Beijing: the forbidden city, the Great Hall of the People, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven and Peking Duck. This is what we had in mind. Of course, we are also aware and wary of some of the notorious downsides: the crush of people, oppressive air pollution, and the risks of being swindled and ripped off that come with any major city. But all in all, we had high hopes for Beijing: where Shanghai is ultra-modern and forever coloured by western influences and a history of colonisation, Beijing was to be a truer glance into the real China experience.
We'd elected to take the bullet train to Beijing instead of flying, both for comfort and convenience, as well as for the experience itself. I love high-speed rail and we both enjoy the chance to see the scenery as we speed across the country on polished rails at a brisk 300kph. The scenery, however, wasn't exactly verdent green fields and pastoral life; instead it was new cities comprised of dozens of identical sky-scraper apartment blocks seemingly thrust up from the ground fully complete and awaiting an influx of humanity. It was new highways and infrastructure. And, of course, dozens of factories producing the concrete to make all this possible. The other downside was a trend we would notice throughout our travels: Chinese people (if you'll excuse the generalistion) are very loud. When they speak to each other in person they seem to be shouting; on the phone it's even worse. Oddly, it only seems to happen when they're speaking Chinese. We would see people change from high-decibel Chinese to normal-conversational-level English in adjoining sentences. Added to this is the fact that there seems to be very little taboo about playing music or videos or games on your phone without using headphones. The two men next to us on the train to Beijing spent all five hours playing videos and slot machine games on their tablets, every sound blasting out through the built-in speakers. It did not make for the most restful journey.
The hostel we selected for this leg was the Happy Dragon hostel, chosen from HostelWorld, one of my go-to websites for cheap accommodation. In this instance, it was not a great choice, for two reasons. First, the bed. The double bed we'd selected was in fact two single beds pushed together, with a nice solid wooden bar smack down the middle. The mattresses also appeared to be made out of some form of sheetrock. Comfort, it turns out, was not a high priority. The second issue was one which would emerge as one of the constant features we would notice in our time in China: perpetual construction and perpetual noise. We have yet to visit anywhere in China where there isn't a significant quantity of construction going on at all times, but our Beijing Hostel was a particularly egregious example: the building directly across the street was being torn down or extensively renovated or something, which required heavy and loud construction to occur starting at 4AM, complete with Chinese workers yelling at each other at all times, continuing the trend of needlessly-high-volume speech. The construction also added a layer of dust that pervades the city and dirties every surface.
Lest you think our Beijing experience was wholly negative, let me delve into some of the positives that we found during our time there. The hostel, though loud and equipped with terrible beds, was in a very interesting area of town: the Hutong area. These interconnected alleyways are a glimpse into the more traditional Beijing living, before the skyscrapers and mega-malls became the norm. Our first day, we wandered down a series of hutongs, and were amazed at the differences: one could be nearly silent and wholly residential, the next could be practically pulsing with activity and energy, thronged with young people and shops. We selected a middle-ground: a fairly quiet hutong, but one with some nice cafés, and most excitingly for Katy, a cat café where we could set, pat the kitties, and watch the world go by. A lovely rest after a fairly hectic travel day. We followed this up with an excellent dinner with Frank, a chap from Katy's course, and Frank's wife. This gave us the chance to eat at a wonderful restaurant we'd have never discovered otherwise.
On the successive days, we hit many of the highlights we most wanted to see. The Summer Palace, a sprawling, beautiful park centered around a lake and dotted with temples, outdoor hallways, bridges and walking paths is a wonderful and surprisingly tranquil escape from the city, at least when it's not mobbed with innumerable Chinese tourists shouting into their phones and photographing anything that will sit still for five seconds. The drum and bell towers require a steep ascent up rather perilous flights of stairs, but provide excellent views across Beijing (and the drum ceremony is deafening and incredible). The Tibetan Buddhist Lama temple has a certain peacefulness despite the crowds and is jammed full of art, icons and ceremonial items from a fascinating tradition. And the Temple of Heaven, an expansive park nestled into the centre of Beijing is a beautiful, if repetitive at times, park clustered around a handful of artistic, elegant temples and greenspace. So we had some truly lovely experiences.
Sadly, we missed out on one of our biggest to-dos: the Forbidden City. Arguably the main attraction in Beijing, we had dearly wanted to see it, but were stymied on two occasions: once due to us moving slowly in the morning, being confronted by swarms of people and an inability to find breakfast (making us both feel murderous rage to the swarms of people and deciding that we should eat and go to the Summer Palace instead). Secondly because it was inexplicably closed on the day we tried to go. It turns out that while normally the Forbidden City is open every day (hence the guidebooks and websites giving us no indication it wouldn't be), it's closed on Mondays for the first half of this year, for renovations. So unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to see this rather remarkable place; something for the next trip, perhaps.
We did make it to the Great Wall, however (at Simatai), though I am going to detail that in its own blog post.
The food we had in Beijing was lovely overall. Most famous, of course, is the Beijing Duck. A delicate and flavourful dish that involves a rather elaborate cooking and serving ceremony, this dish lives up to its billing. We actually ate it three times over the course of our stay, and each time was slightly different, but always succulent. We also went twice to Mali Mali hotpot, a (mostly) Sichuan hotpot place that was so entertained by our visit that they insisted on taking pictures for what appeared to be their "Wall of non-Chinese diners". Numerous other little meals of dumplings, beef and chicken always were tasty and varied, and it's safe to say that the food was definitely a high point, even though I never quite worked up the courage to try the fried scorpions or silk worms on offer from some of the street vendors.
We also had an excellent experience that occurred-as many of the best memories do-through pure happenstance. On our final night in Beijing, we'd booked into the bests-reviewed Beijing Duck restaurant in the Lonely Planet (considered to be one of the better-known and better-respected duck restaurants in the city). Katy and I were meeting another friend of hers from her course who'd elected to do a few days in Beijing before flying home. But we arrived a little bit early, so set off in search of a few beers and a place to sit. In the end, we settled on a tiny, grubby little diner/convenience store/bar hybrid, clearly frequented solely by locals, which sold us the cheapest beers of our entire trip (about 55p for a 600mL bottle). We sat out on the terrace to relax and drink, and soon a dish arrived, sent by the next table. One of the chaps there spoke English, and explained that the vegetable dish he'd sent over was a local Beijing vegetable delicacy, available only for a week or two per year. It was delicious, though we never knew what it was (he said it was from a tree of some sort, we suspect it might have been young, tender bamboo shoots). We ended up chatting with the guys and sharing beers until Katy's friend arrived and we headed to our duck, then joining them for one more round after the meal. It was a fun little slice of local life.
Overall, I wasn't as impressed with Beijing as I'd expected to be, and Katy wasn't blown away either. There were some definite highlights-the Summer Palace is amazing and the areas where the Chinese tour groups don't venture are rather tranquil. The morning market (food and clothing primarily) outside our hostel was a frenetic bustle of energy and semi-organised chaos that was fun to see. And there still is a sense of recent history in the Hutongs, and some beauty in the Temple of Heaven, the temples and the old towers. However, the omnipresent dust and noise that belie the perpetual construction are overwhelming, the throngs of shouting, pushy, inconsiderate people (many of whom clear their throats loudly and spit openly wherever they are) and the general sense of disorganisation and inefficieny are maddening. We certainly enjoyed our time, and enjoyed specific aspects greatly. But it didn't quite live up to our hopes for a view of "Real China". Perhaps our view of modern China was just skewed.
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