Adjusting in Beijing
We've been in China for a week and are finally over the jet lag. We arrived last Monday at 1am English time (but 9am Chinese time) managed to get a bus into Beijing okay but then spent a record three hours searching the city for our hotel, so perhaps not the best of starts! The hotel we'd booked was lovely though, round a pretty courtyard complete with authentic Chinese fish pond.Our first few days followed the trend of the first few hours in being slightly trying at times - we spent most of them running (well, walking fast) around the city trying to buy our train tickets to our next stop, Xi'an, as we thought it would be good to get it sorted. Unfortunately it turns out our trip coincides with Chinese 'national day', which is a week long celebration to mark the defeat of the Japanese in 1949 that takes place every five years - so easy to miss really. So no train tickets for us as all the Chinese had nicked them. Luckily we were saved by two wonderful Chinese students, Hanbin and Li, who befriended us randomly outside Tiananmen Square. They took us to a (distressingly expensive, as we discovered afterwards) Chinese Tea Ceremony, where we were given a free teapot - as you can imagine, just what we wanted to have to carry around. They made up for this by spending literally hours helping us find tickets, eventually getting us a flight out of Beijing yesterday.
Beijing itself was crowded, polluted and smelly but also very enjoyable and an amazing place to visit. Tiananmen Square is vast and filled with various items of national pride/Communist propaganda (they are one and the same here). Most exciting for me were the enormous 3D Olympic Mascots erected for national day - although nothing beats the paralympic mascot, a pink happy cow called Lele (see below) which could be found on posters all over the city dancing under a rainbow! Unfortunately this was not deemed important enough to make the square.
The Forbidden City, former palace of many dynasties of Chinese emperors, is very impressive. It's in the centre of Beijing but nevertheless is huge, it would take about 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other and that's without stopping to admire the incredible temples (great architecture!). I particularly enjoyed the emperor's garden where the concubines would wander among the pagodas, very Terry Pratchett. At the front gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, we befriended a little Mongolian man called Bruce (allegedly) who showed us round part of the palace in order to improve his English - lots of people do that here as it helps them to get better jobs (not to mention the fact that the Chinese government have told them to. It's entirely voluntary, honest.).
We spent a day visiting and hiking along part of the Great Wall, starting at Jinshanling and finishing 10km away at Simatai. The walk was a challenge (although we seemed to be far more able than most of the other people doing it!) but was totally worth it for the view. It really is very impressive. More amazing still, we made it there and back without serious injury. Driving in China is generally a hit and miss affair, but our bus driver seemed to be a crazy suicidal maniac as well so Chris had a fairly terrifying journey - I slept for most of it.
In general Beijing has a few issues that we feel it needs to overcome before the Olympics. We had heard that people spat alot, but nothing quite prepared us for the amount of energy they put into this, really making sure they bring it all up before they lob it at your feet. More distressing I thought was the fact that what remains of the old city is being bulldozed to make way for shoddy tower blocks, so that Beijing can look like a 'modern' city. We spent the second half of the week staying in the oldest area which is made up of 'hutongs', small lanes. Here we found more character in the buildings and more 'real' people than anywhere else, but even the more touristy areas of these seem to be on their way out.
Despite these problems Beijing is an intriguing place that we were glad to experience before the bulldozers get it. We walked around most areas inside the ring road and found hugely diverse types of people living very varied lifestyles - if you ever get the opportunity to go, we recommend you don't do it on a tour bus unless you want to have your view conditioned by the Chinese government. You might not have noticed, but we're so anti-Communist now that we're practically fascist, so good luck to you all when we return!
Emily
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