Our first week in China

Now I'm hearing about demonstrations and a train and dead people in China, but I'm uninformed not because of the The Great Firewall but because of the the slow connections of the hostels. I'll post what happened more than a month ago, and I'll try to understand what's going on now...

So Beijing woke up

So Beijing woke up. At 6am the streets started to pack with people, cars, bikes, motorbikes. It took us a while to understand where, in this huge city, we were, but we managed to find the hostel some people in U.B. recommended us. It resulted to be a very nice place in Xicheng district, near the Houhai lake and Nanluoguxiang alley, one of the most young chic streets.

It was one of the nicest areas we saw, there were a few parks around the lakes where Chinese people were doing exercise or playing some sort of badminton, children were running around, women were dancing Chinese folk songs, and a bunch of middle age to old guys were jumping into the lake and swimming.

The post Olympic Beijing is a much modern city than the city I knew 7 years ago. Part of the city has been completely rebuilt. And now you see toilets everywhere, I guess to prevent hordes of tourists from peeing in the alleys during the Olympic Games.

When I was in the city last time -it was one of my last destinations, I remember to be craving for coffee and ice-cream, and having a hard time to find them. Now there are international brands and chains everywhere, and to find coffee and ice-cream is as hard as finding rice. In general lines, the city is meant to be easy to navigate, there are big signs everywhere also in English with street names or pointing tourist spots and the cardinal directions, and the main streets are designed following the exact cardinal points (but this we have to thank to the Ming dynasty, I think).

I heard people complaining that Beijing is not what it was, that it’s now a Chinese Disneyland. I don’t agree, I liked the old Beijing, and I like the new Beijing.

On the downside, many hutongs, the small alleys in the traditional neighborhoods, were replaced by modern buildings, malls, banks. Most of those neighborhoods lacked plumbing, and most people were happy to get compensation and move the hell out of there, but many of those alleys had hundreds of years, and they could also improve the plumbing without demolishing the whole place.  I’m reading a fantastic book about China called Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. The author is a journalist from US, who lives in Beijing since 1999 and recounts his experiences, as an English teacher and as a journalist. I recommend this book to whoever wants to try to understand something so vast and huge as the Chinese culture. Anyway, the book has a chapter about the hutongs, and tells about the order of demolition of a hutong in 2000 even though the hutong supposed to be an historic relic even  “older than the United States of America”. If the pace of demolition was fast at that time, I can’t imagine what China did with Beijing towards the 2008 to “deserve” the Games, a real plastic surgery.

It’s really a shame that old buildings were destroyed, but at least I think that maybe now, maybe a late though, the city is understanding a little more what makes Beijing special. We saw a lot of construction sites where they were building traditional Chinese buildings, for example, and we were in an area which had the traditional hutongs with a lot of signs that asked to protect the old Beijing.

Anyway, we spent 3 days just waling and biking around. We put certain places as objectives to ourselves, just to ignore them when we found something more interesting on the way. We were like moths distracted by any bright light, but we enjoyed more the distractions than the actual objectives.

Postcards!

 We spend a lot of time just eating, we wanted to try everything everywhere, and we found out that we could split food in three categories: amazing, tasteless and awful. So we fought to get as many of the dishes from the first category, but no matter what the taste is, food almost always surprises you: what seems sweet is salty, what seems hot is cold, what seems strange is something known.

The best soup ever!

Stinking tofu! puahh

By that time, China was warming up for the summer break vacations and many of the tourist spots were already packed with thousands and thousands of Chinese. So we avoided the more or less closed sights, but we did enjoy the classic food market (I guess you’ve seen pictures from any person who traveled to Beijing) and the even more classic Beijing duck, we walked through the silent hutongs and we visited the average 798 art district, but basically we just enjoyed the city. We had the chance to meet our friends from Mongolia for beers in Nanluoguxiang alley and to meet up with our Israeli friend atthe shining Sanlitun bar street in Chaoyang  district.

Biking on the hutongs

And after 4 days in the civilization we decided to make an adventurous side trip.

Great Wall

Just FYI, there isn’t such thing as The Great Wall, there are a lot of Walls built by different dynasties with different materials to protect themselves against different invaders. Now many of the Walls are invaded with tourists and vendors of sweets and Coca Cola and women that chase you while they yell postcards and put them inside your face. So many hostels sell you trips to go to less accessible parts of the Walls, which means less people and less vendors.

We went far with the part of less accessibility, we read in a forum about a part of the Wall called Jiankou Wall which is unexploited and not far from Beijing, but there’s no public transport to that place, and parts of the Wall are literally falling apart, I mean pieces of rock fall while you walk.

We took a bus from Beijing to Huairo, an ugly city which seems as the continuation of the furthest and ugliest part of Beijing. From there we couldn’t find buses that would drive us closer to our destination and we had to take a taxi. So after 1/2 hour bargaining we got to a convenient price and we started going.

The concrete and the buildings gave place gradually to more and more rivers and green and cultivated lands. Suddenly the road started to go up and down on the mountains and we continued going and going for more than 2 hours. And it already seemed too much and the driver started to call and ask people around until he turned around and we drove back one hour to take the right turn. He was so ashamed that he stopped in kiosk to buy as mineral water.

We finally arrived to Zhao's guesthouse at Xizhazi village, the closest village to Jiankou Wall. It was a small village surrounded by mountains and corn fields. The guesthouse was managed by a young family and besides us only a young Chinese couple was staying there.

We only took small backpacks to the village and our plan was roughly to start walking from the nearest part of the Wall on the next morning until we get to a more transited area and take a bus to Beijing from there.

The woman of the family, Zhao's wife, seemed to be in charge of talking with the foreigners and I tried to explain her our plan and ask for a map using simple English words and our magical Chinese phrase book. She answered us back using the translator of her mobile phone; we got a schematic map of the Wall written in Chinese and of the size of a credit card, and we understood that it will take around 7 hours walking until the point where we could take a bus, the part of the wall called Mutianyu. The afternoon we got there we just explored the surroundings and we prepared boiled water for the following day.

We woke up around 6:30 and there was a drizzle which made us start to doubt our plan of 7 hours walking. When we finished breakfast, the day was still very cloudy and humid but the rain stopped and we understood from the Zhao’s wife that there won’t be heavy raining and that it’ll be ok.

So we walked half an hour between the thick vegetation until we got to the Wall. In order to only start our trek, we had to climb a part of the wall which consisted of destroyed stairs (I guess) which become with time a 70 degree floor of rocks sticking out of the surface. I said to Iohi, “Don’t worry this should be the ruined part we heard about”.

 This came out to be one of the easiest parts of the trek along the wall. For 6 hours we walked completely alone, up and down, up and down, we had to climb with legs and hands in many parts, we walked over falling stones, we crawled into holes/doors and we jump from roofs, we walked down on surfaces so stepped that we had to grab from the sides.

Then suddenly we found ourselves in a refurbished area: all the tiles are in their place, there are signs, and refreshment stalls! We got to Mutianyu Wall! We started to see tourists everywhere; we were completely worn out and covered in sweat and around us many Europeans with leather shoes and their new clothes. Around one hour more, we found a cable car –yes, we deserved it. And we went down to an area full of shops, restaurants, and the bus stop to Beijing!

And back to Beijing –some successful negotiations

So we returned to the same hostel and Iohi found out that she forgot her Shoresh (Source) new sandals in the village’s guesthouse. For the next two days she conducted diplomatic negotiations to get her sandals back. She made the hostel workers to call the woman from the village’s guesthouse several times and discussed options that included making a whole day bus trip just to take them. She finally acceded to ship the sandals after a money bank transference, and shortly before we left, we won back the sandals!

Those days we were fed up with the lack of usb in the internet café, we walked around with the camera from internet café to internet café trying to download the pictures without success until we made the drastic decision of just buying a computer. So we went to the famous Zhongguancun District, which has several buildings full of computer and telephone shops. I did the proper research and we decided to buy an Asus so we had to look only for an official Asus vendor. Once we found it and found the computer, we started a new round of successful negotiations this time through Google translator, which ended in the computer I’m using now.

 From Beijing, with the new computer and the Shoresh sandals, we took a sleeper train to Pingyao, a rather touristy place but, anyway, a cute and small old city, in Shanxi province.