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.