Xian to Beijing - Part 3 Beijing and Shanghai

Beijing

(Capital of the largest country in the world)

I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to visit Beijing during a time that was not a chinese holiday (with millions and millions of chinese tourists) and also before the olympics next year. If you don't already know, the 2008 olympics will be held in Beijing and begin on 08-08-08 at 08:08pm. In preparation for the olympics, Beijing is one huge construction site and they have a ton of work to do in the next year.

My first day I rented a bicycle and rode to Tiananmen Square and the forbidden city. It is a really huge city, and as different from Shanghai as Washington DC is to New York or Hollywood. The streets are very wide and impressive. I also rode my bike to the olympic village which is one huge construction site. I saw the Bird's Nest - the building that will host the opening ceremony. And also the swimming building which is constructed to look like soap bubbles. There were quite a few tourists doing the same thing, holding their cameras over the construction fences to get a shot of the famous buildings under construction.

The next day I toured the forbidden city. It was STINKING HOT that day. I think I bought 5 bottles of water and had two popsicles. The front gate of the forbidden city (Gate of Heavenly Peace) has the famous huge painting of Chairman Mao hanging above it. The forbidden city is called that because for many years while it was home to several generations of Chinese emperors, it was forbidden for all but the royal court to enter.

Today it is a HUGE museum. There are many exhibits in the hundreds of buidings and temples and previous living quarters.

You need all day to visit it, especially if you like museums. I rather dislike them and went through them very quickly and it still took me 5-6 hours. You can get a guided tour which you probably need to arrange ahead of time, or you can rent the head phones which I found very confusing and annoying. It tries to guide you trough the buildings but I kept getting out of order and skipping things and back tracking to find the missed parts.

The walls are all an ochre red and the doorways were decorated with beautiful ceramic tiles.

My hostel was in the Hutong district (alleys of old one storey buildings), near the drum tower.

And when in Rome do as Romans. Or in this case Beijing eat as Beijing ren... eat Peking Duck.

Of course a highlight of any trip to Beijing is to walk on the Great Wall. I chose to visit a part of the wall called Simatai. Being a not-so-touristed section of the wall, it's also not-so-easy-to-get-to. I followed the directions in the Lonely Planet and took a local bus and was dropped off 70km from the wall. I then had to negotiate with the taxi drivers there to get to the wall. The new Lonely Planet has just been published and mine was about 3 years out of date. LP said it should cost 120RMB round trip. The taxi drivers wanted 120RMB each way. I managed to get them down to 160RMB round trip.

The views from the wall were spectacular and there were very few tourists there.

The steps were very steep in places. I walked all the way up and back down the mountain and along the wall. Most people took a cable car most of the way up the mountain to get to the wall and walked down.

It was thundering the whole time I was there and just as I finished the wall and was walking down the mountain it started pooring, so I ran down because I didn't have an umbrella or plastic bag to put my camera in.

The taxi driver and I had a great conversation, 100% in chinese. It was good practice for me. He was very good at speaking easy chinese to me. I think he listened to the vocabulary I could use and asked me questions at my language level. By the time he dropped me off, he said we were "hao pengyou" = good friends.

The last thing I did in Beijing was to tour some universities. My little sister Qiufeng's roommate's boyfriend (Yang Ming Yang) is a graduate student at one of the top universities in the country, Tsingtao University. He gave me a great tour of his university and Peking University as well as the nearby Beijing Language and Culture University.

A Shanghai Wedding

From Beijing, I headed back to Shanghai to join Ray at his cousin's wedding. The wedding was held in Jin Mao Tower, the tallest building in China (88 floors).

The top 30 floors are a Hyatt Hotel.

Ray and I decided to pass some time in Cloud 9 bar - the tallest bar in China. A very small beer cost me about 60RMB ($8). Concidering you can buy a beer twice the size for 4RMB in Liuzhou, that's expensive!!! Looking in the updated Lonely Planet, it only costs 50RMB to go to the 88th floor observation deck - better value since you get a full 360 degree view.

The wedding was very interesting for me. Ray's cousin owns an interior design firm in Shanghai and is very successful. The wedding was very expensive. I was the only foreigner there.

The bride wore a traditional wedding dress before the wedding and then a light green one when she walked down the aisle to say the vows, followed by a dark pink one for dinner and a traditional red dress at the end of the ceremony.

They had a huge layered cake which they cut for show but we never ate. After the wedding I saw them taking it apart. It was made of wood with a little cake and icing around the outside. The flower girls had wings like little angels. It was a really nice evening. I met many of Ray's relatives and they were very welcoming to me.

The next day, Ray and I saw a park where parents do matchmaking for their single children. I had seen this on TV, but never in person. They make a profile for their child and post it on the bushes for prospective mates parents to review.

Getting married and having your one baby by age 30 is very important and saves your parents "face". Big cultural difference from America. What do they think about the independent 39 year old single American woman who would rather travel around the world than sit at home and cook dinners for her bread winner?