The Beijing hotel was a pleasant surprise … booked on airlines … but a lot more upmarket than I expected … it was back to good old corporate travel standards. No early starts forecast for a few days … so much R&R anticipated.
Of course, the first priority was updating the blog … and that’s when I bumped into Party Central … or more correctly the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China … whose internet censorship is legendary. Not only could I not access Facebook, Youtube, Picasa, Blogger, etc … but I couldn’t log into my Witopia VPN account … which has but 2 purposes in life … one is to protect our data transfer when in wifi hotspots, hotels, etc … but also to allow us foreigners to access our normal networking accounts when in China. But it seems like China has managed to crack Witopia as well.
It’s tough to imagine what life is life when all the normal means of sharing information and data are out of reach … how quickly we have gotten used to such methods. Even mentioning words like “blog” in an email results in the email getting a “service interruption” message of the sort that I have never received in the past 4 years of using our Swiss ISP.
Of course, we just have to become a little more creative. So thanks to Clive for www.vtunnel.com, and thanks to the brother Ken for taking my emails and attached photos and loading them for me. Of course, since the new ghost writer is my brother, who knows what editorial liberties will be exercised from Australia before my text gets posted onto the blog.
The other inconvenience in China was the implementation of the rest of our itinerary. Because Chinese trains can only be booked from the city of departure and then only 5-10 days ahead of travel date, and then only if the train originates in that city, we could not finalise our train tour around China in advance. It became much worse when we discovered that all trains for the 4 days after our planned departure from Beijing, and then from Xi’an were fully booked … and this is early summer season in China.
After much frustration … and many wobblies being thrown by she who planned so much so early … and who likes to have everything confirmed and in place … we had to abandon train travel and revert to flights between all destinations. This decision was deemed rational when we read the other article in the China Daily … explaining how a man bought a sleeper ticket for the bullet train to Shanghai only to find that he’d been allocated to the dining car … and sheets were handed to him … and he was told to sleep where he can with scores of other passengers in the same dining car. Apparently, the local stations have discretion to sell tickets in whatever manner they decide. Perhaps someone from China Railways will be sent for execution in the next 12 months.
Some observations from Beijing:
I read the Moscow Times at the start of our Trans-Siberian and then read China Daily at the end. What a contrast. Corruption is prominent at both ends, but the response of top leadership is startlingly different. It would appear in Russia that top leadership turns a blind eye to most of the goings on (if not being directly involved) whereas in China, top leadership takes hard action on those involved (while almost certainly deeply involved themselves).
For instance, China Daily reported how 1900+ people were charged with procedural contraventions in their last audit. Of these, less than 100 were guilty of negligence, while the remaining 1,800 were charged with taking bribes, sharing some $40m between them. The Minister responsible for awarding construction projects was found guilty and sentenced to death. Imagine any other Government sentencing one of its ministers to death.
BTW, if you want to understand some more of the behind-the-scenes operation of the Chinese Government, there’s an interesting new book called The Party: the Secret World of China’a Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor. I had to finish reading it before leaving Europe because having it in my possession here might have been detrimental to my well being.
The other obvious comparison is between the infrastructures …. While Moscow has full supermarket shelves and shiny black limousines … Beijing has both of those plus a city skyline and highways that would match anything in the US or even Dubai. I was amazed at the dramatic architecture of the monumental office blocks that are scattered all around Beijing … they do “big” in a manner than Texas could only dream about.
Of course, we did all of the usual sightseeing things … Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Bell Tower, Drum Tower, the Hutongs, and the Great Wall. But you can read all about those in the 1,000’s of other blogs that people have written about Beijing sightseeing.
More entertaining were the little toddlers, all of whom have arseless trousers … presumably for speed and convenience. The traffic … slightly more organized than in Mongolia … but needing just as strong a will (and good peripheral vision) when negotiating pedestrian crossings … even police cars will ignore the “green man”. The night market … where they offer grilled scorpions, sicadas, penis, testicles, etc … Karen declined all offers from the vendors … especially when one of them offers “little dicks”.
Far fewer bicycles than I recall from my last visit in 2006 … and so many cars … and so many enormous, truly monumental, buildings all across Beijing. It makes Moscow, and most Western cities, seem poor and unkempt.
Of course, I also got to try out my Mandarin. Not surprisingly, there are many puzzled looks, but I have had some successes in giving directions to taxi drivers, without any destinations written in script, and in shops/restaurants. By the time we’re finished in China, I should be much more effective, but still pathetic.
For our last evening, we went down our local street and took a chance. 3 great dishes and some Tsingdao beers for 122 yuan, or about €14 depending on the day of the week. But on our 2nd last night, we had to splash out, because Karen had yet to have her birthday dinner. So we choose a restaurant called Xiao Wang in the Embassy District, that had really good write-ups especially for its Peking Duck. After a seriously long walk in 30C heat, we got to the park within which the restaurant is nestled. What a find. Beautiful setting in the park, beautiful setting inside (think Raffles) and really really scrumptious food. But the biggest surprise (apart from them having run out of Prosecco) was that the bill for the Peking Duck, 2 side dishes and an overpriced Chilean wine, was £50.
Finally on the day before our departure, we took the trip to the Great Wall. I was my usual cynical self about this, but to see it in the flesh, and to walk several really arduous kilometers along the wall, really brings home the scale of the undertaking all those years ago. It’s far more steep and precipitous than I had imagined, and the wall runs along several ridges upon which it would be challenging to hike, let alone to which someone had to carry a great many blocks of stone to erect the world’s greatest (but not very effective) defence.
The Great Wall was well worth the long trip ... beyond the very touristy Badaling … to Mutianyu. I was quite cynical beforehand ... because items that you read about so often ... and also often disappointing because they're just like what had been imagined from the reading ... but the location and effort of building that wall was something else.
A few photos to break up all that rambling above:
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
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| De China in June 2011 |
Each major Chinese city has a Drum Tower and a Bell Tower ... so we had to visit:
... and from there we went to see some strange people in a park ... a sort of Chinese-Turkish vaudeville:
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