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| Part 1 -- Glitter and rain |
Disclaimers: Dear Friends: If you've made it onto this distribution list, it's because I thought you might enjoy hearing of my Asia travels from time to time. (I didn't pack my Webster's--just about the only thing I DIDN'T pack--so you'll have to pardon any spelling errors. Also, given that I'm being charged good yuan to use this nice machine at the Sparkice Internet Cafe at the China World Trade Center, I might not be as careful as I might otherwise be in composition and proofreading. Plus, it's awfully hard to concentrate with this schmalzy pop music blaring from the boombox--the likes of Bryan Adams, the BeeGees and Elton John.) Also, not everyone may understand all my references since I know you all from different walks of life. I apologize in advance for that. If you decide that you really would rather read Tiger Beat or almost anything other than my missives, please let me know--I won't be insulted--and I will happily remove you from this list. I'm really not that arrogant to think that the whole world is interested in hearing what I have to say about my life as a vagabond and Asia novice. Plus, if you write me back, it will probably take me a very, very long while to reply. Please don't be impatient with me. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to find one of these Internet centers and whether the connections will be decent. So much for the disclaimers.
I've been in Beijing for three days, and it's a wonderment. For those of you who know the extent of my pre-trip trepidations, you'll be happy to know that once my mom dropped me off in the sleek Japan Air Lines departure lounge, my anxieties fell away and I suddenly felt very calm, cool and collected. A TOTALLY unexpected feeling. I felt like I ["I" is underlined] was the airplane lifting above the storm clouds into a bright blue sky. That clear and steady sense has stuck with me: I still feel amazingly strong. And SO right about being in China. The only worry that's still dogging me is the weight of my backpack. I've combed through it many times, once with the help of Karen, my Asia mentor in Brooklyn, trying to determine what I can dispense with, and everything still seems essential, but the damn backpack plus daypack weighs about 38 lbs. combined. Unacceptable. So far, I've gotten help every step of the way carrying it, but I can't count on that much longer. Gotta do something about this.
I was assisted in reducing my worldly possessions by a thief at Narita Airport in Tokyo who relieved me of my brand new Timex watch. But the watch didn't weigh much. It wasn't even a flashy watch. It cost US$35 at Wal-Mart. I know this is karmic retribution for shopping at Wal-Mart (I'm morally opposed to shopping at Wal-Mart, but I swear I had looked and looked in other stores first). I felt a bit sour after that happened, but I rebounded quickly upon landing in Beijing. There was way too much to be happy about. For one, my baggage showed up on the carousel. Another: Beijing Airport is a FUNKY old airport. You feel like you're landing in some remote outpost, not Beijing. Even the airport in Reikyavick (Iceland, sp?) is spiffier. It looks like the interior of a changing room at the beach painted institutional green--not the gateway to the capital of a world superpower. It looked SO dinky I had to laugh. I loved it. There were only two baggage carousels for the whole airport and only one place to exchange money. But miraculously it took no time at all to get the bags, go through immigration, clear customs, and change money.
Since I arrived in Beijing (this is my third day, did I say that?), trip magic has glittered all around me. It's like the travel faieries are following me down the street. So many wondrous things have happened in just three days. I could write on and on, but the clock's ticking away. I'll try to touch on the highlights because I don't know when I'll make it back here, to the Sparkice. It was a VERY long way. Everything in Beijing is a VERY, VERY long way. The most pedestrian-unfriendly, non-U.S. city I've ever been in, which is sad because most people don't have cars. And the subway system is very limited. The bike traffic here is fierce, though. Crossing the street is NOT a solo venture. I wait until a small pack of people has formed, composed of a couple pedestrians and a few sane bikers before crossing any street. Otherwise, it's way too scary to cross.
Okay, okay, here are a couple of the magical parts. At the airport, the tourist board lady there who books hotel rooms told me that the place I had reserved over the Internet for the first two nights was way too expensive and way too far out of the city center for what I was paying (US$45). Who ever heard of a tourist board lady coming up with a LESS expensive hotel? Everything I've read about China from the LP crowd (Lonely Planet--one of the best Asia guidebooks and its bulletin board) has talked about how everyone is trying to rip you off in China, charging Westerners way more for everything. Now, I may have to pay more as a Westerner, but I really haven't felt ripped off. Yet.
So, the tourist board lady recommended a budget hotel (US$22/night) that's right next to the Forbidden City. Unbelievable. Even LP didn't list anything that central and that cheap. The only thing cheaper would be a dorm room that sleeps 4-8, but they are way out of the city center. I told the lady I would take it, but only if someone from the hotel I had already booked failed to show up to meet me like they were supposed to. Well, wouldn't you know it. For the first time in my whole entire life someone was standing outside the baggage claim holding up MY name, Lucy Friedland, on a sign. Oh, what a feeling. So I told the tourist board lady that it would be impolite not to go with Wendy (the lady holding the sign with my name on it), but that I would call her back later.
So Wendy spoke a few words of English and took me to the Lien Hotel in a cab. When I got there I discovered that the hotel was decent enough, but the neighborhood it was in was wicked cool, remote or not. I walked the street for hours madly in love with Beijing, having wonderful interactions with people who spoke no English. It seems like a very down-to-earth place, not cold as I had imagined it to be. By the way, Wendy turned out not to really work at the hotel, and not one of the receptionists spoke a single word of English. No one at all in the tourist industry seems to speak a single word of English, except for the ladies at the tour board. No kidding. Negotiating anything is VERY difficult. It makes Rio (with its Portuguese) seem like a walk in the park. But for that afternoon, the neighborhood took me in with open arms. A lady showed me her philatelic collection on the steps of a post office. She even gave me a piece of newspaper to sit on. Another lady gave me a banana for free. I saw bicycle repairmen and groups of men playing games with Mah-Jong-like tiles. I'm sure this reads like a first blush of romance with Beijing, and maybe it is. I was flying. Did I mention I'm in China?
Then, I wandered into the Asia Hotel--a five-star hotel near the Lien--that had a poster up about the Chinese Acrobats. Well, I was able to wrangle a ticket for that very night, my first night in Beijing! And the Poly Plaza, the venue for the acrobats, turned out to be right across the street from my "remote" hotel! I was so thrilled to be there and so dazzled by the show, I couldn't help but babble excitedly at an elderly white guy sitting next to me. Well, it turns out this person is an Englishman and works for the BBC. And what do you know, if after the show, he asks me if I would like to accompany him to the Great Wall (at Mutianyu, an hour and a half away) the next day with his private BBC driver in a four-wheel drive! My head was spinning. I couldn't believe my luck. So he picks me (and my dreaded backpack) up the next morning and we have a grand old time chatting the whole way. He gives me all the juicy details about what it's like being a BBC reporter in West Africa and Rome in the '60s and '70s. (Now I know for sure, I don't want to be a BBC reporter--not that I've had any offers).
So we go to the Wall. It's sheeting down rain and I'm laughing like a hyena when a plastic tarp dips and dumps a huge load of water on my foot. We were walking the gauntlet of vendors who were trying to sell us stuff, including rain ponchos and umbrellas, even though we already had rain ponchos and umbrellas. In my silliness (after having read endlessly how the Chinese try to rip you off), I thought that someone had thrown a bucket of water at me to try and get me to buy a second poncho. When I saw it was only water that had dropped off a tarp, I started laughing and laughing until tears were running down my face, and all the Chinese vendors thought I was possessed and started laughing too. Best time I've ever had getting soaked. So we walked the Great Wall in the pouring rain, but it was China, it was the Wall, who cared? And then Norman's driver took us back to Beijing, and Norman treated me to a late lunch at his swank hotel, and sadly, he had to leave for the airport to go to his next gig in Bangkok. On the way, the driver took me to my US$22 hotel, so again, I didn't have to carry my backpack.
Well, the US$22 hotel is a take-down from the Lien, but I don't care. I'm right near Beihai Park and the Forbidden City ("right near" in Beijing terms is about a 20-minute walk). And in this room I can figure out how to work the hot water--a big plus. I'm still sleeping weird hours. I fall dead asleep at 8 pm and spring awake at 6 am and rush off to Beihai Park to see the early-morning ladies doing Tai Chi. Well, some are doing Tai Chi; another group is doing some odd little Chinese dance that looks like the Alley Cat with hand movements to pop music on the boom box; and a third group is clapping their hands rhythmically and chanting something, who knows what. I decide that no one I know will see me, so it's time to do the Alley Cat to Chinese pop music. I join in with the other ladies, feeling like a complete idiot, but, hey, it's a public park, and I didn't think I would be thrown out of the country, providing I kept a poker face like the other ladies and not crack up laughing.
When I had enough of that, I went back to the Yu Yuan Hotel (my US$22/night place) for the complimentary breakfast. Yuck. First terrible meal. Cold fried bread, super-salty greens, a slice of ham, a boiled egg, some hot rice water and a puffy sweet thing that looked like a flower bun and tasted like a sponge. So I went to the market to see if I could improve on breakfast. Then, I had to run back to the hotel for my first intestinal meltdown of the trip, one of many, I'm sure. Then I took off down this very long avenue intent on finding the closest metro stop. After 1-1/2 hours of walking, I found it. I collapsed at a lunch spot--my legs were still tired from the steps at the Wall--where I entertained the waitresses by trying to order off a menu with not one word of English. But one of the waitresses bailed me out. First person to speak English, no kidding. That girl deserves a promotion. Someone should make her VP of Tourism or something.
Then I took my first subway ride. It cost US $0.24. I was very happy. I got off at Jiangwomenwai Dajie. You have no idea how exciting that was. I had typed that street name dozens of times for the Beijing City Profile (for my job at Weissmann Travel Reports), proofreading it over and over because it's so hard to spell. But to be there! This is the main tourist and international business drag, where I finally saw some Westerners. (Surprisingly there were almost none at the Wall or at the first two hotels. I was starting to think I was the only U.S. tourist in Beijing.) So I headed for the tour board to ask the ladies if they knew of any four-day crash courses in Chinese. (In retrospect, I should have spent more time listening to language tapes in advance of the trip. It's really tough here without being able to speak Chinese. There are almost no signs, even in Pinyin--the Chinese words spelled using the Roman alphabet. Even the street signs for major streets, when there is one, rarely uses Pinyin. This town is opaque to me.)
I gotta tell you about the Friendship Store. I didn't think I'd like it. It's a state-run store that's purported to be an overpriced tourist trap, and it is, but it's a really attractive tourist trap. Some of the merchandise was so pretty, I practically cried. And then I saw a saleslady (NONE of the salesladies in this tourist trap speak a word of English) who had the most beautiful long braids I'd ever seen. So I had to check the phrasebook to figure out how to tell her so, which I did, or something remotely like that, and she seemed pleased.
The uncanny thing about the Friendship Store is that I met a guy at the watch counter who had had the same Timex watch swiped off his wrist at the Beijing Railway Station. So even though I wasn't feeling too bad about losing the watch, I felt even less bad then. Plus his buddy Hao from Stamford, CT (can you say "bilingual"?) invited me to join his entourage of three (his female cousin and uncle, I think) on a side trip to Xi'An to see the Terra Cotta Army. I might go. I wasn't planning on it, but the idea of sharing a soft sleeper (compartment on train) with a bunch of bilingual Chinese people sounds awfully good right now. So, I'm thinkin' about it and thinkin' of buying another Timex watch--I found the same one at the Friendship Store. Only it costs upwards of US$50, so I think I'll wait 'til Hong Kong and try and get one for less money that's less attractive to thieves.
So, then I pressed on (another long walk) to the Sparkice Internet Cafe at the China World Hotel. And now it's dark, it's 10 pm, and it's going to take me forever to get back to the Yu Yuan Hotel, but I know I'll figure it out. I'm still calm, cool and collected. And very happy to be in China.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright Wonderlandİ 1999