Do you enjoy being constantly stared at, shop owners rushing out onto the sidewalk to pull you into their establishment, and so much smog that you can’t see more than a city block in front of you? If so, then you’d absolutely love Beijing, China!
You might have noticed that my updates here on Shyzer took a sudden plunge over this summer (and judging from the stats, you didn’t!). Well, if you haven’t guessed yet (Christ, are you slow…), I went to China earlier this summer. And while it might sound like I hated Beijing, the truth is it was easily one of my most favorite trips yet.
My mom happened to be working the flight there and back. We landed on a Monday and getting through Customs was extremely fast and non-invasive, which I didn’t expect at all, especially for a Communist country. (Australia, I love ya, but when it’s easier to get into China…well, you might want to look into that.) By the time we got to the hotel, it was around noon. Of course, I’m only guessing it was noon since I couldn’t actually see the sun. Yes, my friends, the pollution in China is no myth. I think I’m still coughing up some lovely byproducts from the third shift over at Gyung Hong Industrials. Sure, you can’t see more than a city block (no exaggeration) and your eyes may water for a while until you get used to it, but even that couldn’t stop the awesomeness that was China. Plus, we were told that it normally wasn’t that bad. It hadn’t rained in a while and apparently, when it rains, it washes most of the crap out of the sky and clears the air up for a few days. Which left me praying that I didn’t get caught in any rainstorms while in China. Sure, breathing it in might be bad, but I can only imagine the wonders of having it washed straight onto your skin.
That picture above was taken from the top of a building and yet you can still only see, what, a mile? Anyways, after changing clothes, we decided to head across the street and do a little shopping. Now, shopping in China isn’t quite like back home. And by “isn’t quite like back home” I mean “is similar to fending off a pack of cougars while wearing a body suit made of meat.” Yes, there are amazing deals to be had (I type that while wearing a full set of clothes bought over there), but going through the process for the first time is simply stunning. When you walk into one of the little buildings, you first notice it’s littered with booths selling anything from purses and handbags to clothes and shoes to golf clubs and watches. Of course, before you can decide what you’re in the market for, you’re bombarded with such greetings and welcomes as “I remember you!” (video evidence) and “You my best customer!” The fact that I’d never set foot on Chinese soil before didn’t really seem to matter in the grand scheme of things and thus once you’ve decided that you want to buy a new pair of shades, you head on over to the nearest place selling them and start browsing.
At this point we enter the stage I like to call “No thanks, I don’t need 48,000 pairs.” Having sucked you into their kiosk, the owners will now start grabbing blindly at their items and piling them in your arms. I’m not sure if this tactic has ever actually worked for them before, but you’ve got to think that it has somewhere along the line. Either way, we’ll skip straight past the part where you find a place to set down all the crap they’ve loaded you up with and to the part where you’ve decided on a pair of knockoff Raybands that you love and want to purchase. Of course, there aren’t any price-tags on it. For the little old lady who wants nothing more than to see you happily walk away wearing some new shades and feeling good about yourself is suddenly about to pounce on your inability to easily convert US dollars into Chinese Yuans. Don’t worry, I’ll kindly let you blame your poor math skills on the recent jet-lag. So you hold the item up, ask how much, and she responds with a price of 100 Yuan! So you’re now standing there thinking, “Uh, is this a good deal? Yeah, yeah, it’s got to be, 100 Yuan is like 2 bucks or something.” So you pull out a wad of what seems like Monopoly money, pay the kind old lady what you hope is the right amount, and walk away.
You, my friend, are a sucker.
100 Yuan is actually more like $14 USD, which is nowhere near what you should be paying. You see, the general rule of thumb is that you should never pay more than 1/4th of the initial price they quote you. Ever. If you can’t haggle them down, I promise you the very same item is available in five other booths within a 30 foot radius. Of course, sometimes you might only be able to talk the owner down to say 50 Yaun and you’re standing there trying to get her to go to 25 and she’s not budging, so you just turn around and start to walk away. And wouldn’t you know that 99% of the time, they’ll come running after you and shouting that they’ll take the deal. I only wish we had more shopping like this here in America. It’d make going to Wal Mart for a loaf of bread and some tube socks a bit more interesting.
After shopping for a while, I went next door to have a beer before finally meeting back up with my mom and some other flight attendants. We walked around for a while until one of them mentioned this cool massage parlor we should try out. Pretty soon, we were standing outside the place and the damn thing looked nicer than a Waldorf. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had a full body massage before, but let me tell you that it’s almost worth the price of a plane ticket to Beijing alone, for there you’ll be able to pay $15 USD for a 90 minute massage along with all the free food and beverages you can consume. In fact, there were more than a few of us who went back multiple times before leaving, because I’m pretty sure we’re all in agreement that there’s no better buy for 15 freaking dollars.
Of course, any trip to China wouldn’t be complete without a visit to The Wall, so we got up early Tuesday morning to check it out. Before I even got there, I knew it was going to be awesome. It’s about 90 minutes out of the city and some people might think hiring a tour guide or taking a cab would be the most efficient way to get there. Yet the previous night, we’d simply walked into a nearby bar, asked the chick behind the counter if she knew of any cheap way to travel there, and was told that her brother could drive us for less than half of what the tour guides wanted.
God, I love China.
Seriously, stuff like this would never work in America. I dare any of you to go to New York, ask a cabbie how much it’d cost to get to the Statue of Liberty, and then start walking into bars asking if anybody will take you there for half the price.
But getting back to the story on hand. The Wall itself was great. From most of the pictures I’d ever seen of it, they involved about 90,000 tourists crammed onto the walkways. Not so in our case. I don’t know if it was the pollution or where the driver had taken us or what, but there was practically nobody up on the mountain with us. Which meant we basically had the Wall to ourselves.
I can tell you right now, if I was a Mongolian general back in the 1500s and was ordered to invade China, I would have gone ahead and committed suicide in the comfort of my own home. Might as well die in peace as opposed to trying to mount a successful invasion past that baby. People always talk about how long the Wall is, which certainly is a feat to be admired. But before I’d walked upon it, I’d never realized just how damn tall the Wall was or how high in the mountains it gets at some parts, like the one we visited. It’s one thing to build a giant wall in a straight line on flat ground, but it’s a whole different venture when you’re building it triple the height of most people and in remote areas that are a pain to reach even in the modern age.
We stayed up on the Wall for about an hour or so before we decided to head back down the mountain. We could either take the chairlift back down or ride on a small sled down a luge-styled track. I think you know exactly which option I went for. That picture above doesn’t even begin to do it justice. It looks like it ends at the tree line, but in reality it just dips right over it and keeps on swerving all the way down the mountain. After convincing my mom it was perfectly safe, despite any real guarding, rails, or any quality break system on the individual sleds, I picked up my death cart and made way for the start of the track. And that’s when I saw what may be one of the best signs ever.
We’ve got Chinese numbers, English numbers, and far more misspelled than correct words. Hell, there are so many unintentional moments of hilarity on that one sign, I thought it would be hard to pick my favorite. But that was before I actually went on the luge ride down the mountainside back to the village. As I scorched my way down the Metal Tube O’ Death, I not-so-surprisingly found myself going a little too fast for my own good and having a blast while doing it. And that’s when I flew by one of the “safety attendants” who screamed out to me “NO LAUGHING!”
Wait, what?! I was going too fast. I’d about flown off the track to my gruesome death numerous times. And the biggest rule I’d broken so far was enjoying myself? And laughing? Now that made me laugh.
After impersonating a Russian cossack and being attack by a Mongol, we finally made our way back to Beijing. I remembered that afternoon about a DVD store I’d heard of before my trip. When you think of bootleg videos, you obviously think of China. In fact, I think the word “bootleg” is Chinese for “yeah, we got that.” Well a friend of mine swore by this one little place where you could get any DVD for $1 US and a boxset of any TV show for $8-10. He’d picked up over 100 movies to date and they all had worked perfectly for him, so I figured I’d go with the guaranteed bet and hunt down the little place. Yet after arriving on the street where he said it was, I couldn’t find it. I finally remembered him mentioning something about going through a bar first, so I walked into the pub on the corner and asked the bartender where the movies where. He casually flicked his head to the side before glancing back at his newspaper. I looked to my left and saw a small hole in the wall that I figured must be where the shop was. Not quite. And by “hole in the wall” I mean a literal place where somebody clearly took a sledgehammer and knocked out a rough entrance. I entered what I think was a tattoo/bead/Christ only knows shop. At this point I started to wonder if I was even in the right place, but before I could turn around, a little old lady blurted out “movies, yes!” and motioned to a door in the back that blended in perfectly with the wall. Finally thinking I’d found the place, I pushed through the door…
And found myself in some family’s kitchen. “Okay, what the fuck!” I thought to myself. Was this some sort of practical joke? Why was I suddenly standing behind a woman hunched over a kitchen sink washing a pile of vegetables? Before she could turn around and ask why I had barged into her house, I spotted another hole in the wall to my right and quickly darted through it. I was now greeted by a small courtyard about as welcoming and close in size to a New York City apartment closet. The sky was “clear” above me, but on either shoulder stood giant walls for the nearby buildings. Not really wanting to go back into the random kitchen, I decided to continue playing Alice and see what might be down the alleyway. After a few twists and turns, it finally ended and I was standing face-to-face with yet another door.
“Eh, what the hell…”
Only in China. Like other travelers say, if it’s easy to get to, it’s not nearly as fun.
Later in the week, I decided I wanted to go on a rickshaw. Of course, this was partly because of Newman & Kramer, but I still wanted to ride around the town in one. So my mom and I paid a guy to bike us around town and long story short, we ended up in an old lady’s home. In fact, she did a little dance for us, which you can watch here. I have no idea what she was saying, but I think it had something to do with how awesome I am.
It goes without saying that we had a hell of a time in China. But of course, all good things must end. Except in our case, it ended with approximately 29 billion times the amount of stuff we had brought over with us. I had to go buy a giant backpack across the street to cram all of our newly purchased goods into and yet that still didn’t make a dent in the pile. It only took purchasing another backpack, a new suitcase, and then sitting on everything so that I could zip them up in order get everything packed. By the end, I looked like a Sherpa hiking back to base camp. I’m pretty sure that return trip took about 20 years off the life of my back. It was also a small miracle that I got through US Customs with all that stuff despite declaring only $30 worth.
Oh, there was also a hilarious OMFG 30 minutes or so in the Beijing airport, where I’d already cleared Chinese customs and was then told at the gate that I wouldn’t make it on the flight, thereby making me akin to Viktor Navorski. I had only bought a one-time visa and after having already entered and then officially “exited” China, I was considered to be without a visa, yet still on Chinese soil and without a plane seat home. I was assured the reentry process would be “practically noninvasive and somewhat smooth,” which was about as comforting as the thought of taking a shower in prison. Though, after a short wait and 12 freshly developed tumors, a seat was found for me. THANK GOD.
And so went my 2007 Beijing, China trip. Highly recommend from the Goob Travel Advisory Board. We guarantee that you’ll enjoy yourself, just as long as you don’t hate delicious food, dirt cheap prices, and rich history.
Quick Edit: Check out this recent ESPN article, titled the Bamboo Curtain. It reminded me that I forgot to mention how much construction is going on in China. Everywhere we went - city, outskirts, rural - there was construction. When you drive down the highway, just look around and you’ll see second and third highways being constructed on either side. Walk downtown and on almost every corner, there is construction going on 24/7. It’s pretty crazy.
