What I like about you (from the other side)

Only one day left until I leave Beijing, and already the apartment is getting echoey. I’ve given away a bunch of stuff, and packed other things. The movers came yesterday and took away many boxes – I’m really glad I didn’t have to do it all myself.

Before I left Seattle, I made a list of things I thought I would miss and not miss about the city, so now it’s time for the same list about Beijing.

Things I will miss about Beijing

• My friends.
• The food, both in quality and price. And it’s cool you can have roast duck without planning ahead.
• The ancient culture that is never far away.
• Ease of transportation. Between my bicycle, the subway, and buses, getting around is generally quite convenient, even with the ridiculous traffic.
• The chance to practice speaking Chinese with native speakers every day.
• How amazing it can look after a good rain.
• The sense of freedom you have when you don’t have to worry about crime.
• How cheap things are if you’re looking for cheap things.
• Having someone come clean the apartment twice a week.
• The challenge of trying to think of ways to explain English words and expressions.
• The vibrant music scene and all the great bands here, plus the ones I haven’t discovered yet.

Things I will not miss about Beijing

• The quality of the air, and I’m not just talking about the odd odors that sneak in occasionally when the breeze changes direction.
• The bone-chilling winter temperatures.
• The energy-sapping summer temperatures.
• The Great Fire Wall.
• The ridiculous traffic.
• Office politics.
• The hideous desk my landlord provided for my computer.
• The hassle it can often be to deal with seemingly simple things like electricity, mobile phones and internet.
• Having to register with the local police station so they know where I am.
• The feelings I have on the occasions when I do think about politics.
• Never really understanding what’s going on, even when I think I do. Not that this is necessarily different from the situation in the US...

In a very unusual bit of luck, I have never really experienced one of the famous Beijing spring sandstorms, so that didn’t make either list.

Final note

I created this blog when I found out I was coming to China, and now that I’m leaving, I’m not sure what I want to do. In the interest of keeping it to its topic (not that I’ve stuck to it strictly so far!), I don’t really want to continue writing about my life as it involves things other than China. However, I still have lots of China experiences and pictures I haven’t shared, so there’s material for many posts waiting for me to have the time to take care of it.

What little remains

Like most cities in Imperial China, Beijing at one time had a wall around it. And like the Great Wall, it was built in stages, which due to the whims of rulers and circumstances, were not exactly regular in shape. During the 1950s and 1960s almost all of Beijing’s city wall was demolished to make way for the second ring road and other development, but a kilometer and a half of its southeast section still stands.
This segment dates from 1419, during the Ming Dynasty.
The park dedicated to it is quite new, and is in fact still under construction, though most of it is open to the public. A lovely landscaped garden runs along what was the outside of the wall. On the other side, not far away, is the main Beijing train station.
It is also apparently a camping area, as long as your tent is makeshift.
Though I didn’t see any tents on this day.
In this picture you can see how the grass is kept green. That’s a water truck going along the sidewalk, while a guy walks behind it spraying water out of a big fat hose onto the grass. You can also see a couple getting pictures taken, probably for their engagement.
A little further along you can see some restoration work under way. In the background is Beijing’s tallest building, Guomao #3.
I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the warning signs on the construction fence:

NO NEARING
CAUTION, FALLING OBJECTS
NO STRIDING

This archway in the wall dates from 1915, when it was knocked out to allow the city’s first railroad to come in.
And this is the Southeast Tower. It was built from 1436-1440, a little later than the rest of the wall, and was the largest corner tower on any city wall in China. In case you’re wondering, there are 144 arrow holes for archers to shoot from in case of attack.
Like any large open area in Beijing, the park is also a place for kite enthusiasts to do their thing. These guys have some serious rigs.
For Ұ10 (about US$1.50) you can go through the railway entrance and get onto the top of the wall. This is the back side of the corner tower seen from the top of the stairs.
Inside the tower there are three levels. On the first and third, there is an art gallery, and on the second some exhibits about the history of the Ming Wall, including scale models of all nine of the original gates.
From the tower windows you can see both sides of the wall. I think that’s one of the bullet trains to Tianjin leaving the station.

Along the side of the tower, there is some graffiti.
This dates from 1900, when the forces of the Eight Powers invaded Beijing and took the tower. Russian and American soldiers carved names and dates into the bricks, “criminal evidence” as the explanatory sign informs us.

There was a sign for the “underground exhibit” but when I tried to enter, a guy in a uniform waved me away. I’m not sure what’s down there. As it was, I was the last one out of the park for the day, and they locked the gate behind me when I left.

It looks like they’re adding a little street for souvenir shops and food stalls, but it’s not open yet.

No reservations, part 1

Introduction

When I travel, I normally have things planned out to a fair degree. I have reservations for transportation and lodgings, and sometimes even for specific sights that require them. This is a story of the opposite tactic.

A few weeks ago, as the week-long Golden Week holiday approached, everyone in the office was talking about travel plans. Most of them were going to visit their hometowns, and they told many tales of difficulty getting train tickets. With the improving economic situation here, hundreds of millions of people all want to travel at the same time. The government has instituted measures to try to spread out the rush a bit, but so far without much effect. But when I was asked, I had no plans.

Then I was talking with a former coworker (with the end of the Olympics and reduction in our staff, I have a lot of these), and she was talking about visiting her home province of Gansu, but at the end of the holiday instead of the beginning. There would probably be fewer people on the move at that time. I’ve seen pictures of the area around her home town and said, “Wow, that’s amazing. I should go along!” So we started tentatively thinking about a trip.

But it turned out Gansu was just too far to go. We started looking at alternate destinations. Hangzhou and Suzhou? Qingdao, maybe? Then she remembered a place I once told her I wanted to visit, the big Buddhist carvings at Yungang Grottoes in Shanxi. It seemed like the right combination of distance (roughly eight hours by train) and desirability. A little bit of research added another Shanxi destination to the list, and we had a vague 4-5 day itinerary. And two of my friend’s old college classmates from Gansu who now live in Beijing signed up to come along. A friend of a friend who is a travel agent helped out with the train tickets.

Being a typical American, I packed for five days, with five changes of underwear, five shirts, a couple pairs of pants and so on.

I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain’s TV show No Reservations, but I’m well aware that its title is misleading. He’s traveling with a TV crew, so of course he has everything worked out in advance when he goes somewhere. He has a local guide and translator, he has the restaurants picked out, he has a schedule to keep. But still, his philosophy (Be a traveler, not a tourist) is appealing, and if he can’t completely live up to his title, maybe I can try to. For one trip at least.

So here begins a series of posts that are much longer and more detailed than my usual habit. I hope you enjoy them.

Continue to part 2.

No reservations, part 2

Back to part 1

2008-10-05

At a little after 5pm I arrived at Beijing West Train Station to begin my adventure.
After a bit, one of my traveling companions arrived, and we decided to grab a quick meal at KFC before boarding the train. We had tickets for the overnight train to Pingyao. Or at least some of us did. The ticket agent was apparently unable to get us four tickets to Pingyao, so we had two tickets (yingwo or hard sleeper) to Pingyao, and two only as far as another city partway.

We met up with our other companions on the train and immediately sought out the conductor to try to remedy our situation. We stretched the truth a bit and played the “stupid foreigner didn’t buy the right tickets” angle, and she had mercy on us and found us another pair of beds for the whole trip.
In this class, there are six bunks three high in each area, with no door or curtain between them and the corridor. Some of the cars don’t have the partial wall at the end of the bed, and instead have a ladder up the outside.

We sat together and talked for a while in the place where two of us had tickets. Each car has an attendant who comes around and matches up your ticket with a little card for your berth. What we didn’t know is that if you’re not at your berth (so the card for it is still in the attendant’s book), they will give your bed to the next person on the waiting list. So when it came time for two of us to go to the beds in the other car, we found them occupied. Which meant another trip to see the conductor. She managed to come through again. I ended up in the top bunk in a different section than the others. It’s kind of a challenge to get up there, and there’s not much room once you’re there – certainly not enough to sit up.

The cars are not heated, and it’s actually cooler on the top because of the vent in the ceiling. But I slept pretty well, and oddly enough, dreamed of trains.

Continue to part 3.

No reservations, part 3

Back to part 2.

2008-10-06

Once it was daylight, we saw we were passing through a mixed agricultural and industrial area. Corn dominated.
Around 7am we arrived at Pingyao. From here on out, we had no reservations for transportation or lodging. At the little train station, there were a bunch of taxis, which in Pingyao are mostly either open electric golf-cart-like vehicles or three wheeled things kind of like modified motorcycles. We found one and asked him to take us to a hotel in Gucheng (the Old Town), haggling for the price until he agreed to ¥2 per person. It was not a long ride, but it was really cold in the open car.
Once we passed inside the city wall, we could see why there were very few full-sized cars as taxis. The streets are very narrow and mostly dedicated to pedestrians, bicycles, and scooters along with the taxis. There are barriers preventing any wheeled vehicles from proceeding, and if you’re on a bike you have to pick it up to get past.
We paid the driver and looked at the first hotel, then three others. Actually they’re called guest houses, and are not really like a standard hotel. There are a bunch of them around the old part of town, just as there were in Lijiang.
We settled on the second place, which for no reason I could tell, was called the Catholic Guesthouse in English (the Chinese is 永庆斋客栈 Yongqingzhai Kezhan, which has nothing to do with religion as far as I can tell, something like Perpetual Festival Guesthouse), and they agreed to let us stay for a ridiculously low price.
We got two rooms like this one for two nights for a total of ¥100 (a little less than US$15). Right, that is ¥25 per night per room.
It had a Western style toilet which was a bit old and stained, but worked just fine. What we didn’t check was the hot water. Apparently they claimed hot water was available 24 hours.
These guest houses all feature at least one courtyard, and are basically repurposed old buildings.

So we checked in (and they never had me fill out the government’s foreigner temporary residence form), dropped off our bags, had a quick breakfast there, and went out to take care of our first order of business.
We rented four bicycles for the day, and rode off to the train station to arrange for the next leg of our journey.
This is us discovering that there were no seats available for any trains to Datong on the 8th. Well, there’s always buses, right? We asked direction to the bus station, and rode there to see if we would have better luck.
As it happens, bus tickets can only be purchased on the day of travel, so we checked out the schedule and prices, and headed back towards the Old Town.

We passed through what you might call Auto Row, where a bunch of new and used vehicle sales and repair shops were located.
This type of vehicle seems to be the area’s equivalent of the American pickup truck: the farmer’s general purpose work and delivery machine. We saw them all over the place, sometimes loaded with truly amazing cargoes. There are also electric versions, including many outfitted as taxis.

Aside from its Old Town, Pingyao is famous for a type of preserved beef, so we rode to the factory store for the most famous brand, but all the staff were on their lunch break and the store was closed. While we stood around discussing what to do, one of the sellers came and let us in for a look. My companions bought a couple of boxes for gifts, and I agreed to take one bag myself.

Then it was back to town to drop off the boxes at our rooms.
This is the outside of the West Gate.

Then we rode around town to get a feel for where things were, and to find lunch. Just down Nan Dajie (South Street) from the Catholic Guesthouse is Shilou, sometimes called the Bell Tower, though the Chinese just means City Tower.
Pretty soon, one of the themes for the Pingyao portion of the trip made its first appearance.
There are lots of cats in this town. It seemed that about half of the shops had one or more hanging around somewhere, even curled up in the display cases.

For lunch, we wanted to try out some of the local specialties, so we picked a restaurant and ordered some.
On the far side are some fried balls (“poms” on the menu) filled with figs and red beans, sweet and gooey and tasty, if a bit greasy. And watch out for the seeds! Then there is a noodle dish that was pretty good, and a soup with tofu and fatty pork (bacon, essentially).

After lunch, while my companions were busy haggling at a jewelry stall, I rode the short distance to the South Gate.
This was the city’s main gate in its heyday. I think the area just inside it here was where the guards were garrisoned. During the middle of the 19th Century, Pingyao was the banking center of China, with several large nationwide banks headquartered here, and that great wealth made the city a showpiece of Chinese culture at the time. However, once the imperial situation started changing around the turn of the 20th Century, the banks didn’t adapt, and within twenty years, had all failed, reducing the city to a quaint backwater. And fortunately for us today, leaving it untouched by modernization. With the troubled banking situation in the US right now, it makes me wonder...
After the jewelry shopping was done (at least for the moment), we continued our ride, and came across something not listed in the guidebook.
This Christian church near the East Gate is still in use.

Along the inside of the eastern wall, you can see that behind the brick facing is a pile of dirt.
And you can see another of the wide variety of vehicle designs in use. And speaking of vehicle designs...
These larger three-wheeled things are very common as well. You can’t see it from this angle, but the engine is between the two seats, and it uses a belt to drive the rear axle.
We rode around the inside of the wall from the East Gate around to the north and discovered that the east side of town has very few tourist attractions. Just normal everyday life over here. That’s a pile of ears of corn set out to dry.
And that’s a pile of coal in the street with buckets to carry it inside for heating and cooking.
By the time we returned the bikes, it was after dark.

For dinner, we went to a somewhat more upscale place that was recommended in a guidebook. There was a guy in an old-fashioned costume who beat on a drum and announced the arrival of customers.
You can tell it’s upscale because the dishes all match. On the left is a local snack consisting of mashed potatoes formed around a stick and deep fried. You dip them into either the sweet sauce or the spicy salt powder. Interesting, but not outstanding. At the back is a chicken and vegetable dish that was good, and nearest is a nice eggplant dish.
I had been fighting off a cold for several days (living on Sudafed and Halls lozenges), so didn’t feel like a late night (and honestly, Pingyao does not have a bar scene like Lijiang does). We went back to the Catholic and arranged for a driver to take us to a site out of town in the morning.

Continue to part 4.

No reservations, part 5

Back to part 4.

2008-10-08

However, when I got up the next morning, I couldn’t get the water temperature even up to lukewarm after letting it run for 20 minutes or so. Out of desperation I managed a quick shampoo, but left it at that before I froze to death.

We visited the breakfast buffet at Tianyuankui, which was a good mixture of Chinese and Western style morning foods, along with pretty good coffee, something I’d been doing without so far on the trip.

After eating, we hit a few of the smaller attractions along Nan Dajie that were covered by our tickets.
I believe these brick platforms were used for seating even in many offices. During the winter time they were heated with coals from beneath. I suppose the bed in my room at the Catholic was originally designed to work that way.
Most of the places we visited this morning were commercial enterprises, whether banks, merchants or whatever, and most of them featured living quarters for staff, including this fancy bed for a manager.
Close up of the woodwork.
This is the second courtyard back from the street. The first one had ordinary business and communication offices. If I remember right, the rooms to either side here were for accounting and sales managers, and in the back was where the boss lived and entertained important clients and government officials.
More rooms filled with antiques and historical descriptions in Chinese.
By this point we were going through things pretty quickly. There’s only so much of this you can take in at a time.

At the very back was an area where the company’s guards lived and trained with their weapons and martial arts skills.
Here’s a bank vault, Pingyao Gucheng style.
And here’s the staff kitchen of one of the compounds.
At one of the compounds, there was a suite upstairs where the boss’s wife and mistress lived a life of luxury, devoting themselves to music and womanly things while the men worked below.
And here’s something I liked that wasn’t antique at all.
Then we came to the largest of the commercial compounds, which once housed the Rishengchang Draft Bank, considered the first real bank in China. The buildings now house what is called the Chinese Draft Bank Museum.
This was the best of the business attractions in the town, but we’d seen so many smaller ones that we were kind of overloaded on them by this point.
Back out on the street on the way to the next exhibit, I spotted another member of the city’s feline population taking a nap.
Outside the city’s main gate is the UNESCO World Heritage notice sign.
After a quick look around outside...
... we went up to the upper level.
Of course they were ready to defend themselves.
I’ve read that a section of the south wall collapsed in 2004 and had to be rebuilt.
There was originally a moat around the city, but it’s all dry now.

From the top of the wall you can see the layouts of the houses inside the old city.
This one looks to be very well maintained and quite cozy with its courtyard.
This one is not in such good condition, but the residents seem quite comfortable.

After finishing with the main gate, we found a taxi to take us to the bus station to arrange for the next leg of our trip.
After arriving at the bus station, some locals advised us that we’d be better off checking on the train again, since there were no bus routes directly to Datong. So the driver took us to the train station. We managed to get some tickets as far as Taiyuan, which is the same place we’d have to change buses, but it takes less time and costs a quarter of the price. Go figure. The downside is they were wu zuo class tickets, which means without seat. Basically standing room. But it was the only option, so for ¥7 each we took it.

By then it was lunch time, so we asked the driver to take us back into the old town. It was a pretty wild ride, and I took a little video:

He really wanted us to eat at a particular restaurant (I suspect they give him a kickback for any customers he brings in) but we really wanted to go back to Tianyuankui one last time. The driver waited for us outside while we had our meal.

As we were passing under Shilou, we saw that we could actually go up into it with our General Tickets, so we did. This made a total of 13 attractions we saw for our ¥120.
The view from there was pretty nice, but there was not much to see inside.
Then it was back to the taxi and a winding trip through the back streets (since the main streets are restricted to traffic).

After that it got kind of unpleasant. When we got to the train station, my companions said they actually wanted to go back to the beef warehouse to buy some more. He argued a while, then turned around and took us back to the north gate, which was not where they asked to go. Not only that, but he drove at a crawl the entire way. When we got there, he stopped and said we could buy our beef at the store there. He got out his tools and started tinkering with his vehicle. We went into the store and they didn’t have the same selection, plus it was getting a little late to make our train, so we tried to find another taxi to the station. That took what seemed ten minutes of arguing about prices (there are no set rates for these things in Pingyao). We finally found a driver who agreed to our price, and off we went.

We rushed onto our train and managed to squeeze into a few seats in one of the cars for the trip to Taiyuan.
It’s only about a hundred kilometers, but the train stopped at a bunch of little towns, and the trip took about three hours. Once we got to Taiyuan, we rushed to the ticket counters to see what we could do to get to Datong. Taiyuan is a bustling, noisy, more-or-less-modern city full of traffic, and was quite a shock after quiet lazy little Pingyao. We managed to secure more wuzuo tickets for the overnight train leaving around 11pm. We crossed the street to KFC for dinner and discussed our strategy for trying to get beds for the trip. We ended up deciding we didn’t really want to invent some kind of untrue sob story, and would just find the conductor and ask nicely.

After eating, we went to the station’s waiting room, which was packed. We plopped ourselves down right in front of the gate where we would go out (there were no seats available). Every time I looked out at the room, I noticed a dozen or so people staring at me. I guess they don’t see a lot of foreigners here, especially not waiting for a train with them.

When the time came, it was a wild rush to the platform, then the search for the conductor. He said there were no bunks available, but eventually offered to let us sit at a table in the dining car as long as we would buy a ¥20 dinner. We agreed and off we went. I did not take a picture of this meal. It consisted of a scoop of shredded cabbage with a dash of soy sauce, a few pieces of tasteless sausage, and two slices of plain white bread. I ordered a beer to go with it. Luckily we had a fair supply of road food along with us. For this privilege we had paid ¥26 each, for a Pingyao-Datong trip total of under US$8, even adding in the cost of food.
As uncomfortable as the dining car was for eating, it was much worse for trying to sleep. And they left the lights on all night. it occurred to me that one of the easiest jobs in the world must be cook on an overnight train in China. You fix about 40 simple plates, all identical, and then sit around talking for seven hours, since no one ever orders anything.

Continue to part 6.