A Day in Beijing with Elizabeth!

So I woke up around 7:45 to a line to get into the bathroom/shower. Ben and Vinny had arrived the day before and were planning on leaving early on Monday morning so they had limited time in Beijing to do everything that they wanted to do. Sumana let Vinny get into the shower before her and then she went in because she was already late in trying to catch a train to visit her Uncle about 2 and a half hours outside of Beijing.

I finally got into the shower around 8:15 (even though that was when I was supposed to leave) and then speedily made my way over to the train station to meet up with Elizabeth in the Forbidden City. I walked down the street towards the train station and there were so many people in the area! There was a market that happens every Saturday morning there. Fruits, Vegetables, Clothing..you name it, they probably have it. I snapped some pictures as I was zig-zagging through people so that I would get to Elizabeth before she started to worry too much.

I got out at the Tiananmen East Exit, went down the underpass and over to the entrance to the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City). First thing I noticed was that there were SO MANY PEOPLE. SO many. It was 9am and there were a couple thousand people right at the entrance. It was crazy. I didn’t know how I was going to go about finding Elizabeth but I figured I would just head over towards the gigantic picture of Chairman Mao and hope that she would be somewhere over there like we had planned. I crossed over the bridge and she was standing in the doorway! Thank goodness for that. Apparently she went around in circles through the Entrance and Exit to make sure that she didn’t miss me somewhere in between there. We walked through the entrance and there were so many tours that were going though. Mostly older people, all wearing the same type and color of hat and following a flag to make sure that they all stayed together.

We bought our ticket with our Student Discounts started our journey through the Forbidden City. It is HUGE. There is no possible way to get through the entire thing in one day. There’s probably, also, no possible way to FIND all the parts of the Imperial Palace. There are tons of little nooks and crannies and corridors all over the place. After walking through the imperial palace, ogling at the thousands upon thousands of people there and looking at the little rooms that housed the emperor’s everyday needs (a room to sit in before important meetings, a different room to change in before important meetings, etc) we made our way back out of the Imperial Palace and attempted to find the No. 5 bus to get to Jingshan Park.

We found the bus stop and the bus came within a few short minutes. It was a really interesting experience because everyone runs over to the entrance, pays the driver and then squishes as many people into the bus as possible. Elizabeth asked me if this was like India and I told her that in India, they fit as many people as they possibly can into the buses but that there aren’t really doors on the bus so people end up on the bus but hanging kind of outside. The Brightside about being squished on the bus is definitely not even having the opportunity to fall over when the bus breaks.

We got to Jingshan park and paid the couple kuai (another word for Yuan) entrance fee and made our way to the lookout points. The first thing that I noticed when I walked into the park was the cleaner air that I was breathing in. People aren’t allowed to smoke in the Park and the trees make breathing a much more pleasant experience. We walked around the park for a little, made our way to the different pagodas and saw the Forbidden City from the top. It was MASSIVE. You couldn’t exactly see all of it because of the pollution but you could definitely tell that it was a really, big area. It was interesting to look out on the forbidden city and not be able to see very much and then look out on the city on the other side of the pagoda and be able to see much more clearly. I am not exactly sure why that would be but it definitely caused us both to wonder. After munching on some bread and some shelf milk that Elizabeth brought, we headed back on the No 5 bus and were even more squished than before and made our way to the Subway line to head on over to the Lama Temple (a Tibetan Buddhist temple).

The subway system is pretty extensive and covers a lot of Beijing. Each trip is only 2 Yuan no matter how many transfers you make or how long it takes you. Definitely the easiest and cheapest way to get around Beijing (though I like Buses better because you can see more of the city (when you aren’t being squished in the middle of the train)). Trains are also very packed and people will run between transfer points to make sure that they are at the front of the line so that if there are open seats on the train that they can race one another to sit there. It was pretty intense.

We got to the Lama temple and paid our Student fee and then went inside through the park and over to the beginning of the temple. This temple was set up like Forbidden City where you enter through one part and go through it and then follow into the next part and keep going to the next one. The architecture was very similar. The Buddhas would start relatively small and by the last part of the temple the Buddha was 26 meters tall! 8 meters below ground and 18 meters above ground! It was massive and very beautiful. I snapped a picture and then got yelled at but it was worth it. We walked around the area a little more and it was so quiet and serene. Very peaceful and even though it was in the middle of the city, it felt as though we were farther removed from the sights and sounds and smells of Beijing.

The temple was about to close so we made our way towards the exit and over a street or two because I told Elizabeth that I wanted to walk through a hutong to see how a lot of people live in Beijing. We walked through what Elizabeth said was a fairly nice Hutong. There were several cars parked outside of their community homes. And we walked further inside and people were playing cards and smoking (the norm) and little kids were playing with their toys. We walked through some winding paths and some people had their doors open so we peeked inside and we could see people cooking on this small little stove that was in the entryway and they had a tiny table on the side that they placed their cut vegetables on. We came outside of there before it got dark and headed across the street into a different hutong where we were about to talk more about her sister and med school and my brother and his job and we reminisced about high school Spanish class and everything.

We started to walk back towards the way we came and part of the alleyway was more polluted than when we came in. It looked like it was stagnant in the air and not dissipating. We covered our mouths and noses and kinda jogged through it and then went around the corner a different way to get out so that we wouldn’t go further into the polluted air.

We made our way back to the subway station and went over to the Temple of Heaven park with the help of Elizabeth’s Lonely Planet China book. We got to the park and walked through the pitch blackness and stumbled upon people practicing their singing in the park and a whole lot more people watching someone else sing and some people dance. People seemed to really enjoy themselves. We went further on into the park and found another rather large group of people that were doing the same thing. We went further yet, almost to the actual temple itself and we saw some people playing Chinese hackey sack. We sat near them and people watched for awhile and they were actually pretty good. They were all older people and were spinning and twirling while they were kicking their feet up in the air. It was pretty nifty.

We started to get cold and we had to meet up with Sumana in Tiananmen Plaza so we made our way towards the exit of the park and we saw a whole lot of people standing and chanting and clapping so we went over there and we started doing it with them even though we couldn’t understand exactly what they were saying. Everything was being said in a rhythm and it was fun. People would walk past and they would do it with the crowd as they were going to their next destination and so we figured it must be something pretty well known. As we were leaving another couple was about to leave and Elizabeth asked them, in her awesome Mandarin skills, what this was. And the man said it was a kind of exercise that people did and to get more blood to their hands and keep warm. He also said that you could pat other parts of your body like your knees or your thighs or something to do the same thing. It was pretty interesting.

We walked outside of the park and low and behold we saw a group of people sitting there and watching two women doing ballroom. After a couple seconds the song ended and everyone paired up and they all started doing ballroom right there! It must have been a class of some sort but it was cool because everyone was doing the same moves at the same time.
As we were leaving, Elizabeth and I talked about how we would never see this type of thing in the US. People don’t generally meet in the park for random group activities like that. We talked about how there is less privacy here, in China, but there is more community involvement and community activities. We talked about how cool it was that older people would go to the park on their own to enjoy the company of other people around their age and have fun whether that’s singing and dancing or playing hackeysack, going for a walk, dancing on the plaza outside of the park. It was so cool to see all of that and I definitely felt like it was an honor to be experience this type of thing. I took some pictures of people dancing and singing and the Chinese people that were sitting there just smiled at me and nodded in approval. It was really nice.

We made our way back to Tiananmen took some pictures of the Forbidden City at night and listened to Sumana’s account of her day that included an unregistered taxi, a really nice driver, her train ticket getting stuck underneath the train 10 minutes before it was supposed to depart, really broken mandarin and a meeting with the Chinese and Indian National table Tennis teams.

Sumana and I headed back to the hostel and stopped to get McDonalds (GROSS) where we ordered corn (yummm) and fries (yuck) and then headed back to get ready for The Great Wall the following day. :D