there is only one time zone in china: BEIJING TIME

i just returned from a trip to beijing a few days ago. this trip was easily both the best and worst trip i have ever been on. we went on the sketchiest tour ever (i guess you get what you pay for -- a too good to be true price for an all inclusive package to beijing for 5 days), but despite its dubious tactics, we did hit up all of the mingsheng guji aka scenic spots and historical sites. beijing is a fantastic city! there is so much history there, it's no surprise chinese people are so proud of having 5000 years of history. the excitement about the olympics is overwhelming. right now, the olympics is all anyone cares about, so it will be really interesting to see what unfolds and especially how it effects the people in beijing and all of china.

the trip began with an overnight train leaving shanghai thursday evening. the train was good fun because our group took up an entire train car. we had soft sleepers and each cabin-cubicle (there were no doors) was comprised of 6 bunks, so it was like a giant 34 person sleepover. we arrived in beijing around 9am the next day welcomed by beautiful weather (check out those blue skies!!) and our soon to be demonized tour guide (daoyou=tour guide in chinese). we immediately headed on to tiananmen square, which is HUGE and was filled with about a billion tourists.






mao's mausoleum is located in tiananmen, so we headed there next to wait in a line 5x as long as any i've ever seen at disneyland to see mao's embalmed corpse. they really hustled us through there and didn't allow cameras, so i unfortunately couldn't snatch a picture of what was clearly a wax figure (they rotate the wax copy and the real body throughout the day so as to keep the real guy better preserved), draped in the old communist flag of the USSR.

after the mao-soleum, we took what should have been a quick visit to the NPC (national people's congress....the congress building of china) which turned into the 1st of many debacles with our tour guide. he argued with us (by us i mean the people who could speak chinese....because this guy only spoke chinese) for about 20 minutes, claiming there was no student discount, when we could all clearly see the sign in english: student price - 15yuan (half of the general admission).

after the NPC we headed to lunch, which we were all impatiently awaiting as it was well into the afternoon and no one had eaten anything the entire day!

quick side note on organize tours in china (besides DONT GO ON ONE!!!): tour agencies are regulated by the government and therefore are required to take tourists to specific government operated "restaurants" (because "food" is included) that all serve the same awful food and to government owned souvenir shops, although tourists are not obligated to do buy anything. if tour guides don't take enough tours to these shops, they have to pay a premium when they want to renew their tour guide license.....this is china folks

so the first restaurant turned out to be infested with rats!! yes rats (plural because there were 7!!!) were hanging out in the kitchen and when we refused to eat there, the staff was confused because they said the rats were only in the part where they wash the dishes, not where they cook the food. which clearly changes everything? we ended up buying our own lunches that day, which for some, was comprised of donkey meat sandwiches aka an asswich. i pulled the veggie card and avoided the asswiches.

by the time we got to the temple of heaven it was practically closing, so even if we had wanted to purchases additional tickets to see the different parts inside (our tour guide tried to convince us that just to get into the main area was 60kuai, and to go in the other parts was an additional 20kuai for each one, and therefore wasnt worth it -- it was really only 8kuai to get in or 28 for a ticket that included entry to everything!) it was at this point, now well into the evening, that we learn from our tour guide that we don't actually have hotel accommodations because beijing has some exceedingly discriminatory laws regulating which hotels can rent to foreigners and which can't. apparently the one they booked for us could not, which was a big problem as we were all americans and only half could pass for chinese. we ended up finding our own hostel, which we had to pay for ourselves because the tour agency refused to. (we later found out that a lot of the tickets this agency purchases for us were obtained illegally and we are now involved in some sort of lawsuit against them and even had the US embassy on the phone; however, i think given the recent senate resolution on china, the us embassy probably, and hopefully, has more important things to occupy its time).

the only redeeming quality of our first day in beijing was the fact that i was going to see dj tiesto at was was supposedly one of the coolest clubs in china! after loading up on some beijing specialty rice liquor we went to see tiesto and it was amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!

.......until we had to be in the lobby of our hostel at 8am the next morning to go to the forbidden city. the forbidden city is huge!!! it really is a city. it was pretty nuts to actually be there after seeing it in so many movies.

afterwards we had an awful lunch at another one of the government operated restaurants, sans rats we hope, we went to jingshan, which was cool because you could climb up to a pagoda which had great views of the forbidden city, and then to beihai park, which was a nice, but not too interesting park. and they didn't let us lie on the grass. i guess that's why it looked so well kempt and inviting.

view of the forbidden city from the top of jingshan (well kind of view....view of brown air)

after another long night on the town in beijing, at a place called Vic's, we convened in the lobby once again at 8am (i think i was running on less than 5 hours of sleep in 2.5 days) to find a new tour guide (yay!!!) who is super friendly and could speak english (double yay!!!). this guy was really great and provided background information on the places we were going to and walked us through the sites explaining things as we went along....pretty much what tour guides are supposed to do, right? anyway, zhong he (that's his name) took us to see the olympic stadium, or niu chao -- bird's nest as it is called here on our way to the summer palace. the summer palace was basically a vacation home for the ming and qing emperors. it is incredibly expansive and beautiful and i would definitely want to be a concubine if it meant i got to live here!! as zhonghe explained to us: china has a one wife policy, but you can have many girlfriend. that night we were too exhausted to do anything more than eat dinner at Hooters
Beijing and walk home. we had a big day ahead of us.





we met in the lobby at 7am the next day to go to the ming tombs and then the GREAT WALL (chang cheng)!!!! the great wall is amazing. it's completely surreal to be climbing on the great wall. the great wall of china seems sooooo far away in both time and space when you learn about it in school or see it in kungfu movies set in imperial china. it was really mind-blowing to be up there. but as it turns out, the great wall isn't the only attraction at the great wall....I and every other white person were also attractions! i can't even count how many times i've been stopped by chinese tourists asking to take pictures of me....i feel like one of the people at disneyland, dressed up like mickey mouse or cinderella (and yes i realize this is the 2nd allusion to disneyland in one post...) at one end of the great wall a group of maybe 10 asked for pictures with me and tony, one by one, until they all had their souvenir of seeing a white person at the great wall....and then we took a group shot.

this was the last stop of the organized tour, so from then on we were free to do what we liked. we went to the silk market, a huge 6 floor building of fake designer goods from iphones to designer purses. after a little bargain shopping we headed up to the 6th floor to get peking duck at a place called quan jude, supposedly the most famous peking duck restaurant in all of beijing...which pretty much makes it the best in the world. and daaannnggg was this good duck!!

on our last day in beijing i decided to go back to the temple of heaven to see it for real. the temple was pretty cool, although the weather was awful, but the best part was the park that the temple is located in. all the old people in china go to parks early in the morning to exercise. so we saw huge groups of 65+ year olds doing ribbon dancing, taijiquan, taijiquan with swords, chinese yo-yo and singing. an old man taught me how to do the yo-yo and i suck at it.

then we headed to the lama temple, which is the most renown tibetan buddhist temple outside of tibet. this was the most interesting and beautiful of all of the temples i've been to. and the ratio of people coming to worship to tourists was much more favorable than any other place. then we spent about 2 hours in a tibetan buddhist store near the temple looking at all sorts of cool tibetan things. and i bought some prayer flags.









after that me and adam headed to hutong, which are these long, narrow alley ways formed in between traditional beijing style architecture houses that are all built in the shape of squares, with the middles cut out for courtyards. originally only one family would live in a hutong, but they became a sort of low-income housing with many families sharing a hutong. we picked a hutong street, on recommendation from our chinese friend Sylvia who is from beijing, called Nanluoguxiang, which was really cool. the hutongs on both sides of the street had all been converted into really cool cafes, boutiques and craft stores. we ate at one of the best indian restaurants i've ever been to and then got lost trying to make our way to houhai lake. on our way to the lake we stopped in one of the cafes called NLGX, which turned out to be owned by a recent UC Irvine grad and had just opened about a month ago. he told us all about starting a business in china, not knowing any chinese at all, although he is ethnically chinese, and dealing with contractors and bribing police. we were making some guanxi....connections!









then we returned to tiananmen square for the last stop on our trip to beijing for the flag lowering ceremony, which was a very holistic and full circle way to complete our trip. the ceremony was nothing special really....they just took the flag down. but there were sooooo many people there and the sky was really dark and ominous, so it had a cool feel.







and then it was back on the train for another overnight trip returning to shanghai!