More October Holiday!

Monday morning a big group of us went to Qing Huang Dao, a city near the ocean. It was my first experience on a train in China. It was pretty nice. There are 4 or 6 seats facing a table so we could play cards and eat lunch easily. What I really liked about train travel is how smooth the ride is especially compared to the buses in Ecuador. I could actually sleep and not have my head bouncing against the side of the seat. When we finally got there after 4 hours, we started the search for a hostel. We were a group of nine: two Chinese and seven Americans. There’s a rule in China that foreigners can only stay at certain “approved” hostels. Why? This is China, you don’t ask questions. It made our search for a decent cheap hostel a bit more difficult. For example, Mike and KK would walk into a hotel and ask the price, see a room, bargain the price down. Then the rest of the group would come and the price was no good and we couldn’t stay there. Too many foreigners. After about two hours(!!!!), we finally found an ok place with an ok price. After that we went on a “hike” up a “mountain” to see the “sunset”. In reality, it was walking on a concrete path up a hill to see the sun slip behind clouds/smog.

Supper was exciting. Because we were on the coast, we of course had seafood. Instead of ordering from a menu, we picked out live clams, scallops, crabs and fish from buckets and took it to the restaurant to have it cooked. After supper we walked through a night market where vendors were selling jewelry and animals made out of sea shells. On the walk back to the hostel, we passed a vendor selling cotton candy on the street. It was too tempting. Mmmm… Giant cotton candy!

The next morning the plan was to go watch the sunrise together at 5:50am, sharp. Well, about 5:55am Catherine and I were still the only ones in the lobby waiting. A few minutes later Becky, Zach and Josh wandered down. Mike and his friends who planned the event failed to wake up for it. As we were walking down to the beach, I realized that sunrises in China weren’t going to be any more exciting than sunsets in China. And sure enough, it wasn’t. When we got to the beach, there really wasn’t much of anything to see. Just a ton of people already there. (Why???? When you could be in your bed sleeping???) We took a few pictures to prove that we really did get up. Zach and Becky went back to the hostel for more sleep and Josh, Catherine and I decided to wander around and see more of the beach. It was definitely the least beach-y beach city I’ve ever been in it. First of all, there weren’t any waves. The Yellow Sea, I guess, is too small or too protected, so no waves. Another thing, no one wears beach clothes. In China, no one wants to be tan. They all want to be as white as possible. So laying out in the sun just isn't their idea of a good time. Instead most people were wearing long sleeves and pants. Only the kids were actually playing in the water. And yes, it was warm enough during the day to be in the water. The only thing beach-y about the place was the seafood and the fishermen.

After everyone else finally got (ok, so we went back to bed for a while too) and we all had some breakfast, we went to the Great Wall! The problem with traveling with a group of nine people is only four people fit in a taxi. That is unless you find a less than honest driver who is willing to squeeze five in, which we did. Trust me, there are more comfortable ways to travel than having five people (four in back) plus a driver in a compact car. To see the start of the Great Wall, we took a speed boat and were able to take picture from the water (as opposed to paying 70RMB to go in the museum). It’s suppose to look like a dragon’s head but that takes a pretty big stretch of the imagination. Then we went to a part of the Wall where we could hike on it. To get there we had to travel through some very rural areas. One of my favorite parts of traveling is seeing how the people live especially outside the big cities. All of the houses had flat roofs and people were drying corn on them. When we got to the Wall, it was pretty clear that apples are in season as every vendor was trying to sell some to us. The section of the Wall we were at was really cool: most of it was restored but part wasn’t so we got to see what is left of the original wall. To get on the Wall, we had to walk through an aviary (why? See same questions above). This is kind of pathetic but it was one of my favorite parts of the trip. There was a macaw who was trained to talk but instead of saying “Hello!”, he said “Ni hao!” (which is Chinese for hello of course). I don’t know why I found it so funny but I still laugh every time I watch the video of it. I’d send it out but it’s too big. So anyways, back to the Wall and how cool it was. Another great part was that there were very few tourists there. So the only thing in my Great Wall pictures is the Great Wall and not the Great Wall covered with thousands of people. Hmmm... There’s not much to say about it. The best way to describe it is with the pictures. I’ll post a bunch of them. BTW, when I say “climb” the Great Wall, I really mean climb. Most of it is steps. The area where we started was in a valley and the Wall went up the mountains from there.

The train ride back to Beijing was uneventful with the exception that we didn’t have seats for the four hour ride. So we sat in random open ones or on the (not so clean) floor in between cars. For four hours it wasn’t too bad but I can’t imagine taking an overnight train like that (people do!). Back at my apartment, Polly and I were happy to find that our water was turned back on. We were unhappy to find that it was blood red with dirt and clay in it, especially since I hadn’t showered since Sunday morning (that was Tuesday night, yuck!) and desperately needed to do laundry. We ran the water for at least 30 minutes before it was clean again and I did an empty load of laundry. We wanted to make spaghetti but the water had a funny smell so we decided ramen (made with drinking water, of course) would be a better supper.

Day 1 Pics

Dragon statue inside Forbidden City



Forbidden City, outer walls



Tiananmen on National Day

October Holiday Day 1

Oops! So I've been told that the link to my photos doesn't work. I think I need to invite people to the group. I'll keep playing with it to see if I can get it to work but for the time being, if you want to see my photos, send me an e-mail and I'll send you a link (that works, hopefully).

Here's installment one of my October Holiday adventures. I'll keep posting them day by day as I finish writing them.

After beginning school just a month ago, we already had a week off for National Holiday. October 1 is National Day kind of like our July 4th and October 6 is Mid Autumn Festival so the two holidays are rolled into one big week off for the whole country (unless you work in tourism…). I suspected that it might be a big deal when starting on Thursday all the highways in Beijing became even more congested then usual. Commutes to our schools that normally took 45 minutes all of a sudden lasted an hour and half. The roads were bumper to bumper cars.

On Saturday my friend Polly from high school, who is also teaching in China, flew to Beijing to see me and hang out for the week. She lives in a rural village (population only 300,000 people, seriously, that’s small here) and was very excited to come to Westernized Beijing with McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner. We went out for pizza and ice cream for supper at Big Pizza. Then we went to Carrefour to buy some Western products that she can’t get in her city like butter knives and spaghetti sauce.

The next morning we got up early to go to Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. That was somewhat of a mistake: going to Tiananmen on National Day. I didn’t realize it until we were transferring subway lines and there were so many people at the station we could barely move. When we finally got to Tiananmen (“which way to you think we should go?” “well there are about two million people walking this way, so I think that might be it.”), we didn’t stay long. There wasn’t much to see except Chinese people taking pictures of each other. So we took some pictures of ourselves there and pushed our way out to cross the street to go to Forbidden City.

Forbidden City is the place where the emperors and their families and anyone else who they allowed lived. When they call it a city, they’re not kidding. A person could spend days wandering around there looking at the all the rooms. It’s a very interesting place but after a while, it all starts to look the same. Some highlights were the rooms that had the bronze mirrors (very elegantly decorated of course) from 5 or 6 dynasties going back to about 500 BC, the rooms that had the furniture that was used by the last emperor and the gardens. The whole place was covered with very detailed paintings and wood carvings.

After lunch (which I was able to order without an English menu, a huge accomplishment), Polly and I met Catherine and Becky and Zach who had just come from Wuhan at the Silk Market. It’s not actually an outside market but instead more like a five story mall filled with vendors and they don’t sell very many thing made out of silk either. Each floor features a different type of products. Catherine showed us around and explained how the bargaining works. To put it nicely, the bargaining is fierce. It’s very hard and almost stressful. I’ve done a lot of bargaining in Latin America but it doesn’t even compare. For example, I wanted to buy a wind breaker for cool mornings and evenings and biking. Most vendors’ starting price was around 1200RMB (about $150). Of course I wouldn’t (couldn’t) pay that much. Catherine told me to expect to pay around 100RMB. I felt so ridiculous offering them 50 or 60RMB after they said over a thousand. What’s worse is the vendors are professionals at ripping off foreigners. They have all these lines to get you to offer more money and feel bad about how little you did offer. “Ha ha ha! That is joking price, ok, now you give me price that is not joking price. Oh, lady, you are so beautiful. I can’t pay my suppliers at that price.” It’s so crazy, it almost takes all the fun out of bargaining. Although we did learn that it’s to our advantage to mention that we are teachers (making Chinese salaries) not tourists. They really have a lot of respect for teachers here.

At night at my apartment, we had a service for all the FOC people who were in Beijing. It was great to see my friends again who teach in other cities in China. We had tons of people visiting Beijing (clearly the place to be): 5 from Ningxia, 2 from Wuhan and eventually we met up with 4 teachers from Kingdom Workers. I tried making banana bread for a treat but it didn’t turn out so well. I learned about a very important feature on our toaster oven: the button that switches between using just the top heating element and using both. Oops! Raw on the bottom banana bread isn’t so good and needs to be eaten with a spoon…

One of the “fun” things about living in China is that you frequently get little surprises. My surprise that night was the water in my apartment had been turned off! Ha ha! I had a sink full of banana bread batter covered dishes, no way to wash them, plans to be gone for the next two days and the possibility of some other people coming to stay in my apartment. A very lovely combination… Luckily, I had filled the biggest bowl with water before to start soaking it and that was enough water to at least rinse most of the dishes off.

More Photos

I've been working on uploading my photos from National Week Vacation. Thanks to a new feature on Snapfish, you can easily view them without me having to send out links for each individual album. Just go to www.everydaysanadventure.snapfish.com. Hopefully in the next 24 hours I'll be able to write up a few stories to go along with the photos. Keep checking back...