May 15-16: China Day 1 - Arrival, Forbidden City, Shopping, Peking Duck

My dad was invited to speak at a medical conference in Beijing, China, and decided to bring my sister and me along with him. I managed to negotiate the time off my project by promising to work at least 16 hours over the duration of the week. Originally, the conference was booked in a downtown hotel and conference center in the middle of Beijing, but just about a month before it was to take place, some Chinese state event declared they needed that block of rooms and the conference was bumped out. I feel bad for the event-planner, as these things can take years to put together. We therefore stayed at the Juihua Resport and Spa that was over an hour outside Beijing amongst the farmlands. Trust me, it's not as nice, yet, as it looks on that site. It is still very much under construction, I don't know how they came up with such nice looking photos of the place. This is the view out of my hotel window. Farmlands.

Since we were out in the Chinese boonies, in a country that already has very little English, the English proficiency level at my hotel was about 0.5 on a scale from 1 – 10, with 10 being proficient. It took over 30 minutes to check in and get my room key, with no queue. That first day was pretty much a bust as I arrived at 8 am at the resort, but had to wait until almost 5 pm for my dad and sister to arrive from their direct Chicago flight. So I slept and worked, as there was literally nothing to see around our resort had I been brave enough to venture out alone in the first place.

The next day, we paid for a taxi ($20) into Beijing to see the Forbidden City, a huge royal complex that was originally built in the 1420s and has been inhabited by all the Chinese royal families (dynasties) since then. There is building after building included in the complex, with important halls and temples in the center. It was beautiful. It’s amazing that such a vast expanse of land exists right smack in the middle of downtown Beijing.

We exited the Forbidden City though the Meridian Gate to the south and were shuffled along the available bridge space for tourists, as the center one was closed off and guarded. We weren’t allowed to take any photos looking back at the immense gate with an enormous portrait of Mao displayed in the center until we had reached the other side of the bridge. There were guards everywhere outside the gate and also across the huge thoroughfare in Tianmen Square. I still find it a bit shocking how revered Mao is considering he put 45-70 million of his own people to death.

I am ashamed to say that we stopped at this enormous Beijing McDonald’s for lunch as it was the first food place we came across after 15-20 minutes of walking, and we were pretty starving by this point. It was the first time I’ve had McDonald’s since I backpacked Europe in June 2004 when Shelley, Nora, Kristy and I arrived in Budapest on a Sunday and it was pouring rain and everything was closed. I think the Chinese version actually contains more real food items: my chicken sandwich looked like real chicken, albeit dark meat instead of white. And I didn’t feel sick to my stomach afterwards, either!

We hailed a cab after lunch to take us to the big Beijing market, but on the way determined through hand-gestures (don’t ask me how) that it was closed for renovation, so we went to the Pearl and Silk Market near the Temple of Heaven instead. My sister and I got silk Chinese-style shirts and Dad purchased gifts for his secretaries and nurses and wife. I got a necklace out of it too. J And my sister and I got mobile phone dangling ‘charms’ thrown in for free as well. Say what you will, but that ‘phone jewelry’ as I like to call it is kinda cute and makes finding my phone in my purse much easier!

We were next guided upstairs and given a tour of the silk-making process. We saw the silk worms in all stages of development and then experimented with real silk worm cocoons sitting in large baskets. You could hear and feel the dead worms jiggling around inside. Then we were led to the machines that pull the bits of silk from the cocoons and thread about 8 of them together to form one strand of very strong silk. These strands are then lumped together and gradually stretched out over arched posts. The stretched out bundle is stretched further still to the size of the top of a bed where it is combined with many other layers the same size and placed inside a duvet to become a very soft and very warm bed comforter. Our guide did her best sales pitch for us to purchase one of these bed covers, but none of us much wanted to pay the $200 or so for the pretty patterned silk covers that would go over the raw silk-stuffed comforter.

We finished our first day with an adventure to this ‘famous’ Peking Duck restaurant not far from the McDonald’s where we had lunch. We attempted to find it on our own, even though the guidebook said it was ‘difficult to find’ and it wasn’t marked clearly on the map. We finally asked the waiting bicycle-taxis about it and sure enough they had signs printed in English with the name of the restaurant on it. We took two of these bicycle cabs to the restaurant, which we would NEVER have found on our own. We were pulled at least 10 minutes into the depths of a Chinese slum, where residents paid no attention to us whatsoever. It must be a pretty common thing to see Westerners bicycled down their ‘street’ (or rather, dirt path) to this restaurant. The place was tucked away down an ally of sorts and blended right in with the slummy surroundings. The kitchen and eating area would certainly not have made code in the United States to serve food, but we got our Peking Duck adventure. We asked for one duck and had some delicious duck mushu pancakes with Tsingtao that night for dinner.