Trip to fasicinating Beijing

My husband and I returned back from a one-week trip to Beijing, China yesterday. My husband's purpose of visit was to attend the conference and I was taking my much needed vacation away from US.

We left from SFO airport to Beijing last Sunday. The preparation for the trip included some grocery shopping for ready-made Indian snacks and food. I was determined to cook, so we got our mini rice cooker. Two days before leaving to China, I realized that the voltage at China was 220v and I needed a step down transformer, if I wanted to cook. This information did not stop me from wanting to cook, so we purchased a transformer and an adapter suitable for Chinese plug points. I made check-lists of everything else we needed before the trip and checked and re-checked it. Basically, I wanted it to be a well planned trip...well, what do we know, God has always his plans :-)

Our flight left to Beijing was on time and the flight journey was very smooth and the Indian veggie food was really good. I enjoyed John Grisham's latest "The Summons", while my husband was dozing off as usual. I envied his remarkable ability to attune himself to any environment and sleep anywhere anytime...some lucky people :-). The guy sitting next to my husband was a Chinese and he knew how to speak English. He suggested some places of interest and explained the concept of "ring roads" in Beijing. He was really nice. He offered to help us, in case we had any language problems and gave us his visiting card.

The flight landed on time (around 2:00pm Beijing time). After we collected our baggage, it would not be as simple as getting out of the airport and taking a taxi to our destination. Later we would realize the communication techniques needed to go around Beijing, but at that time, we preferred to rely on somebody to help us out. As far as speaking the language, I knew only "Ni Hao" meaning "hello", while my husband knew more words compared to me and kept repeating it like a parrot all the time. He would tell me the word and the meaning and ask me to repeat it. After 5 mins he would ask me word again. I would forget the word. I always knew my brain was not meant to retain stuff like that :-)..Anyway, we looked around for the conference booth at the airport, setup by the organizers of the conference. We found them after looking around for a while. They were a bunch of college grad students at the booth. They were giggling and eager to help out. Their English was not perfect, but good enough to communicate and understand each other. One of the guys accompanied us outside the airport. He explained to the driver where we needed to go and loaded our luggage and opened the cab doors for us. How sweet...my husband thanked him in Chinese correctly, while my natural response was "thank you very much" in English.

The travel time from the airport to the hotel was around 45-50mins. During my trip in the cab, I was quite excited to see the traffic signs, buildings and everything else in Chinese. This experience was totally new to me, as I had never visited a country where English was not one of the spoken languages. The trip from the airport to the hotel consisted of mostly freeways, similar to US. I was impressed as I had expected Beijing to be similar to India as regards the roads. However, I did find that the Beijing drivers were as resistant to following traffic laws as much as the Indian counter-parts. I closed my eyes, while the driver speeded away overtaking buses and other slower moving vehicles and of course I got reminded of India :-)...My husband offered to tip the driver after we reached our hotel. But the driver refused to accept it, his body language indicated that tipping was uncommon in China.

We then checked into the hotel. We were exhausted by now and I just wanted to sleep. But, we had to hold-off on sleeping, as we wanted to get used to the local time. We were hungry and I offered to cook. At this point, I was very proud that we had all the ingredients needed for a tasty Indian meal. We connected our transformer and rice cooker. We turned the switch on, and eureka..the cooker worked..or so it seemed. After filling the cooker with rice to cook and the thought of relaxing came to mind, within 5 minutes the cooker stopped working and the lights were out. Apparently, the transformer conversion did not seem to work well and it blew the fuse. We realized that a microwave would solve our problem and we called the front-desk. My husband asked the receptionist for a microwave and I could hear the person at the reception slowly spell out "microwave". At this point, it was apparent that it was not a commonly requested item and we wondered whether she even knew what a microwave was.

All my cooking plans were ditched at this point and in some ways I was happy and relieved. I did not have the burden of the cooking responsibility and it meant my husband had to be in-charge of the food business, after all he was the "provider" ;-)..Anyway, at that time, my husband was slightly disappointed as he was very hungry. We searched for the room-service menu, but we were not able to find it. Anyway, I called room-service and ordered steamed rice. We heated one of our ready-to-eat packets in hot water and our dinner was all set. Well, like the saying goes "when God closes one door, he opens another". It might be too silly to use that in this situation, but as humans we always find a way to survive and I believe God has given us that ability.

The first 2 days we were jetlagged. I hardly slept for 5 hours in a day. My husband's presentation at the conference went well on the third day. He attended the conference for one more day, while I was trying to get out of my jetlag. On the evening on the second day, we ventured out. We realized there was a departmental store next to the hotel. Even though, we got a map to the store, it was not clear. Of course we were not able to communicate with locals in their language, so we showed them the Chinese words for the store on the map. Thus, our communication standards were established and this would be our protocol wherever we went. This also gave us the confidence that we could venture out alone in the city. The people were quite friendly and nice. We must have asked 4 or 5 people for directions and we tried to guess from their body language where the store was. This was a very interesting, new and fun experience. Finally, we reached the store and later realized that we had earlier missed taking some turns and took the long route. The departmental store had a grocery section in the ground floor. We wanted to get some fruits; we were trying to locate them. Passing through the store, we had to see and smell things, that we had rather not, but what the hell, everything was part of the Beijing experience. Finally we found what we needed and returned back to the hotel.

The third day my husband returned from the conference at 4:30pm and we decided to visit the famous Lama temple, as it was pretty close to the hotel. I really wanted to see a Buddhist temple and I was very excited about the visit. We took a cab and reached the lama temple within 20 minutes. These pictures were taken from inside the cab during the trip to the temple.

Lama Temple (Yonghegong):

Lama temple was totally fascinating. There were several halls with statues of Buddha in all shapes and forms. I found the temple similar to the temple in India in terms of practices within the temple. Like for example, people light incenses to worship the lord. Also, inside the sanctum people perform "semi-sashtanga" worship of the lord. Another thing I found similar was that Buddha seemed to take many "avatars" - for harmony and peace, everlasting protection, happiness, etc. The monks inside the temple would not allow anyone to take pictures inside the sanctum. Out of all the amazing Buddha’s I had visualized, the last and the most amazing was "Maitreya Buddha". Apparently, this Buddha statue was carved out of single white sandalwood. The statue was 60 feet tall (can you imagine) and looked very majestic. We would have loved to take pictures, but practices of the temple had to be respected. I found a picture of "Matrieya Buddha" on the net (I am not sure how this person got the picture .. anyway, here it is. For more detailed information about the lama temple, navigate to the Picture Source: http://www.kinabaloo.com/yonghegong.html

One the fifth day (Friday), we decided to visit one of the must-see places at Beijing.

Temple of Heaven and Shopping at HongQiao Market:

We packed lunch using the ready-to-eat stuff and headed to the temple of heaven. We decided to visit the temple of heaven and then head to the shopping market, as they were close to each other. We reached the temple of heaven around 9:00am and we found many locals and tourists. Inside the temple of heaven we found many locals practicing Tai-chi and dancing. The temple of heaven has 3 main areas and one must walk a lot from one area to another. The 3 areas were

1. The Altar of Heaven -

This architecture was different from the rest of the temple of heaven structures. There were 3 white circular structures built out of white marble.

2. The Imperial Vault of Heaven




This is next to the Altar of Heaven. The architecture looks amazing and I did find that similar to the lama temple. I believe you can hear your echoes seamlessly through one side of the wall to the other side, but we did not experience this. Instead, there was a big queue to view this hall and part of it was closed.






3. The Hall of harvest - This one was a big hall and I believe it was used to pray for good harvests long back in those good old days. I found the temple of heaven very interesting, but I did like the Lama temple better, as each hall in the lama temple had a something new to offer, unlike the temple of heaven halls, which did not have much inside them. Most of them were dark and public was not allowed inside the halls.


Shopping at HongQio Market:
This was the most fun part of the trip. I think we shopped for 4 to 5 hours, the longest my husband has tolerated shopping :-)...I think he enjoyed the bargaining more than me and I really think he became a pro there. Actually everybody does, after a couple of bargaining experiences. The HongQiao market had everything ranging from silk scarfs, electronics, clothes, handicrafts, shoes, purses and other accessories. In my world, this is a shopper's delight. The initial prices quoted by the vendors will be 10 times more than the actual price (I am not joking:-)) and it is funny how everyone uses the same pricing strategy. They will say "this is very expensive" and the price is XXXRMB and then they will say "since you are a special customer, I will give it for YYYRMB". If you act disinterested at this point, they will say "quote me your price". You really have to shamelessly divide their price by 10 and say that. The intense bargaining starts at that point, you will have to remain firm or increase the price only 5 or 10 RMB. However, we gave in many times and probably paid 20 or 30RMB more than the initial value we started with, as we were really tired with this process after a while and our time was limited. I think we managed to get some really good stuff. Silk is very famous in China. So, I recommend buying silk scarfs here. Of course they might not be real silk, but who cares...I think they will serve good for rare use. Fake brand watches are very cheap..like Rolex and Cartier, etc. I bought a Rolex for 10$ and a Cartier for 5$!! I also got some custom made pearl necklace and earring for 7$. We also got some other handicrafts. I could have spent an entire day there, but like I said the time was limited and my husband had reached his shopping threshold.

One the sixth day (our last day at Beijing before taking the flight next day), we visited Great Wall of China (how can we miss that), Forbidden City and Tianamen Square.

We decided to take the hotel arranged tour for this visit, as the Great Wall was really far away from our hotel and we decided that only a hotel tour would help us cover all these places on the same day. Also, the lunch was arranged and they promised us that they would arrange for veggie food. We started the tour at 7:30am. Our hotel was the first pickup location. We spent the next one hour picking up other people, from other hotels. It was interesting to see the city, traffic, people and shops along the way. As usual the traffic laws were not obeyed as strict as U.S and everyone drove based on their moods and skill-set. Some of the streets looked very similar to Mount Road, Chennai (place from where I come from) and my husband told me some streets looked like Bombay (place from where he lived for most part of his life). We had a very entertaining English-speaking Chinese as our tour guide. His English was very good and he was very funny. He told us a lot of interesting things about China I never knew- for example, he explained how jade was the most precious stone in China, how the color red meant happiness and always used at weddings, taught us some simple Chinese characters, and how people at China get married only on even days, his experiences with tourists at Great Wall - how fascinating and dangerous the climb can be and he also spoke about chairman Mao and a lot of history. He seemed very proud of his heritage and his culture. I also learned about the different dynasties- most of the Chinese belong to the "Hun" dynasty. However, Jackie Chan belongs to Manchu dynasty.


Forbidden City:

Our first stop was Forbidden City/Kingdom. The guide said the place was so named because in the good old days commoners were not allowed into Forbidden City, only the king, his ministries, queen and several of his mistresses. Forbidden City has about 9999 rooms, used for several purposes by the King/Emperor. The famous movie "Last Emperor" was filmed predominately in this place. Most of the rooms looked alike. Public was not allowed to enter these halls; however you can see them from outside. They had rooms for weddings, official meetings, relaxing and conducting other ritual and ceremonies. It does give you an impression that life was a lot more fun for the kings back then. We walked for about one mile and reached the Tiananmen Square on the other end of the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square:

I did not find anything very special about this place. Basically, this place was a huge square where 10,000 people or more can gather for political meetings, etc. It place is significant because of the huge protests by the local people against the government in 1989. After Tiananmen Square we headed to the Silk Factory. Though, the visit to this place by the tour guide was based on making the tourist buy Silk, they had a demo that showed how silk is extracted from cocoon, which was interesting to see. The prices here were triple of what we got at Hongqiao market, but it was real silk. After this we headed for lunch to get the energy needed to climb the Great Wall of China.

Great Wall of China:

For lunch we went to a Chinese place. My husband and I were wary of the food we were going to get and had made backup plans. But to our surprise, the restaurant looked and did not smell bad. Even the non-veggie food, did not look that scary. They served us veggie food separately. We got tofu in soy sauce, some mildly salted cucumbers; green beans mildly fried in oil and steamed white rice. The food was decent, with no weird smell. We ate well preparing the hiking up the Great Wall. After the lunch, we reached Great wall, Badaling section. Like everyone else who sees the Great Wall and gets amazed, I was amazed too. I wondered how such a wall could have been built 2000 years ago. Really very fascinating. I believe that this 6000km long wall was built over a period of several 100 years and the main purpose was to protect the borders of the country. It seemed like Great Wall seemed like better security system, compared to the border protection at US. :-). We climbed some steps and then focused on taking some pictures. We decided not to climb to the top, as the steps were very steep and I was feeling giddy. We returned back to our tour bus after one hour and proceeded back to our hotel.

Olympic Stadium:



On our way back to the hotel we saw the Olympic stadium. According to the tour guide, China has already spent about 40 billion US dollars on building the stadiums and getting the city prepped up for the summer Olympics. We saw several stadiums, but the one closest to our hotel was called the “Bird’s Nest”, where the opening ceremony will be held. Nobody was allowed to go in to the stadium, so we clicked some pictures from outside. We also saw the Olympic Garden Village building where the athletes will be staying.

We left to the airport the next day and took the flight to SFO. It was a very bumpy flight to make up for the smooth ride we had during our arrival to Beijing. In short, the trip was very enjoyable and it motivated me so much to write a blog :-). We arrived at SFO around 8:30am. Nothing much had changed in SFO, during the time we had gone :-)…the only thing that has changed is our laptop wallpaper. We now have the Great Wall wallpaper.