Beijing

Upon our arrival we wasted little time in heading to the famed Tian'amen Square. Outside the forbidden city there are tons of gawkers as well as college aged students asking us three main questions - where we were from, if we liked art and if we had been to the Great Wall. Evan was polite and answered all of their questions - Canada, no, and we'll go there later. I just was extremely annoyed. When we got back to our hotel we read a sign warning about these people. They tried to convince people to go to an art gallery where everything is overpriced and really pressure you to buy something. Scams are everywhere!

With our stomachs growling we set off to find food and do some exploring. We wandered through some pedestrian only shopping streets and came across a food market. This wasn't any food market though. They were selling fried bugs (any and all kinds), fried starfish, squid, octopus, snakes, sea urchins, and Evan's favorite, fried ice cream. He couldn't pass up the ice cream, but didn't try anything else.



We walked around the wall of the Forbidden City and into Jing Shan park. We noticed a crowd gathering and decided to check out what was going on. They were filming a movie, and the main actor in this scene (an old guy) kept forgetting his lines and hitting his head in frustration. It was pretty amusing.





The park is built on a hill overlooking the Forbidden City and the view was amazing.



Next we headed to Beihai Park and took a stroll around the lake. We were impressed with the number of people outside walking in parks and exercising. All throughout China we have seen people, young and old, doing Tai Chi, walking, playing badminton, etc. Not the most strenuous of sports, but at least they are getting plenty of exercise.



Saturday morning we woke up with high ambitions - visit the Panjiayuan market, Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City. To accomplish our goals, we decided to take a taxi to the market to get the day started asap. Wrong decision. Not only did it cost $7 (a fortune compared to the subway), he dropped us off at a different market and we were duped. Granted, we should have been looking for a market that brought in around 50,000 people a day and the one we were at probably saw about 200. Oh well, we found some interesting items and went on our way oblivious (until we figured it out later that evening).

Next stop was the Temple of Heaven. It was pretty much a large park with a temple in the middle. The layout was nice with all the green space, but the temples weren't too different than ones we had seen before.



Disappointed from the market and the temple, we felt like we hadn't accomplished much, so we decided to squeeze in the Forbidden City/Imperial Palace as well even though we only had an hour and a half before it closed. We are professional temple tourists now and were able to cover it in our given time.



We did find a 4 star toilet in the Imperial Palace...





At night we treated ourselves to the very special Li Family Restaurant, a very intimate dining experience that specializes in the selections of the Qing and Ming imperial court. We had about 10 different set menus to choose from, and just like we do when ordering wine at a restaurant we took not the cheapest, but second to cheapest. The top set menus were tailor made for expense accounts at $300 per person but we couldn't even go there.

The dinner started with our "small dishes"... stir-fried pickled cucumbers, Beijing smoked pork, boiled celery, mung beancurd, fried lotus root box, fried fresh green beancurd, fried beancake, spicy beef, mustard seed Beijing cabbage and spicy chicken. We enjoyed every dish here and we knew with this warm up we were in for quite a treat for the full meal.

Next came the "main courses"...deep fried fish scallops, pork fillet in soya sauce, sweet and sour pork ribs, lobster with Beijing flavour, fried sea prawns, steamed snowfrog with egg, fried eggplant, sweet and sour mandarin fish, and baked Beijing duck. Everything was delicious except for the snowfrog with egg...yuck.

What a meal, one of if the the finest dining we've seen on the trip and worth the expense. We did wonder, having not studied the expensive menus, what exactly do you get for all that extra money??? Well, we checked the menu after the meal and saw some of the highlights...bird's nest soup, shark fin, braised abalone, and braised fish maw.



Sunday we set out to right our wrong with the market, but the first stop was the Lama temple. You may recognize the Lama part from the second half of Dalai Lama, and this temple was for the Lama sect of Buddhism. It was a really nice temple complex and we enjoyed it especially for the giant Buddha, 26m high, and made from one piece of sandalwood. No pictures allowed here, but take our words for it, this thing was amazing.

We liked these lions that seem to be protecting most of the temples we visit.


Onto the market where we managed to score some great souvenirs and used our quickly increasing Chinese vocabulary to bargain with the vendors. Evan even managed to conduct an entire purchase in Chinese! This was more like what we had expected with thousands of people and tons of great buys.



The next day was spent at the Great Wall, which we will talk about separately, and the evening at Luoguxiang hutong. This was a place that we found in the NY Times before the trip and the recommendation was seconded by some fellow travelers in Xi'an. Very narrow streets, cute shops and tons of bars, cafes and restaurants made for a great finale to our time in Beijing.

We spent 4 full days in Beijing and had great weather for our entire stay. One of our first comments about the city was that we couldn't really sense the pollution. The sky was blue and there weren't many people wearing masks. The day we flew out to Seoul, we finally understood the concerns of the athletes. The smog was so bad, visibility was horrible and the sky was an ugly yellow/grey. We don't know what caused it to turn so suddenly, but we are grateful that we only had to deal with it on our taxi ride to the airport.

Even though we are still going to write about the wall, we figured now would be as good a time as any to let you know how much we love China. It's a place that can be very intimidating at times, but holds some of the most spectacular sights for travelers. The history of the country is really hard to get your mind around and the feel of being on the edge of a new world order with China being at the forefront is really something. There is a great deal of wealth concentrated in certain areas, but the sheer scale of everything here means that if they get their act together this country will be throwing a lot of weight around for the rest of our lives.