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Friday night, after work, the three of us met at Katie's house with our luggage, and gushed about what we would do on our trip the next day. We slept for about 2 or 3 hours before waking up early to catch a shuttle bus to the airport.
The shuttle was probably as long as the flight to China. I was exhausted, good old insomnia prevented me from getting more than an hour of sleep so far.
We made it to the Beijing International Terminal, which is absolutely huge and really beautifully designed, around 11am (China time).
After a little monorail shuttle ride to the exit area, we found a cab and showed him the address to our hotel. The landscaping along the highway is a bit one-note, with the same trees planted in a very redundant grid pattern, but it was landscaped the whole way (which is not the case on the way to the Incheon Airport just outside of Seoul).It seemed our cab driver could not specifically locate our hotel, even after he called them, so he dropped us off and gave us some helpful advice (in Mandarin) and drove away. The three of us wandered up on street and then back down and around, until we went into a different hotel and asked the clerk where ours could be. Oh so eventually, we were in our moldy room, changing our clothes and sprawling out, exhausted, on the beds. I asked the clerks where we were on the map, but mostly we communicated using pointing and gestures, as the gap between Korean and Mandarin was sizeable. Our hotel was on Hepingli Xijie (和平里西街"Hepingli West Street"), so from there finding our way around made sense.
We decided to walk south, since the map said that's where everything was. We came upon a lovely public park, and strolled through it. This was the Park of the Altar of Earth, and it had a large entrance to a market that we considered but didn't enter. Around the bend was a HUGE restaurant with big gaudy red lanterns and elaborate wooden carvings. Since we were starving, we went in and figured out the extensive menu. I took photos of all our plates, which included spicy smoky duck soup, Sichuan noodles, stuffed eggplant, steamed dumplings, but some of the dishes were less than tasty for our Western palates. We simply ordered more, because the food was SO cheap! That was fun.
Then we investigated the strange building across the street, which turned out to be the Yonghe Lamasery. It was about to close, so we exlpored nearby the preserved hutongs (alleyways), and down Guozijian Jie (国子监街/國子監街 "Imperial College Street"). We drank Red Bulls while sitting on a stoop and watching the world a bit, marveling at how different China and Korea seemed to be. We decided to go to Beihai Gonguan (北海公园 "Park of the Northern Sea") from there.
This place was truly magnificent, with a lake, or the "Northern Sea" (Bei Hai), surrounding the Tuan Cheng (Round City) and the Qiong Dao (Jade Islet) where sits the Bai Ta (White Dagoba), and we walked all over and took hundreds of pictures. It was really peaceful, and as the sun was setting, bats and swallows swooped all over the water's surface. The pollution, sadly, was so thick that the colors of sunset were really vibrant and lovely.
We walked around the northern gate of the Imperial Palace, also known as the Forbidden City, and enjoyed people with their night kite-flying. These kites were affixed with LEDs of many colors and suspended hundreds of feet above us, much to the delight of the three of us and several tourist children.
From there we took a cab to the infamous Donghuamen Night Market, with a long row of carts and lanterns, and hundreds of patrons clamoring to taste the squid and fish balls and candied fruit on skewers. I got the latter, which looked positively delectable, but had trouble eating it because the noxious smells wafting and often pouring from some other ghastly menu options. Truly, the odor was too nauseating to enjoy or even taste my sweet fruit, so we high-tailed it from the market and wandered down Wanfujin Dajie, a popular Western-style shopping area, crammed full of boring American franchise eateries like Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut. We ended up at Pizza Hut, unfortunately, and while Briana's kebab came out in reasonable time, Katie and I had to cancel our pizza because it simply took too long and we were exhausted.
After walking well out of the range of tourists, we finally found an empty cab, and took it home.
That was our FIRST DAY.
***
On Sunday morning, after having a successful sleep with earplugs (THANK GOD for that!), we got ready for a big day and headed over to a nearby 7-Eleven that we had discovered during our search for the hotel. We were looking for somewhere to eat breakfast or at least get some coffee.
I need to take a minute to express just HOW amazing this 7-Eleven was: well-lit, clean, fully-stocked, steamed buns, sandwiches, gimbap, salads, fresh fruits, teas of all special types, and a ridiculously large and affordable alcohol selection that wasn't even behind the counter! There was also some really strange loop of two instrumental songs over and over again, and to one of which I decided the lyrics were "Xanadu...la la la la la la, Xanadu..." It sounds only vaguely similar to the Olivia Newton-John Broadway number.
We unanimously decided that we would end up there a few more times before we left Beijing.
Afterward, we again made our way to the Lamasery, through the lovely park and all the happy, relaxed Beijingers playing badminton and stretching and doing group synchronized dancing to a tape.
The Yonghe Lamasery was so cool, huge and extravagant and crowded. There was a long entry path lined with large shade trees and golden ceramic-roofed buildings and gateways and incense burners in every corner and cart selling piles of huge incense sticks all around the entrance. Inside each building was a shrine to Buddha or important Buddhist masters, gilded and surrounded with silks and ornate gilded wood carvings, candles, flowers, and extensive paintings all over the walls and ceilings.Although dozens of people were burning their incense in homage to Buddha (since it was Buddha's birthday), burning it inside the buildings, as well as flash photography, was not permitted. People came in and lay three sticks of fresh incense down by altars in every room. I came across one man who was clearly en train de 108 bows. It was so peaceful to float quietly into rooms with Buddhists silently saying their prayers and finding spiritual solace. It was remarkably quiet everywhere, despite so many believers and tourists. I think everyone displayed a significant amount of respect (except for those snapping photos inside the rooms).
Wanfuge (the Ten-thousand Happiness Pavilion), was very large room that housed a three-storey Maitreya statue, gilded of course, with intense yet serene black eyes and long drapes of rainbow silk swagged over its hands. I stood directly below it and craned my neck upward. It's made of a huge white sandalwood tree trunk, which extends 8 meters underground and is 18 meters tall, and is one of the three best wood carvings in the Yonghe Lamasery. It took three years to transport it to Beijing and was carved under the supervision of Emperor Qianglong. It was mesmerizing.
I found a little corner shop in this absolutely enormous complex and picked up some nice souvenirs, including a little jade Buddha and some gorgeous post cards of pictures I wasn't allowed to take of the shrines.
How could I forget my lungs? With Beijing's air already irritating my tender post-bronchitis lungs, the incense smoke pluming from fire pits near every shrine smelled lovely, but I was choking and growing more hoarse by the minute. Katie and I both were dying, actually. After about an hour, we had enjoyed and inhaled our fill of the Lamasery, and elected to take a cab to Tian'an Men Square.
Obviously the cab ride was very exciting, and I was already starting to feel like I knew my way around the city, at least a bit. The Imperial Axis has such an energy, it's unmistakable. The cab driver dropped us off beside the Great Hall of the People, right next to the National Grand Theater (nicknamed "The Egg") which I had unfortunately forgotten to insist on walking past. We turned and walked toward the Mao Zedong Mausoleum and the Zhengyang Men, and on the way I purchased a lovely pink bamboo parasol from a pushy and manipulative lady, only because the sun was definitely beating down on my shoulders and it was a relatively hot day.
We walked all around Tian'an Men Square, which certainly lives up to its colossal reputation. We sat in the grass (which was suspiciously empty when we came to it), ate popsicles and pondered China, and within 25 minutes we were shooed off by some irate police.
On our way toward the Forbidden City entrance, we took several "we were here" photos, and so many opportunistic Chinese tourists grabbed me to pose with them! The first couple were cute, the next group a bit confusing and funny, and the third befuddled me into exclaiming, "What? Again? Why? WHY?!" But I posed anyway.
Describing the Imperial Palace is useless. Words like "big" and "beautiful" have no business anywhere near it. This place spared no expense. Having recently been repainted and restored quite a bit for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the buildings were in marvelous shape and gave a good sense of how the privileged few lived within these forbidden walls. We were a bit pressed for time, so our path led generally through the middle section of the palace, almost completely devoid of trees other than the Imperial Garden in the northern part of the palace. This is where the Emperor and Empress spent October through April of every year through the Ming and Qing dynasties. Huge bronze pots sat near the buildings, meant to be kept filled with water in case of fire.
Every little thing, every stone rail along a step, every platform, every gate, door, door knocker, brick, garden pebble mosaic, veneer, ceramic tile, overhang, incense burner, drainage spout, everything was a detail that was given attention and that meant something like happiness, luck, wealth, longevity, or represented the Emperor or Empress. My thoughts were consumed with what this place must have been like hundreds of years ago, quiet, new, and imperially exclusive.
We were in too much of a hurry to entertain my imagination in this swarming tourist trap. I would've stayed all day, meandering my way around. But I'll find my way there again.
The exit out the north part of the palace seemed oddly open, and, free. As in, it's possible we wouldn't have had to pay admission if we'd entered this way. We tried really, really hard to catch a cab at the end of the sidewalk, but we were blown off by at least half a dozen drivers and coveted by twice as many motorized rickshaws with enough room for two but NOT three people! Why would they stop? Who would we boot?
*****(I'll finish this and add more photos when I have time, but until then, I'll post what I've accomplished)*****
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