Our tour guides, Miss Huang and Mr. Lee, kept us entertained with jokes and facts about Beijing (almost all in Mandarin). The main industries in Beijing were (1) Tourism, (2) Traditional Chinese medicine, and (3) Education / University. That last point was apparently why Beijing girls don't make good wives (they're too educated and don't like to cook - unlike the Guangdong girls - though Mr. Lee was probably biased).
We're told it took 27 years to build the 9,999.5 rooms (an attempt to show respect and not upstage his father, who's palace had 10,000 rooms). We obviously didn't have time to visit each one, but the guides did take us to some of the highlights.
We were then lead through the front gates and into Tian'anmen Square. Given 15 minutes of free time to explore, I apparently did the worst thing possible (at least in Mom's opinion): I made eye contact with a street peddler. It was hard to disengage since I was actually interested in the stamps and postcards he was selling, but Mom kept pulling me away. This worked in my favour in the end, the peddler took Mom's protest as bargaining and ended up dropping the price of everything without me having to say a word. Unfortunately, that did cut into the free time, and I didn't get as many photos as I'd like.
We then break for lunch. At the restuarant we're assigned to tables - the same group of people we're to spend all tour meals with. Lucy is an architect from New York. Her twin sister, Lisa, and her brother-in-law, Momo, are also part of our table. They all are on the extended China tour and they all are super friendly and outgoing. The others at the table are more quiet.
A very hot hour later, we were once again round up to the tour bus (thankfully air-conditioned).
We drove around to the Bird's Nest Stadium and actually stopped to go inside. That was anticlimatic though. The stadium was closed, and all that was there were other tourists and street peddlers with questionable souveniers. We left after a quick bathroom break.
After so much walking, we all gladly sat down at our next stop, the Beijing Theatre. We watched lion dancers walk on planks and balance on large balls (as if they were puppies doing tricks) to the sounds of traditional horns. We saw a contortionist bend and undulate on a platform to soft music (slightly ruined by all the unrelated girls with fans and puffs of smoke that swirled around).
From there, the show got more and more interesting. There was a modern electronic music piece with tumblers, which integrated some break dancing with gymnastic feats. There was plate twirlling and great balance acts with many glasses of water. Then, the show ended in a edge of the seat number involving a spherical cage and motorcycles riding so fast they were able to loop upside down or stay on the equator. They started with one, and then continued to add more motocycles until it seemed like there was no way they could all fit. And then they added one more (for a total of 6).
We all left pretty thrilled. However, as we took the bus to a restaurant for dinner, Mr. Lee relayed the reality of such a life.
"Was this meal based on the lecture?" I wish! Dinner was not to my liking. Though there was one dish of veggies with some other good things mentioned in the Chinese medicine talk, there wasn't much otherwise. They ruined a perfectly good fish by deep frying and then soaking it with sweet and sour sauce. But I guess this is Beijing style food - either sweet and sour, or spicy, or both. I could make a meal out of the spicy items, but poor Mom couldn't handle that either. (Thankfully, we'd saved dinner rolls from the on-flight meals.)
We returned to the hotel with the clear message that our day as royalty has ended - tomorrow we will be peasants and commoners.
1 comment:
You didn't mention that all the dishes were oil soaked and salt cured; I guess the Beijing language doesn't have the word 'moderation' in their vocabulary.
Post a Comment