a full plate: A quick hop up to Beijing

After my program ended in Shanghai, I took an overnight train to Beijing to spend a couple of days seeing the city before catching my flight to Lhasa. I stayed with some friends of my mother's who moved to Beijing for work - they were great and gave me a warm welcome to the capital city.

I arrived in Beijing on Saturday morning from the overnight train, which was an experience in itself. The train was actually really nice, as I had shelled out more for a bed in the soft sleeper compartment. The categories are (from most expensive to cheapest): soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat. It was really very plush, with nice beds and breakfast and dinner service. Each compartment had two bunkbeds in it to make for four people a compartment. Everyone else in my compartment was a Chinese businessperson travelling back from a meeting or to one, so they were a pretty civil bunch and didn't spit on the floor or anything.

I did get a bit ripped off because of my luggage, however. I had my large hiking backpack with me, and when I got to the station they told me that I had to pay to check it because it was too big to bring on board (or at least that's what I thought they said). In the end, I was just paying some guy to carry it for me and dump it in my compartment anyway, which I could have done myself. But the kicker was that he kept making this big fuss, saying that it was really hot and he needed some water after carrying my heavy bag. I offered him some water, but he refused, and it occurred to me (duh) that he wanted money. I gave him 2 yuan, which is enough for two bottles of water. Then he got out his calculator and typed in 50. 50 yuan for a bottle of water, yeah right! It had been really getting on my nerves that it seemed everyone in Shanghai was out to rip me off, from the people in the fake market who asked for six times what something was worth to the taxi driver who took my friends and I around the entire city to run up the meter and then was angry when we refused to pay that much. Luckily one of my fellow compartment-mates showed up then and assisted me in telling him to bug off.

Anyway, so I had a couple of days in Beijing. The first day I spent with my rugby teammate Angela, who is working for the English-language newspaper in the city and doing research on Beijing's hip-hop scene. We went to the Fragrant Hills Botanical Gardens outside of town, as she and her friends were all sick of the Beijing air. After some all-you-can-eat Japanese food and sushi (mmmmm) we went out to a rock concert to try to catch a local hip-hop group that Angela wanted to film. We arrived late and missed them, but we didn't figure that out until we'd suffered through an hour of disgustingly awful local rock bands. I don't want to be judmental, but it appears that Chinese people really do not know how to rock. The ultimate low point was one band that had three guitarists, none of which was playing more than two notes at a time, while a pre-recorded (and still pretty awful) riff was playing in the background. Yikes.

[Angela and I hanging out at the Fragrant Hills Botanical Gardens in Beijing]

On Sunday I slept in at Angela's house, and we all went out for dim sum. The dim sum was actually really good, which was nice after the disgusting food that someone thought they'd call dim sum we'd had in Shanghai. I spent the afternoon seeing Tiannanmen Square and the Forbidden City, neither of which were particularly impressive. They were both just swarming with tour groups, and half of the Forbidden City was under construction/renovation to get ready for the Olympics. Rebar and tour leaders with microphones weren't really giving me the historic vibe.

[The Forbidden City: 1 - I wasn't alone, 2 - Tourists and construction, that about sums it up]

On Monday I got up early (well, later than I'd planned, but still early) and started out for the Great Wall. From the long-distance bus station downtown, I took a bus to the town of Miyun, where I was planning on transferring to another bus headed to the section of the wall at Simatai. However, on the bus I met a group of four Israelis who were planning on hiking from Jingshanling to Simitai, and they convinced me to come with them. I ended up being the translator again, and we bargained with a particularly unpleasant minibus driver to get to Jingshanling. The hike was actually pretty nice; it was about 10km, but it took over four hours because of the ups, downs, and bends. The weather was great for hiking as it was cloudy and breezy, but it was not so great for picture taking. I tried a bunch of different settings, but what looked good on my camera looked different on my computer, and now looks different on the computers here. Oh well. Local people followed us all along, hawking cold water, beer, t-shirts, postcards, and their guide services (even though there's not really much need for direction if you're walking on top of a wall in one direction).

It was nice to go on a real day hike, as I haven't really been doing that much excercise in China, besides riding bikes and walking. After finishing the hike, we were feeling really accomplished and sat down for some ice cream and then a quick lunch before the ride back. The driver, of course, tried to cheat us. We had agreed with the same driver that he would pick us up when we got to Simatai and drive us back to Miyun for the same amount it would have cost to ride a bus. Of course, once in the van he produced some phony parking receipt and claimed that we owed him another 20 yuan for parking fees (the receipt was from a parking lot in Beijing). He even claimed that he didn't know about the fee beforehand and that he'd never been to Simatai before (despite being a tourist minibus driver). Eventually I just gave up arguing, said we wouldn't pay it, and pretended to fall asleep so he couldn't talk to me anymore.

The bus back from Miyun took F-O-R-E-V-E-R, and I didn't get home until after 9pm, at which point I scrambled to shower and pack all of my things so I could get up and catch my 7:10am flight the next day.