China (Part I).

This is seriously overdue. It's been over a month since I left for China and I haven't posted a single entry on it (ironically, the trip was what originally provided me with reason to start blogging). I blame China for blocking blogger...and the rush to prepare for college...and my laziness for not organizing my pictures until now. >_>

Oh well, let's start now.

Day 0 - In transit.

Everyone seems to have an airplane story, right? With more than a few hours on a long-distance flight, one is bound to experience something unusual or notice something noteworthy. I remember Ved mentioning how he was faced with a great assortment of movies on the flight to Sweden. I was not so fortunate. Faced with movies like 17 Again and Wolverine which I had absolutely no interest in, I opted to stare at the flight trajectory for most of the trip that I was awake. But I did happen to meet a very interesting person who sat next to my family. He was a little boy, just 8-years-old in fact, and he was flying by himself all the way back from Washington, D.C. to Beijing. As in, his parents sent him to visit D.C. by himself, even though he could not speak English. Man, if I was that boy, I would have been frightened out of my mind to travel half the world solo. And plus I didn't know there were parents that trusting and confident of their child being able to return safely. Downright extraordinary. But still he was not completely independent. He asked us to help him fill out his international travel form (well who can understand all that technical jargon at the age of 8?) and of course we obliged. In the end, we accompanied him after arriving at Beijing Capital International until we met met up with his parents. After parting, I realized that he must have underwent a similar experience on his flight to the U.S., purely relying on and trusting the goodwill of strangers.

So the first thing that hit me after getting off the plane was "IT'S HOT." Well I guess that's what I get for going back to China in August, but still. The heat was stifling even inside the airport terminal. Another thing I had on my mind was that we took off at 2 P.M. and got to Beijing at 2 P.M. That sucked. Taking a 12-hour flight west through a 12-hour time zone difference sucks. It seems that no time has passed but your dead tired. We quickly made our way out of the airport, and after parting with the boy previously mentioned, flagged down a taxi-van and made our way to the hotel. If I remember correctly, that alone cost us $400.

For the record, any monetary unit of dollars I mention will refer to the Chinese RMB. 1 U.S. dollar = 6.87 Chinese yuan.

Lesson #1: In China, special conveniences do not come cheap. We learned that day that getting two taxi cabs is MUCH cheaper than getting a taxi-van, like almost 4 times cheaper.

Not much else happened for the rest of the day as we were all suffering from jet lag; left us with no appetite, so dinner tasted bland. Also, I was pretty disgruntled that our hotel room only had two beds that had widths shorter than your arm span. We've always gotten rooms with two beds before during past trips, but this made 4 people sharing two beds impossible. So I ended up sleeping on the couch for the duration in Beijing.

Lesson #2: If you're 6-feet tall, sleeping on the floor is probably much more preferable than trying to cramp up on a 4-feet-long couch. I seriously did something to my arm after a couple nights. Couldn't bend my elbow back past my shoulder without feeling unusual pain. That lasted for a week. D:

Interesting note: like how hotels in America tend to not label a 13th floor, hotels here skip the 4th floor and 13th floor. Superstitions...

Beijing - Day 1

The eatery we ended up frequenting in the mornings was a short walk from the hotel and served the basic morning staples: fried bread sticks, buns, dumplings, noodles, etc. Pretty standard stuff, but they were made really well so it was satisfying regardless, and the prices are incredibly cheap. Four bowls of noodles and four dishes amounted to just $48. (Food will be a prevalent topic)

So this day marks the first day of sightseeing in Beijing. Is it sad that I've never been to China's capital until just now? Anyways, we took the subway to Tiananmen Square and I have to say the subway system is better in a lot of ways than those back home. First off, taking the subway is really cheap: $2 for a ticket to anywhere in the city, no transfer fees. Second, the subway lines are really expansive, with 9 lines, 135 total stations, and 22 transfer stations, so practically any place in Beijing can be reached by subway. And third, subways provide several side-conveniences like a way to cross otherwise uncrossable busy roads. No need for cars, right? However, there's always that big problem associated with highly convenient mass transits. We had the terribly unfortunate experience of taking the subway during morning rush hour and the trains were ridiculously packed. Cities back here on the East Coast can't even compare. On one line, we were squished together so tightly that when the doors opened, people standing near the door were forced out whether they like it or not, like potential energy stored in a spring. Also, my dad got yelled at because his backpack was "taking up space that another two people could fit in." It looks like the comical depictions of a crowded subway transit in China/Korea/Japan I've seen in shows were not exaggerations at all.

After we got off that dreaded line, we stopped by the Beijing Opera House.

At first I wondered how they made light randomly shimmer along the passage to the main building. It turns out there's a huge pool on top of the line of sunlight windows.

Then we walked over to Tiananmen.


And Tiananmen Square, which is comparable to the Mall in Washington, D.C. if you will, except it's not as long, wider, and is entirely paved in concrete.


From on top of Tiananmen.

Where did all these people come from??? It's not like we came on a special day. >_>;;

Now from inside the Imperial City and entering the Forbidden City.








Yes there are more pictures, but I'm only going to post a selective few because the files are large and uploading is tedious.

After leaving the Imperial City through the north Meridian Gate, we entered Jingshan Park which is right across the street. The park used to be an imperial garden and is said to be where the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty committed suicide. The part centers around a huge 45.7-meter high artificial hill (insanely impressive considering all the manpower that would be necessary) on top of which rests 5 pavilions that all originally housed Buddha statues. But all except one of the statues were pillaged by the Eight-Nation Alliance after putting down the Boxer Rebellion. The last one was too heavy.

View from atop the hill. The opera house really seems out of place.

Next we visited the Temple of Heaven.





Made entirely from interlocking beams, so technically no component is permanently attached. Though this isn't that surprising as I later found out. Many imperial buildings were constructed this way.

So after a day of physically demanding sightseeing, we headed over to Wangfujing Street, basically a huge shopping district, for dinner. It seems that no mall on that street has less than 7 levels. I don't see why they have to build them so high, but meh I'm not a mall person. I just found it interesting that the mall we went to was called Beijing APM (Actions per Minute mall? Okay.....). The restaurant food was decent, and still pretty cheap, but everything else besides food in the mall is so expensive. They even give expensive sounding names to the most common type of stores. One memorable example was a store called "Ole Lifestyle Experience." What does one expect to buy in so-named store? Clothes...fashion...antiques? Turns out it's just a food store with a small emphasis on import foods.

But the most interesting things in that mall were definitely the bathrooms. Instead of having multiple bathrooms in different locations as we're accustomed to, each labeled bathroom entrance on one floor leads to the same mega-bathroom through an intricate series of passageways. A map would probably look something like this:

There are multiple passages, multiple double doors everywhere. Were the designers trying to get us lost?


That was too long of a post for just two days. Looks like covering all 23 days will take a while. To be continued...