China - beijing

...stop on a tour of China that would last 10 days, taking in Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Hong Kong before heading for an 8 day stay in the Sabah region of Borneo.

After landing at 6am, doing that bit on the air bridge getting off the plane where you look through the window and state loudly “I’m in China!” just to remind everyone what they already know, we set foot into the shiniest building I’ve ever seen.

Beijing’s new ...
...That’s where.

China has gone all embracing of the creepy clown King of Capitalism Ronald, and my Big Mac meal set me back 22 Yuan, which is about £2.10 in proper Queeny money. A tasty result, and no danger of accidentally ordering a Shih tzu kebab.
I’ve got no shame in saying we ate fast food, and I felt our choice was fully exonerated later in the evening at the famous Beijing night food market.

First though, ... more

Beijing

Walking to the gate in Heathrow’s shiny new Terminal 5, I decided to test out the rumour that all airline staff get emotional when you tell them it’s your Honeymoon, go all gooey, throw away their professional integrity and upgrade you to turn left with the celebrities and politicians grandkids when boarding the plane, not turn right with the cheap seats.
It’s a lie.
I asked everyone.
I even ambush-questioned the pilot of our BA flight.
Face to face as he walked past me in the departure lounge.
Apparently approaching pilots isn’t fashionable these days, and although somewhat startled, he still said no.
9 ½ hours in Economy it was then, and more comfortable than a police cell at least.

Our destination was Beijing, the first stop on a tour of China that would last 10 days, taking in Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Hong Kong before heading for an 8 day stay in the Sabah region of Borneo.

After landing at 6am, doing that bit on the air bridge getting off the plane where you look through the window and state loudly “I’m in China!” just to remind everyone what they already know, we set foot into the shiniest building I’ve ever seen.

Beijing’s new Terminal 3 building was extraordinary. We were distracted somewhat from the shininess by the thermal imaging camera checking us for swine flu, before having our eyes scanned, for reasons that were unclear, but I was in China, so I obliged. I might now be officially a communist, but I’m a healthy one with a body temperature deemed “acceptable” and, visas stamped, we were on a proper Chinese motorway with our guide, Jean Wang, and our driver Mr Wan.
It quickly became apparent that driving in Beijing is not like driving anywhere else I’ve seen.
It genuinely appears to be entirely voluntary if you want to use any form of signal or obey any form of electrical 3 coloured lighting system.
A four lane highway is wide enough for 6 cars to fit across, so behold, a man in a battered Nissan begins to undertake us on the hard shoulder whilst a 70mph demonstration of the chaos theory in action folds out ahead.

Amazingly, we didn’t arrive at our hotel in the back of an ambulance but in one big piece, with a slightly sweatier me and a grinning Mr Wan.
We would be staying in the Beijing Novotel, and our 13th floor room gave us views of the CCTV Tower and a strange linked tower dubbed “The trousers” by witty and imaginative locals.
We were quickly back downstairs to take advantage of our hotels central location, and no sooner had we set out to explore this strange and foreign land, than a young lad approached, speaking carefully pronounced posh-ish English and calling himself “James” asked us to go to his university art exhibition with him.

With wonder of hindsight, it does sound like the start of a story that will also end in ambulances, but follow him we did, and art exhibition there was, with 8 exhibiting artists using rice paper and silk, and we were cheerily informed of the importance of bamboo for males and blossom for women, or koi carp being yin and yang, every picture had a story, and every story was for sale, on offer, as of course it’s their last day of the exhibition today. Very good price.

We left empty handed, and mightily wizened on Chinese art, and headed to the pedestrianised central shopping area which is a newly refurbished wide street, lined with much welcomed air-conditioned shopping malls.

By now, it was approaching lunchtime, and we had to find somewhere to eat.

Where do you eat on your first day in the great sprawling Chinese Capital?
McDonalds. That’s where.

China has gone all embracing of the creepy clown King of Capitalism Ronald, and my Big Mac meal set me back 22 Yuan, which is about £2.10 in proper Queeny money. A tasty result, and no danger of accidentally ordering a Shih tzu kebab.
I’ve got no shame in saying we ate fast food, and I felt our choice was fully exonerated later in the evening at the famous Beijing night food market.

First though, we wandered to the bottom the shopping area, asked around a bit, and found ourselves some 10 minutes later standing in the centre of Tiananmen Square.

Known by most as the scene of the massacre on june 4th 1989, Tiananmen Square is the centre of Beijing and has the Forbidden City to its north, Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, with a Perma-Queue snaking around outside to the South (They love a bit of Mao here – he’s everywhere, literally, watches, murals, cards, on their money – all banknotes), East and West is the Chinese National Museum and Chinese Parliament buildings.
As we stood, trying to get a sense of scale of a square of patio paving that will accommodate 1 million people, it didn’t actually feel that large, until you started to walk towards the ‘Monument to the People’ somewhere near the middle and realise it’s massive. Bloody enormous.
I was just coming to terms with where I was, and taking umpteen photos of a portrait of Chairman Mao on the entrance to the Forbidden City when I felt a tap on my elbow.
Looking down, I found a group of extraordinarily excited Koreans who wanted a photo.
Obviously, I obliged, but they didn’t want me to take their photo in the square. They wanted to take MY photo with THEM.
As soon as they left, giggling and laughing, but another group of Koreans were politely and quietly waiting to ask for our photograph as well. And then a third.
I was out-Mao-ing Mao in his own square.

We left the square before a queue formed to see us, and returned to our floor hotel room for a jetlag induced power nap.

A short while later, slightly confused, but a needy desire to settle a rumbling of tum, we went back into the shopping zone, to a street market that is set up every night, and is really rather popular.
It is on this market that I could see why there were so many McDonalds’s spattered around the city.

Roll up, Roll up; Ladieeeeees and Gentlemen:
Can I tempt you with “Sleeve-Fish Head”? What? No? OK.
Sheep Penis? Still no?
How about Stinking Dou Fu? I understand the name might put you off that one, not the best choice of description, and it appears to be some sort of fried mouldy fruit too. I guess stinking beats mouldy as a description, but no thanks all the same.
SilkWorm? Dog? Lamb?
Are you sure it’s Lamb though? Are you actually confident, looking at the list above it, that when it says Lamb, it means Lamb?

I wasn’t confident enough, so moved on to the next stall - all of the above were on one menu at one stall on a street that had about 100 stalls – I had my work cut out to find something that sounded palatable.
Ignoring the Cockroaches-on-a-stick, the Seahorses-on-a-stick, the Starfish-on-a-stick, Scorpion-on-a-stick, and the rest of the cast of Disney’s The Little Mermaid-on-a-stick, I finally relented and handed over 15Yuan (£1.50) for Snake. Boiled in Sesame Oils, served, that’s right, on a stick.

It was Rotten. Utterly utterly vile.
I’d like to go all Bear Grylls or Keith Floyd and describe the taste and textures of snake better for you. But other than being a bit like overcooked octopus, it was more of a:
Bite it,
Chew it twice,
Get overwhelming sense of culinary wrongness,
Hand snake-on-a-stick to a passing local who seemed happy for his unexpected freebie moment.

We did manage a Banana Fritter, albeit seemingly without a banana in, and a chicken kebab, that wasn’t chicken.
If it was chicken, it was a sickly one whose meat looked a bit grey.

The following day we woke for breakfast and decided the best course of action would be to gorge ourselves silly on the hotels amazing selection so we would at least have something nourishing at least once a day.
Pancakes, waffles, fruit, jam, Chinglish breakfast (no, really) and we were ready for a day with Jean exploring the cities sights.

We were collected at 8am, fully stuffed with breakfast delight, raring to go.
By 11.30 we were being taken for a lunch that comprised of 7 courses.
They eat early in China.
The whole day itself deserves a review all of its own as we visited Tiananmen Square again, the Forbidden City, both the 9,999 roomed Palace with a guide and the Hutong “Common People” district – with a local man called “Peter” who had some more art he thought we’d like to see.
Don’t worry. We’re not gullible.
The people of China are so friendly that we’d begun agreeing to go and look at identical art just to be taken to places off the tourist trail and make our excuses before looking at how the locals live.
We also visited the Summer Palace, with included ‘Traditional Chinese Street Kare-oke’ and the Temple of Heaven in an epic day of information bombardment that was mingled with yet more driving on Beijings roads, of which we’d lost our initial fear and had started looking forward to being in the car as much as we were to be looking at pagodas.
The following morning we again ate well it was a day where we knew we’d need a bit of energy.
We were going to the Mu Tian Yu section of the Great Wall of China.
This section was slightly further out of Beijing, at an hour and a half, but it is much quieter than the Ba Da Ling section which is only 45 Minutes from the centre and therefore overcrowded.
On the way, as well as being driven like we were in some sort of pursuit, we were entertained with information about how the wall began as city walls built as far back as 300bc before being linked and lengthened by every dynasty through until the 17th Century into the 10,000km long Space wrinkle we have today.
For 50Yuan (£5) we rode a cable car up to the wall, to save a 2 hour hike. £5 has barely ever been more worthwhile, and the views of the wall and the surrounding mountains were outstanding.
We had about 2 hours on the wall, walking between the ramparts that are spaced every 200 meters apart and gave welcome relief from both the 35degree heat and taking so many photos it looked like a flicker book on review.
An hour later and we’d walked as far possible, time allowing, energies allowing and big “No Entry” sign allowing, and began back down the 300 final steps we’d only just conquered.
The views from the wall of the surrounding mountain range, where there is no horizon, just a fading layer of green mountains for as far as you can see, even with a 10x digital zoom.

After another 7 course lunch, we headed for our final objective in Beijing.

We asked our driver to drop us at the Olympic Village, site of the 2008 Games.
And, polite as he was, he did.
We walked around the base of the colossal Birds Nest stadium, peaking through gates and down pathways for a glimpse of the running track inside.
We could have paid 50Yuan (£5) for a tour, but as there was nobody running around inside, we declined and went for a better look at the famous “Water Cube” swimming pool which, on TV, looks incredible.
In ‘real life’, the individual bubbles appear to be made from inflated cling film, and the description of Cube fits very well.
What we were struck down by however, was the sheer size of the Olympic promenade.
It’s so big, that when you stand between the Birds Nest and the Water Cube, and look east, you can see a pavement the stretches to the horizon, and it’s the same to the west.
You can actually see the curvature of the earth. We’d been informed by our Guide that Tiananmen Square is the largest city square in the world. She needs to come over here, because I think they might just have outdone their own record.

After a photo opportunity with some Tibetan Monks – this time I asked them for a photo, not the other way round – we headed for a cab to take us home to the Hotel.

What our ever so helpful and polite getaway driver hadn’t mentioned when he dropped us off was the fact that the Beijing Olympics were staged on the very outskirts of Beijing.
Some 45km from our hotel, which was in central Beijing.
The ensuing hour of taxi-banzai driving through rush hour traffic left us sweating at the potential mortgage sized bill that would surely come at the end.
Not so. Our hour long ride came to a total of 120Yuan (£12) which, when compared to where you could get to for £12 in the UK, we were virtually jumping for joy at the figure, much to the confusion of both our concierge, and the driver.

Beijing has a tremendous amount of places to see, and it has a tremendous amount of people looking at those places, mostly from other parts of IndoChina.
We found it entertaining to be amongst the hoards of local tourists and Koreans as it was to be somewhere quiet, and the general population were all extraordinarily welcoming, even the battalions of army types who would be everywhere, marching through the Square, or on apparent day trips to the various places we went to, would break from their metronomic strides to give us a cheery wave.

What we had noted from our first few days in China was the ground-breaking, earth shattering revelation that not all Chinese people look the same.

Apparently there are 53 different nationalities of Chinese in China, the longer you’re there for the easier it gets to see the differences.
‘Some people’ (I haven’t actually done any surveys, but I did lean out of the window at shout a bit) think China is a country behind the west in its development, but in considering this fact, I also thought how perhaps they’re generations ahead, and if the concept of Europe was taken to a degree that would make Robert Kilroy Silk weep, and everyone in Europe were kind shaken about a bit it’d be like China, in land mass, population although to get the comparison totally accurate, there would need to be more Europeans selling DVD’s in Chinese tea houses. I didn’t see any, and I saw a lot of tea shops on that shopping street.

Back in the car, and back to the Turtle-shaped Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport, shaped forr reasons of Feng Shui, meaning their planes won’t crash as often ready for our next stop of Xi’an, and the Terracotta Warriors.
 

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