The Great Wall

Somebody ought to be shot for saying that the Great Wall of China is visible from outer space. The most surprising thing about it is that it's not really all that wide. Or tall. If you could see it from space, you could easily see a three bedroom house at the same distance. Frankly, with Beijing smog being what it is, it's surprising you can see it from the ground. And it's a ridiculous proposition that you could see it on most days from a blimp.

But it is quite picturesque. More on that later…You get there by taking a bus, the 919, north of Beijing. Getting on requires the usual hand signals and misunderstandings. Luckily the pronunciation and tone pattern for "Badaling," the town where you see the wall, is nearly identical to "Badabing," Tony Soprano's favorite strip bar.

Once you get there you have a ¾ mile uphill walk—I mean, really, why the hell wouldn't you put the bus stop a full 3/4 of a mile from your destination? This is China after all! The town itself is a collection of souvenir shops, selling, as is the way with communist countries, all the same stuff.

So you arrive. And there it is, many feet high, 15 feet wide, built and rebuilt of rocks and concrete, most of it presumably 12 years ago with a crane, and covered for miles with hoards of Chinese. It's steep too. The wall snakes along the ridges of mountains, which ascend and descend with no particular regard for your feet, legs, and lungs.

The crowds are astonishing, and they accentuate a problem westerners will always have with the Chinese: space. In America, everyone gets a good foot and a half circumference and must be asked permission to be touched. Not in China. People simply bustle along, jostle and shove eachother, without so much as an "excuse me." We usually try hard to accept local culture, but for some reason, it is exceptionally difficult to do so with space. Whenever someone shoves you in a line, you instantly react, typically with a four letter word and an elbow.

But there are advantages to being a westerner. As we trudged through a particularly narrow doorway, Nicole and I were pushed out of the way several times by those trying to get there first. Then, she tapped my shoulder.

"What?" I asked.

"We're much bigger than them," she said.

It was true. Suddenly, a great weight lifted off my shoulders. The next second, an old lady tried to jostle past me, and I promptly hip-checked her over a baby carriage. I looked back, and saw Nicole stiff-arming a couple of schoolgirls. Then, to the doorway. A middle aged man was barreling through with a full head of steam. He saw me coming, my right shoulder lowered. He knew what had happened. He tried to reverse direction. But, alas, it was too late. I slammed into him like a freight train, knocking him back into his wife and three children. We emerged from the doorway, serene and triumphant.

Actually, it was a peculiar thing, because we soon realized that everyone had taken a right when they reached the wall making that side particularly crowded. We decided to go back and try the left, and for some mysterious reason, the area was nearly empty. After an arduous climb, we found ourselves high above the valley, with no one to bother us. We opened a bottle of water, sat down by ourselves, and quite enjoyed the peace and quiet for a good long stretch. The wall really is quite impressive, especially in its great distance, and worthy of the homage it receives.

So much tasty, so little stomach

Weary from yet another so-what tramp about one of Beijing's vast tourist traps, we found ourselves in a dumpling shop. Now here's something worth shouting about. The rest of Beijng may be smog filled, loud, huge, footsore, and tiring, but slip into a dumpling restaurant and you can, at least, taste heaven.

This delicious snack is available about a buck a half dozen and offers mouth-sized bursts of flavor. Succulent duck, pork mingled with pungent spring onions, shrimp mixed with ginger and garlic, all dunked in soy sauce and red pepper—does this sentence need a subject and verb? The best dumpling restaurant we've found makes them to order, and nothing in any Chinatown compares.

Then there's streetfood. This is what the Beijing-ers eat. And no one said they were fools. Most of it is half cooked and then finished in front of you. There are seemingly endless varieties—at first. Soon, you eat most of them. Our favorites are potstickers, spicy noodles, fried potatoes and eggs, baked dog (just kidding), and kebabs. A good dinner for a couple of dollars.

Third, last and most importantly. Peking Duck. Even if you've never liked duck, or duck skin, or duck fat, you can't say you won't like Peking Duck along with its skin, meat, and fat. You eat it with little pancakes, sugar, scallions and plum sauce. It's a little more pricey, but much more yummy.

Of course, there is one caveat about Beijing dining. If you're one of those people who prefers to eat his chicken feet, beef intestines, pork liver, and lamb stomach packaged as "cotto salami," "chicken apple sausage," or "hotdogs," fine. You may not like the food in Beijing. But remember, if you ever look at the steaks and chops at the butcher counter and wonder where the rest of the cow, pig, chicken, and sheep is, turn around and look at the deli counter. That is where they have magically transformed the feet, lips, hooves, ears, and assholes of those animals into cylinders of "baked ham," "bologna," and "chicken roll." Here, they just eat 'em. Without apology.

A Walk in the Clouds

We started our day with a plate of spicy tofu at the Fast Food restaurant on Tian 'anmen Square. Our objective was the masoleum of Chairman Mao, but outside something was already more interesting: smog.

It hadn't been so bad the days before, but now a thick fog attacked the back of our throats. It was easily visible looking across a modest sized street, and it steadily got worse all day. Eventually, we were standing inside a mall and noticed that the shops across the way looked a little hazy. Beijing's air is downright filthy.

In any case, we paid our respects to Mao, a process exactly as interesting as walking by a dead dictator can be (he's a fat, jowly fellow with a double chin, lounging, surrounded by white flowers, behind two layers of protective glass).

Then we headed out in the general direction of a big circular building called the Temple of Bountiful Harvests. The walk was more interesting than the destination. It took us through a hutong, a particular kind of neighborhood that the Lonely Planet refers to as quaint. And although that adjective covers a vast category of sins (most of them on the part of writers), it doesn't answer here.

Hutongs are the Old Beijing, gray concrete shacks, hovels, and courtyard houses built in adhoc arrangements around tiny alleyways filled with cats, dogs, chickens, and children; bridged by banners advertising god-knows-what; and cluttered with the rubble of hundreds of never-completed construction projects. We picked our way along, past stores and restaurants, women squatting over fires, men smoking in doorways, people hustling to and fro, and all sorts of character-laden jumble lying here and there. It was quite fun, but tiring.

Finally we accepted a ride from a bike cab—a world war one era contraption with a bench seat. At our destination, the fellow tried to charge us $35. We managed to bargain the number down to a couple of bucks by the usual method of flagging down passing cop cars.

From there we had a gargantuan slog through the gargantuan palace park, all to reach the gargantuan circular temple (obscured by smog at 200 yards). It was the usual Chinese whatever, impressive mostly in size. Signs, as usual, went into great detail about the number of times the thing was burnt down and rebuilt and no explanation whatsoever of how it was used.

You could tell we were ready for something good. And yes, we found it. (the next post will cover our discovery).

Impressions of Beijing

It occurred to us as we were standing in a courtyard at the Forbidden City. Courtyard, perhaps is the wrong word. There are Nascar tracks with less area. It could hold about 100,000 people comfortably. Nicole turned to me and said, "They didn't just lick this up off the street, did they?"

The "this" is scale. Beijing is big. In every possible way. It's a big modern city with big boulevards, big buildings, big theaters, big sidewalks, big benches, and big ambitions. Tian 'anmen Square is so big that the vast buildings that surround it look flat. The Forbidden City is so huge that even though it had tens of thousands of tourists in it, Nicole and I found a quiet cafe inside where we the only people having a cup of coffee. In certain corners of it, you could have conducted howitzer practice without worrying about raising your insurance rates.

That said, Beijing is so striving so hard to be modern that, except for scale, it is hard to describe. Think of any large city, add a few pounds, and then strip out whatever it is that makes it that city, and you have the parts of Beijing we have visited. They are modern, slick, and excessively clean (Beijing might be the only major city I've visited where I'd recommend the public toilets). But it's hard to say what it is beyond that. Of course, there may be other parts of it with more character. Without a decade to explore the place, you can't be sure.

We've spent the last two days walking through the tiniest fraction of this place, marveling at the number of skyscrapers, and being somewhat shocked at the smog so thick that it hazes up buildings a hundred yards away. Our first day, we took in Tian 'anmen (too large for pictures to do it justice), and passed on to a touristy hotel where we feasted on pig knuckles and two-colored tofu ($6). The next day, we walked through the weird Forbidden City, which took eight hours simply to walk through a few parts. It was the home of the emperors, and though described as a pleasure palace, it was a vast monotony of red-roofed buildings with ornate gardens, cold palaces, collections of indifferent gems, and concrete avenues.

Today, we are off to visit Chairman Mao.

(The photos are from the Forbidden City. In case there's any photographers looking at these, the sky is not washed out, it's actually smog-overcast.)

Day One

We're pretty beat, but we thought we'd share some photos. After a short night of sleep and a long day of slogging around the Forbidden City, followed by a plate of Peking Duck, we're not especially coherent. These are just a few shots of the city...

Beijing: A Dubious Arrival

Since we have arrived, we've found to our surprise that we can't see our blog. Of course, given its seditious nature and history of inciting conflict, this is hardly surprising. In any case, we're not sure if this will be broadcast or not.

That said, we're almost too tired to write anything anyway. It's mid afternoon here, and 11ish on the West Coast. We were also bold enough to forget the taxi ride and try to get here by bus, subway, and a short walk. We made it, barely, and it wasn't our fault

I'll give you our hotel's instructions to explain:

1. Take number 2 bus to Deng Zhi Men
2. Get off bus, continue for 30 meters to subway.
3. Get off at Jishuitan Station, exit and turn right for 20 meters, then right again. Walk along bank of Xihai Lake for 7 minutes.
4. Hotel has a beautiful terrace that overlooks the lake.

Here's the actual instructions.

1. Get a ticket for the number 3 bus, because the ticket lady is adamant that that's what you want in spite of your best efforts to convince her otherwise.
2. Explain to the bus driver that you really want number 2, and convince him you're correct.
3. Get off atDeng Zhi Men, continue on for not less than 100 meters.
4. Get off at Jishuitan Station, exit, turn right for 20 meters then walk along the bank of Xihai Lake, which is really a pond. Watch men fishing in this glorified puddle with poles capable of hauling out a shark.
5. Get lost, because 7 minutes is an absurd instruction and the stupid hotel isn't on the bank of Xihai Lake anyway. Circumnavigate the puddle, arouse the curiousity of the fisherman.
6. Finally, show your printed instructions to everyone and learn that your hotel is actually in an alley alongside a canal about 2 minutes walk (give or take) from teh lake.
7. Hotel is a bunker with a concrete roof, where you can sit and dimly view the puddle.

Actually, Beijing is very very very interesting, and we'll have much more to say about it when we've got our brains back.

Not impossible to do

It's time again, but this time, the goal is a little less out there than South Dakota. The tickets we have say China…

Of course, our friends have already called us idiots—most had the courtesy to do it behind our backs—for undertaking such a trip without a tour. Even my well-traveled uncle told me last night that "it's not impossible to do."

The problem is the language. Apparently Chinese taxi drivers don't have the common decency to learn English. So unless you've got a card with the exact address written on it in the Empress's Chinese, you're in for a long, meaningless conversation that ends with you on the side of the road looking for another cab.

The truth is, I have every expectation of this turning into a disaster. You may have gotten the impression that, with the amount of stamps in our passports, Nicole and I have picked up some rudimentary orienteering skills. Such an impression would be faulty. In fact, we have spent several days of our lives in aggregate staring at maps, streetsigns, and landmarks without so much as a single spark of recognition going off in our heads.

I remember fondly one occasion when we set out looking for a restaurant on a river. We spent an hour trudging around a market neighborhood, before we found the river.

In any case, don't expect any more posts for several days. We'll probably be wandering, broke, around Beijing.