of Beijing gave an angry beep, and the bored teenagers became suddenly very interested in what was in my bag. “Chopsticks” I replied innocently when they pointed to the sheath and knife shaped object on the x-ray machine.

None of them spoke English. I expected to be waved back rather than to cause a disruption in their texting and a load of paperwork.
Little did I know that there was a party meeting upcoming in Beijing and security was heightened and all subway guards with floppy chic hair under their uniform caps were under somewhat more strict orders.

A helpful local English-speaker stopped when he noticed the fuss and offered to translate. The guards made me unpack my souvenir and withdrew the admittedly six or seven inch knife (dull edge, but sharp tip). I did my best to look nonplussed, even as our airport travel time was rapidly diminishing.

Floppy-hair’s brow knit. It was decision time.

Teenager 2 and 3 looked at him for guidance.

Barbara looked at her watch.

I looked equally ashamed and regretful. My eyes pleaded somewhat less than earnestly.

Floppy-hair said something and started digging around in the desk.

Helpful translator looked confused and said he is looking for paper. Perhaps a form? In triplicate?

Flops withdrew paper and a roll of tape. He thoroughly papered and taped my knife into its sheath and handed it back.

Profuse thank yous all around and we dashed for the escalator and didn’t look back until the wheels were up, Beijing airport was shrinking behind us, and a voice came on the intercom.

“This is the Captain speaking, if you look outside the left and right of the airplane you’ll see fireworks.”

Happy New Year, Beijing!

Great Leap Northward IV – I left it behind through carelessness

Greetings from two tired travellers,

Today for my birthday we climbed up to JinShanLing, one of the oldest sections of the Great Wall and trundled about in fine fashion.

But since I’m not quite caught up to this point, I’ll return with you now to the eastern end of the Silk Road, where I longed to find a caravanserai and set out camelback, just a scant few days ago. Short a camel, a 5 hour bullet train took us West to the ancient city of Xi’an, the ancient capital of classical China and a fascinating walled city that seems smaller than Beijing, but also more diverse.

Another easy, modern, expansive (circa 2008 don’t you know) subway system took us from the rail station into town and from there we walked to the Seven Sages Bell Tower youth hostel. What a name!

If you haven’t travelled by hostel before, this one had a good reminder in a poster on the wall. A hostel is not just a budget hotel. Nor it is only for those who wish to sleep in cheap dorms. We stay in comfortable private rooms with a double bed and full facilities (although shared facilities are cheaper, in this I must defer to my partner’s more involved toilette). Youth hostels, this poster proudly invokes “promotes cultural exchange, conservation of the environment, social responsibility, love and care of the nature, simple but quality living, do-it-yourself and help those who help themselves.”

I love hostel travelling. I love the common rooms with backpackers and other travellers everywhere – sometimes to chat and share stories, sometimes just to sit quietly, recovering with a drink from the day’s travails. I love having a host whose aim is not to serve obsequiously but to genuinely assist you with planning your day of adventure. Who can also serve you a beer, or point you in the direction of the shared laundry machine. They can also just sit back and share a beer with you, tell you about a trip they have gone on, or point out someone to ask about that particular place.

I also love Xi’an. At night the whole city is lit up, from the belltower and drumtower pagodas of the town square to the strips of stores and the giant fluorescent Chinese characters on building sides. I love the Muslim quarter, a network of alleyways packed with tourists, hustlers hacking meat from a red hanging carcass, then grilling you a spicy mutton kebab. Bakers and soupmakers ladling out street food to hungry passers-by. I love the shrill whistle of the clean-up crew, who approach behind, industriously sweeping up all the street trash and impatiently brushing anyone in their path aside. The quick and somewhat dirty restaurants with staff who certainly speak no English, but have pictures on their menus that can help foreigners figure out what dumpling, what skewer, what noodle bowl to order.

I loved hopping on one bus, then another to head out of town for an afternoon to visit the terracotta soldiers museum. Going from pit 3 to 1 to see dozens, then scores, then hundreds of clay warriors protecting the tomb of a long-dead king with real bronze weapons and individually rendered faces. Seeing archaeologists work uncovering and re-assembling even more soldiers, horses, chariots, every day.

I even love being delayed an extra day in Xi’an due to a sold out train and spending an extra leisurely day, wandering the alleyways and bartering for souvenirs with merchants whose command of English is limited to pointing to the decorations on bone knife sheaths and declaring over and over again “This is man. This is dragon” as if I didn’t get it (I also love getting her to come down from Y1800 to Y350, although she probably loved getting me to come up from Y50. This is a bit better, by the way, than my first barter of the day for some drawing reference books where I change the price by a piddling Y10).

I love climbing up to the city walls and strolling along the broad parapet, moving aside for the ding of bicycles (yes, they rent bicycles for those who want to really move), and walking in and around the strange giant paper dinosaurs and dogs that have been erected for the New Year/Spring festival.

I love finding yet another German beer hall, complete with lederhosen-clad Chinese server happy to see us and to serve us frothing half-litres of Xi-an brewed German style lager that tastes distinctly of banana. Or a Uigher souphall that brings me a bowl of two “pancakes” of bread to tear up before taking back to the kitchen to cover in spicy mutton soup. Or a Cantonese dim sum place that brings us a dozen dishes while we stack up empty Tsingtao beer bottles on the table in the best boastful fashion.

I also love finally recovering from my blistered toe so I no longer have to limp along or try myriad methods of bandaging that will provide relief from the pain. I don’t love that I recovered this movement just in time to depart Xi’an for our return to Beijing, only to hear about a nearby mountain that is just begging to be climbed.

Zaijan, Chinese mountain. You’ve escaped my footfall this time. But your Great Wall is next, and I will not be denied.

In short, we drank a lot of good beer and had a lot of lovely experiences. And besides, I didn’t like that camera anyway.

Great Leap Northward III – Planning a City

Happy New Year, friends,

On our last day in Beijing before leaving on a “Journey to the West,” we found our way to the Beijing Capital Museum. Our pocket guide to Beijing assured us this was the best museum in the city (although the Beijing Police Museum is supposed to be the quirkiest). Slow down, pocket guide. I think we’ll rate museum experiences around here.

The building was massive and architecturally impressive – daunting in scale almost as much as the line-up out front was daunting in extent. I infer from a reference in my book that several years ago it was suggested that Beijing was not a very culturally rich city and lacked in museums. Central Planning may have then taken over and ensured that this and other monuments were ready to fill the gap. And this one fills it tolerably well.

The first gallery we enter is a history of northern China, packed, as is everything, with Chinese tourists. The gallery is a giant square within a giant square room. The inside wall display cases give you a timeline of Chinese History and present to you corresponding artifacts. The outside wall displays a related timeline of the rest of the world. Yawn. The only interesting bits were some secret rooms on the inside that attempted experiential installations. One room proposed to transport you to an old Chinese dock. Another, more intricate, had a small scale model of a historical Beijing neighbourhood with the Emperor parading through the streets. This last was the most engaging, since it was a 3d model based on exactly replicating the scene from a giant painting on the wall, and no detail was missed. Still. Pretty bland.

The second gallery was better, as it eschewed an object based exhibit for one more interested in narrative. This was the folk customs of old Beijing and its galleries used video, images, text, and recreated scenes from the historical streetscape to share displays on cultural practices related to marriage (the groom fires three arrows at the foot of his bride’s palanquin), old age (an old gentleman is toasted on his 70th birthday and given cups by his young descendants), childbirth (gifts featuring artistic representations of a boy riding a qillin, or magical beast, are meant to encourage the swift arrival of a male child). Much better!

(Notice the helpful docent with her sign)

 

A few swift passes through the galleries related to traditional Chinese ceramics, representations of Buddha, and bronzework took us to the end of our day and we departed mostly ambivalent.

What would it be like to do museum consultation here, I wonder? How much narrative is controlled by the party? How much of Falk’s visitor motivations, or other interpretive techniques would be applicable? Are the museum plaques’ pre-occupation with numbers (exact dimensions, age, weight, etc) indicative of a Chinese visitor preference for this type of information, or simply a museum profession that thinks visitors prefer this type of information. How provocative can museum interpretation be in a country that seems to discourage provocation?

A bank sign we read about says “Question authority”, but it is not an anarchic challenge, merely a reminder that inquiries should be directed to the bank clerks. The police on the streetcorners are not armed with machine guns but with curious giant forks. One side has a set of giant pincers, and the other a sort of handle and trigger. Like a giant picker-upper – but with human sized trash in mind. (There are police with machine guns, but you find them in the train station – and I hasten to add that we saw the same thing in New York’s central station). There is simply no way a two week visit can even provide a hint into the relationship between everyday life and a Maoist government. I would never ask, as no one will ever be in a position here to give me an honest answer.

The Beijingers we have met are polite and happy to help. Occasionally they are eager to take a selfie with a foreigner (these are most likely not from Beijing, where we aren’t quite as rare). On the subway they are like everyone else in Canada, buried in their phones. I don’t know what they’re looking at, necessarily. Many of my favourite sites are blocked here. I can’t use google, can’t use youtube, can’t use facebook. We have to use bing to search the web. Bing. Bing. What can they find to look at on Bing?!

Central planning is the most prevalent indicator of the hand of that government. I’ve mentioned the five, six, seven ring roads in Beijing, each almost perfect squares. The massive subway network that was built in a scant ten years. As we travel the bullet train through the countryside we see forests of apartment buildings 30 stories tall, standing in groves of 15 or 20, all identical. A kilometre over is another grove, this of a different style, but the same height and the same number. The size and density of the population is unimaginable. It seems only a government could order a gross of building x and have them built here, and then another gross of building y over there. Massive highways, bullet train rail systems, dams, nuclear power plants, bridges, warehouses, wind farms. All these dot a landscape that has seen cultivation since the beginning of civilization.

The 2008 Olympics were a cause for massive change as Beijing prepared to host the world. Not just infrastructure, but air cleanliness targets were instituted. All the tuk-tuk-like contraptions, the scooters, the tiny vehicles- they’re all electric now. All home heaters that used coal or diesel were refitted, too. A refresh of poor translations around the city (“Chinglish”). A massive education campaign for the public and for the police. Ai Wei Wei, the famous artist, was brought back to the nation’s bosom to design the famous bird’s nest stadium (then swiftly demoted when his provocative art continued – if you haven’t watched Never Sorry, you are missing out!).

We see curiously little coverage of the Olympics in restaurants, bars, hostel lobbies. Perhaps this is because of China’s historically low medal count, or that the businesses we frequent happen to be uninterested. Or maybe the Olympics just aren’t that big a deal.

They didn’t fix the menus that offer directly translated dishes like “Mountain city hair blood wang” after all. And thank goodness for that!

(As usual, check strangervictory.wordpress.com for B’s “hot takes”!)

Great Leap Northward II – Pavement Pounding

Shie shie for your attention, friends,

I have just run through a railway terminal to catch a train (the regular experience of many a hardy traveller), have kicked an older man out of my assigned seat (the regular experience of many younger, worthier sitters), and have opened up our new tablet with a *Gasp* keyboard (having acknowledged that finding an internet café is going to become a more and more irregular experience of most luddite travellers).

We are en route to Xian from Beijing for a few days, primarily to see the terracotta soldiers, a minor tourist attraction you are unlikely to have heard about. Being mostly uninterested in in ancient warriors and the complex tombs of hoary kings, I am sure to be bored with the sight.

Xian promises to be warmer, but Beijing has been quite cold – this being winter and it being so far north. The air quality is good, but most days are overcast – so much so that a day and a half of blue skies and sunshine were a delight to us and, from our hosts reactions, also a welcome rarity. It felt like it ought to be an aphorism.

The last several days of Beijing have had a certain routine. Our hostel serves breakfast, and sometimes I choose their western (cold eggs, potato pancakes, bacon, sausage), but more often their Chinese breakfast (dumplings, steamed buns, hardboiled egg). I tried for the first few days to make due with tea, for the experience, but my addiction has reached such heights that this experiment was quickly abandoned – and easily too, as the Chinese have realized that Western tourists crave coffee at its darkest and blackest and are happy to provide. Sometimes we eschew breakfast at the hostel and visit a local bakery. There is a chain here called Holliland where the pulchritudinous Chinese staff wear pleasing powder blue uniforms with white collars and high hems. The place has a Dutch feeling to it, with all pale blues and subdued yellows. The walls are decorated with bread coiled and washed in the most enticing ways, but the central glass cabinets are filled with Chinese delicacies of pineapple, coconut, red mung sweet buns, or custard tarts, or savoury buns with pork floss decorations. They have black coffee suitable to my requirements, but their tea comes in a milky form a bit too sweet for Barbara.

One wall in each establishment has a display case full of ridiculously ornate cakes for sale. Some have rose petals, others have tiny tophats or pagodas atop them. The largest and most elaborate is a three or four tier Princess’ castle, complete with minarets, gates, and tiny marzipan Royals. It is listed as Y7000, or about $1400.

This is a strange Socialist country. There is plenty of private enterprise alongside the central planning. Wealth signifiers are very prevalent – especially in the capital, Beijing. A car, for instance, is not really a useful encumbrance. Beijing’s subway and bus system (mostly built in the last ten years, especially in the lead-up to the Olympics) is absolutely stellar. The city itself has over 5 ring roads, each 8-12 lanes wide and not super busy. There isn’t a great deal of traffic, because people are moved too efficiently. But to have a car is to be wealthy and important (there is a great deal of tax imposed on driving in Beijing). It seems very desirous to appear wealthy and important. (I do not mean to insult, merely to describe).

The subways make it easy to get around, but Beijing is an utterly massive place. We walk about 20km a day, even with the transit, and crawl into bed at the end of the day with swollen and blistered feet. My hiking boot is not fitting perfectly and at least one little piggy is more blister than toe.
Beijing is a marvelous mixture of old and new. The Hutong I mentioned are enchanting and rich, full of bicycles, scooters, and little enclosed scooters resembling a tiny tin truck. Even a few cars. There are restaurants, and many public toilets (convenient, but a reminder that many houses do not have plumbing, or did not until recently). Red lanterns for festival time hang overhead and rooves are tiled in that iconic Chinese manner.

The big streets are massive and comfortable and full of hundreds of modern shops of all manner. Banks, convenience stores, music stores, and clothing emporia are easy to find. There is a supermarket down the road called Wumart, where we can purchase wine for $5 and some snacks for the day.
We took a walk around the Houhai lakes the other day, and fortified ourselves in a tiny brewpub in one of the hutongs, enticingly named the Great Leap Brewery. The Ramones, Rancid, and other punk tunes floated down from the ceiling, while the chalkboard listed over two dozen beer to choose from – some local microbrews and some imports. We loved it so much, we didn’t want to leave and I bought an emblazoned sweater to remember it by.

Yesterday we finally got into the Forbidden City on our third try. They only (!) sell 80,000 tickets a day and this is festival season, so we have never managed to make it before the cut off. Yesterday was the exception, and we found ourselves in a press of about 3,000 people (no lineups) trying to make it through 5 security stations to get in (metal detectors, bag scanners, the usual). That was the first hour.

The FC is humongous and five more hours exploring this palace complex, the home of Qing and Ming emperors, had our feet even more swollen than usual. It was a fascinating experience, worth elaborating upon, but I think pictures might do it more justice.

 

So I’ll skip to us hobbling out, our feet black and blue from the unforgiving flagstones, staggering the extra few kilometres to find a pub. There’s something about sitting down and tasting that first sip after an exhausting and punishing day. The exquisite relief is something to be savoured. Much like blue skies in Beijing.

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Great Leap Northward I – No Peeking

Ni hao, chums!

I am comfortably ensconced in a hostel in Beijing, snug on a couch and watching an outlandish Chinese historical comedy currently making Titanic references.

All is good.

The flight here was very manageable and we arrived at the Beijing airport shortly before dusk. Customs and baggage took a little while, but afterwards the train and subway system were a cinch to navigate. We quickly found our way to the right subway station and emerged above ground into the evening festival atmosphere of the week after New Year’s. Red lanterns hung above the streets, children snacked on sugar-covered crab-apples on sticks, and the noisome mass was pleasantly thronging. We pushed our way through the crowds and eventually got our backpacks onto the lobby floor of the hostel, content to have finished our fifteen or so hour journey in a place with cool low-fi music coming through and German beer cooling in the fridge.

Only to find out we had printed out directions to the wrong hostel. This hostel was named the Peking Yard, but it was only one with that name. Luckily the host gave us good directions and another half hour or so in the cold streets of Beijing brought us to OUR Peking Yard.

Both hostels are located in hutongs, which are Beijing “alleyways” with narrow lanes and courtyards holding multiple homes. They are sweet and evocative and historical, so of course they are under threat. The vast majority have been razed in order to put up brutalist apartment blocks, especially in the lead-up to the last Beijing Olympics. We are happy to have found a few hostels located herein – but there’s the rub. Tourists *like* hutongs. Locals don’t, necessarily. So heritage preservation is not necessarily a simple affair.

We have spent the first few days strolling around the city, pounding the pavement and seeing the sights. (Pavement is right…I think we’ve seen about ten square meters that aren’t cement). Braving the crowds of Tiananmen Square and some of the markets, feasting on dumplings and noodles, and finding relief from the chill in teahouses and coffeeshops.

One of the most interesting things so far is getting used to the lack of Canadian crowd etiquette. There are so many people here that one just sort of pushes through, and accepts that others will do the same. It wouldn’t really work if you apologised and excused and hesitated. And since no one else minds, and no one is rough about it, it just sort of works.

We move to a new hostel shortly, and will take a train later this week to X’ian to see the terracotta warriors. The Great Wall will come in somewhere as well, and hopefully some Peking Opera. Two weeks to ease into a city seems, in a way, a luxury compared to one month to see a country!