Beijing, continued

I enjoyed the second and third days in Beijing much more than the first, largely because (almost) everything looks and feels better with a little sun. I can’t say I like Beijing as a whole, but distinct parts therein were worth the visit.

First stop: the Temple of Heaven. Actually, don’t think you get to hear about China without having to read about family drama. Very first stop: the elevator.

Dad: Why not brush your hair?
A.: Otstan(b)

This is a very important word in Russian, and quite difficult to explain since its connotation is much less rude than any close translation. It means something between “stop” and “f* off.” It’s very common; it merits a detailed lesson—one that touches on Russian prefix and suffix usage. Remind me to write one up later.

A., continued: You can tell me about bringing my hair under control when you have enough of it to understand.

Mom, Dad both jump on me. I stand by what I said; don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, and don’t nag me about something of which you have no concept. Of course, my dad continued to point out throughout the trip that my hair did not look brushed. I retaliated by pointing out that his eyebrows were safety hazard on account of attracting birds looking to nest (as much out of concern for his safety as retaliation).

***
Our cash flow challenges began almost upon arrival; I didn’t write about them in that first dispatch, as I hadn’t realized then that they would become a recurring theme. We didn’t bring enough cash, having read that there would be ATMS on every block. There were, indeed, numerous ATMS on every block: Bank of China, Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial Bank of China—you name it. It’s just that our cards were NYCE, Pulse, etc., and the plentiful Chinese banks took Cirrus and Plus. The international banks that would take our cards were much fewer and farther between and even on our rare encounters with them, we were limited several hundred dollars per withdrawal per day…

…which may not have been an issue, if it weren’t for the tour’s significant tipping “suggestions.” Over half of the money that we managed to take out ended up going to tips, which added about 10% to the base cost of the trip. These suggestions had been sent ahead of time in our booklet with itinerary and other details; dad and I had read them, mom of course did not, and our jaws had dropped. Please understand that I think tipping is great—when it’s tipping, i.e. a reward for service, rather than a transfer of cost to the consumer. Indeed, many years ago tipping was not allowed in China. When that changed, much of the travel industry there lowered salaries to “account for” tips. Every day entailed a tip to the program director, local guide*, driver, and hotel housekeeping adding up to $14 per person per day. On the Yangtze River Cruise, this about doubled, but more on that later. The point is, I had spent less on food in Canada, Turkey and Greece than I would on tipping in China, so I had not appreciated how much cash I would need there.

*Half the time I just wanted the local guide to shut up. By the time we got to Hong Kong, Mom said, quite appropriately, “Finally, a guide that doesn’t sing the praises of Mao.” More informative than the statistics that they spewed out with great ease (however many millions of people, square feet, etc. or more importantly this is the biggest/oldest/what have you or second biggest/seventh biggest/you get the point) were their offhand remarks or answers to questions:

Question: So what will parking be like during the Olympics?
Zhen Jun: I believe there will be some sort of lottery system for permits. I and other Party members will have priority.

Question: What does your wife do for work?
Zhen Jun: She’s a Japanese language tour guide, which I do not like.
Question: You don’t like the Japanese language?
Zhen Jun: I don’t like that she works for the Japanese.

Zhen Jun: Mao, the father of our country…[choose your own adventures; many a sentence was started with this, and I couldn’t be bothered to take note of the rest].

Weeks later, in Xian

Mark: People often ask about the situation in Tibet. In my opinion, Tibet is part of China. Even Dalai Lama is a title historically bestowed by the government in Beijing. People say, ‘but China invaded Tibet…’ but we don’t use the word, “invaded;” we use the word , “liberated.” Liberated from whom? China liberated 90% of the population from the wealthy 10%; that 90% is happy.

[Click here for more on this perspective, which has a quite bit of truth to it.

Much more later. Now I return to our hotel in Beijing.

***
We visited a Bank of China ATM the night we arrived. It didn’t take my card or my parents’. This had never happened to me before, in any country (even in Nicaragua, where entire regions lacked ATMs, ATMs in the capital took all sorts of cards), so it didn’t immediately occur to me to check the symbols. It did occur to me after about five minutes of trying different machines within the lobby. I checked the cards against the machines and told my parents why we were having trouble.

Mom: Let me try again.
A.: No! The machine will just eat your card.
Mom: Let me try the other one.
A.: It’s the same issue.

Mom is agitated, paces. I worry that her nervousness will provoke the guard.

A.: We have enough cash to get us through Beijing. I know Shanghai has international banks. We don’t need to deal with this right now—we’ll change cash at the hotel and play it by ear.
Mom: Let’s try the bank across the street.
A.: We can try the bank across the street tomorrow when it’s light and possibly not raining. We don’t need more money now than we can change at the hotel.
Mom: Okay, you’re right.

Except that she continues to obsess about this throughout the rest of the evening and much of the morning. On the way to breakfast, she goes to redeem some traveler’s cheques. Except she can’t because she filled them in wrong (signed the bottom part), even though dad and I emphatically told her not to. The hotel cashier tells her that Bank of China will still be able to change them for her, but they can’t. As we walk across the lobby to the restaurant for breakfast, she starts to panic. I ask her to let it go, tell her it’s not a crisis. She starts threatening to complain to the cashier’s manager, says he’s incompetent, says he’s not doing his job, they’re perfectly good traveler’s cheques. She repeats this line of reasoning a few times before I can’t take it and tell her that she’s the one that made a mistake. No! If the Bank of China can process the cheques, why can’t the hotel? I tell her we have enough money for Beijing, that she would do well to stop obsessing.

The breakfast buffet is massive and exotic. The interesting vegetarian food can mostly be found on the Indian buffet table. The following conversation occurs as we’re passing, stopping at various tables:

Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.

It was like watching a movie with her. There’s a point where most other people would think, “she doesn’t know more about this than I do. We have the same amount of information, so I’ll stop asking questions.” Not mom.

At the breakfast table, mom was raving about the cereal she had found:
Mom: Try this, it’s amazing. It looks and tastes healthy, too. I wonder what it is.
A.: I don’t want cereal right now.
Mom: Try it.

A., in disgust: These are Cocoa Crispies!
Mom: What?
A.: It’s a sugary, artificially flavored cereal widely available in the US.
Mom: Well it’s good, and it tastes healthy.
A.: It’s not.
Mom: Chocolate is good for you.
A.: Not the chocolate in cocoa crispies.

Flash-forward to the farewell dinner in Hong Kong:

A.: Would you pass the rolls, please?
Mom: You know, bread is the worst thing for you.
A.: Would you pass the rolls, please?
Mom: I don’t eat bread anymore.

I just look at her until she passes the rolls. I take a whole-wheat one. She looks at me in disapproval.
***

On our way out of the restaurant, we pass a case of fancy cakes.

Mom: How can you say we have enough money? Just one of those cakes is almost $20.
A.: How many cakes will you be buying? Besides, an establishment that charges that much for a cake will take credit cards.

We’re early risers, especially in the first days after arriving. As such we usually have at least an hour after finishing breakfast before we have to meet the tour group for the day. I picked up a magazine, got into it, but when mom is agitated, she doesn’t like for others to be at peace. She walks across the room, accidentally steps on my feet.

A.: OWW!
Mom: Sorry. You should be ready by now, anyway!
A.: Actually, I shouldn’t.

***
While I came to appreciate several places in Beijing, the city as a whole didn’t grow on me. The sights out the window of the bus were not generally interesting or pleasing to the eye, so I took to trying to recognize commonly recurring characters. The one for “middle” was simple (like the Russian letter “f”) and everywhere. I’d meant to ask someone how to write “finger.” Those first few days, perhaps as a result of the coffee I drank to hasten my adjustment to a twelve-hour time difference, I entertained wild delusions about wanting to learn Mandarin. I practiced forming characters and made an effort to learn words. Then I remembered that I was tone deaf and already struggling with the more advanced stages of a much easier language, and came to my senses.

Every morning, once we were all onboard the bus, Kathy (yes, I’ve caved; it’s just shorter) greeted us with an enthusiastic, “Ni hao!” We answered back, some with pronunciation so lacking that Kathy’s greetings were met with shouts of “I need to pee!”

Zhen Jun narrates our ride to the Temple of Heaven, tells us that Dr. Kissinger has visited it fifteen times. I wonder whether Mao or Dr. Kissinger had caused greater loss of life. The interesting thing about Mao deference in China is that I heard no one deny the catastrophic consequences of his campaigns (well, at least the Cultural Revolution), but people write them off as the excesses of the Red Guard rather than considering them in any systematic light.

Beijing’s ancient city walls were largely destroyed in the 1970s to make room for the ring roads. I wondered later why Beijing got to be the capital, especially since I liked Xian, a previous capital, so much more. I could spend weeks there, including a few days just cycling on the city walls. Mark, our guide in Xian, told us that the placement of the capital was put to a vote, which Xian lost to Beijing by one vote, to which Kathy replied, “yes, that one vote was Mao’s.”

Anyway, Dr. Kissinger, who was apparently an architect, was particularly interested in the Temple of Prayer for Good Harvest. Like many marvels of architecture in China, it was destroyed by fire and later rebuilt. Originally, it had been built without beams or rails. Zhen Jun tells us about the symbolism of the colors, numbers. In the Forbidden City, yellow was the dominant color—if I remember correctly, it symbolized royalty. Anyone, other than the emperor, found wearing yellow would be killed, even if it were just yellow underwear (Zhen Jun didn’t talk about enforcement; we can only hope they didn’t do random underwear checks, but it wouldn’t surprise me). The Temple of Heaven’s pagodas are more blue, the color of Heaven.

We arrive at the park, walk by morning exercisers practicing their Tai Chi, ribbon dancing, ballroom dancing. Others are playing music or Mah Jong or dominos. Zhen Jun tells us the Chinese take their exercise very seriously, especially after the SARS scare.

Before we’re herded back on the bus, we’re given a few minutes to use the happy room. The one in the park is less disgusting than the one in the restaurant where we had lunch yesterday. Many of the older ladies in our group are horrified at the prevalence of Turkish toilets. I don’t mind them except that the floors around them tend to be dirtier, stickier; I don’t mind the ones with the spray guards at all. The men are a bit put off by the two-in-one stalls. The only thing I’m put off by is the cultural differences pertaining to standing in line, which is up there with spitting in public on the Chinese government’s pre-Olympics politeness campaign. As we stand in line, a woman walks directly in front of us into the stall that just opened. Before we’ve fully understood what just happened, another local woman chews her out and restrains her to let one of us claim the stall. This scenario would repeat itself regularly. Actually, a few minutes after that, I came out of a stall and saw another woman in our group about to walk in, when she was cut off by a stampeding local. Once again, another local intervened. Just the other day at the airport in Hong Kong, where I was least expecting it, a woman bee-lined right in front of me to a stall. At that point I needed no time to process; I just walked right in front of her, too close to the stalls for my liking but when in Rome.

Off to the Summer Palace, where we took a cheesy Pagodaesque gondola to lunch, and spent too much time at lunch and too little walking around. Zhen Jun offered some impressive stories about the thousands of everything—seven thousand different paintings graced the walkway the emperor had had built for his mother. “The Chinese are very superstitious,” we would hear again and again (my favorite aspect of this is the dragon holes, I think they’re awesome). Most even numbers are unlucky, eight being the very lucky exception. The Olympics will begin at 8:08 on August 8th of this year.

We returned from the Summer Palace with about an hour to get to a bank before it closed. Mom spent most of that time rearranging her suitcase. I finally got her out the door with half an hour to spare. She spent most of that time wanting to try ATMs that I could have told her wouldn’t take our cards—she just wouldn’t accept the symbol explanation. She spent even more time explaining our situation to bank clerks that just couldn’t help her (they told us that they couldn’t conduct the required transaction on a Sunday but that the Bank of China might be able to). Instead of moving on to find the next Bank of China, she told them she couldn’t come back the next morning because she had an excursion scheduled that would leave before the bank opened. I had forgotten the extent to which my mother indulged in unnecessary explanations, but this wouldn’t be the only time she would remind me. The clerks were remarkably helpful—one even drew us a makeshift map of the nearest Bank. After she continued to try a few banks, we got to a Bank of China ten minutes before it closed. They, too, could only salvage the traveler’s cheques on a weekday. Don’t reason with them, JUST MOVE ON.

Dinner wasn’t included that night. Mom proudly announced that she was not hungry (this was an at least-daily occurrence). Later I realized that this is partly because she ate about twice to three times as much as I did at the included meals. She wasn’t hungry at those, either, but like me, eats when food is placed in front of her. Dad’s the only one of us with self-control when it comes to food, which is ironic, since he’s the Blockade survivor (mom was evacuated to the Urals during the war—not exactly abundant by most standards but a cornucopia compared to St. Petersburg in those years). I was naturally limited by vege/pescetarianism and while I would overeat just a little bit, mom would eat A LOT. And then express shock at the next mealtime at the idea that I could even think about food.

We wandered around in the neighborhood of the hotel, where there wasn’t much but street food, and the two universally accepted and emphasized rules of travel in China are, NEVER drink the water; and NEVER buy street food (lesser rules include, if you must buy a Fauxlex, use small change). We wandered a bit farther and came upon… a Walmart. Now, if you’d asked me before the trip if I’d go to Walmart for dinner, I’d have thought you were nuts, but it was there and it took credit cards (mind you, the cashier had to take my card and run it at another location). And it was quite an experience. It was massive and its downstairs section was a giant Chinese supermarket. I got some prepared tofu and an Asian pear, and mom got some bananas (dad was resting back at the hotel). And that was dinner.

As for water, hotels provide a bottle per person per day—yes, I’m horrified at the environmental implications, and yes, I took it anyway. That day I had taken my bottle but mom had left hers and drank out of mine. The next day, since we were going to climb part of the Great Wall, I reminded her to bring her own. Bad idea. I boarded the bus, sat next to her as I had the day before. For the second time in three days, my butt is wet.

A.: Mom!
Mom: What?
A.: Why is there an open water bottle on your seat [dripping onto mine]?
Mom: How was I supposed to know you were going to sit there? Why are you blaming me? You have a complex- everything is my fault.

Great. Now I would see one of the original seven wonders with a wet butt.

So, did mom take her water bottle out of the bus when we went to climb the great wall? Of course not, she just drank out of mine.

Later, when we got to the Ming Tombs, I reminded her to take her water bottle, since mine had run out. In the parking lot, an elderly woman collecting empty water bottles. Mom spills out the rest of our drinking water so she can give her the bottle.

A.: Mom!
Mom: Look at how painfully that woman was walking!
A.: We could have drunk the water!
Mom: I wasn’t going to force it down my throat.

You could have offered it to someone else. You could have brought it with you and given it to her on the way out. You could have brought it to the Great Wall so we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You could have given her the change she would make on that empty bottle. But whatever.

As it were, I had a chance to dry off before we got to the Great Wall, because we stopped at a Cloisonne factory. This was the first of many factory visits and perhaps the most impressive and informative, but it was also the one that made me angriest. I understand this kind of thing is great for running a travel business—not only is it free admission, but you probably get kickbacks from the factory (all the ones we would visit—carpet-making in Shanghai, jewelry in Hong Kong, Jade in Beijing, lacquerware in Xian, etc.—were government owned)—but is it really necessary to have us spend as much time in the shop than at the Great Wall? Only after forty minutes of shopping time later, we set off.

The ride out to the Great Wall offered some gorgeous scenery. Zhen Jun said he’d climbed most of the mountains in the area, but not Jade Springs Pagoda (Mountain?), because many senior government leaders lived there and it was very heavily guarded. The Wall was powerfully impressive as it appeared and kept going and reappeared. Climbing the Great Wall at Ba Da Ling was more a lesson in modern than ancient China. I tried to imagine what it was like in the old days, without a vendor sticking a kite or pasmina or dvd or just about anything else in your face every minute or so and saying “TEN DOLLARS! EXCUSE ME! TEN DOLLARS!” Ba Da Ling, however, was good for a Citibank ATM, which set us at relative ease for a week or so (until our serendipitous encounter with an HSBC ATM in Shanghai). The ride from Ba Da Ling to the Ming Tombs once again offered a peaceful opportunity to take in the Great Wall.

The Ming Tombs and the Secret Road near them were okay. I’m not just jaded—they’re really not that impressive. Some of the statues were pretty cool… but as my mother’s video camera battery had died, she demanded that I photograph every one of them. I balked. This, too, would happen often: she would want pictures of things I wouldn’t want to deal with. Once in a while was okay, but it could be very demanding. I now have over 1,500 photos to deal with as it—I knew then that I didn’t want to take pictures of everything in my path. Arguments ensued, pictures were taken, some pictures were not taken.

***
Our last morning in Beijing, I was getting very nervous as mom hovered over my stuff.

Mom: What about those?
A.: I plan to use them.
Mom: What about that bag?
A.: I still have something to put in it.
Mom: You need liquids? Between now and tomorrow morning?
A.: Yes, I am going to brush my teeth.
Mom: Toothpaste doesn’t count.
A.: Yes, it does.
Mom: What can you do with toothpaste on a plane??
A.: I don’t make the rules.
Mom: What about that? You’re going to forget it.
A.: No, no I won’t.
Mom reaches…
A.: DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!
Mom: What’s wrong??

I’m not saying that I never forget anything, but I don’t forget things like that, things in plain sight that are set out for last-minute use. I still shudder when I remember that train ride from Moscow to St. Petersburg, before which mom stashed away my toothbrush and toothpaste- so I couldn’t brush my teeth, and my earplugs- so I couldn’t sleep for a minute through the sound of dad’s snoring—all because she saw it neatly sitting on top of my backpack and “just knew” that I would forget it if she didn’t stash it away. Still scarred, I frequently snap when I see her coming near any loose ends that I have arranged but not packed. Much later in the trip, when I thought I was coming down with a cold (not a huge stretch of the imagination, since everyone else was, including the people with whom I’d been sharing bottles of water), mom had stashed the vitamins I had put out to take after breakfast but before we left. I was livid.

Mom: How was I supposed to know?
A.: Why can’t you just leave my stuff alone? I have it under control.
Mom: Well, you didn’t want any of the stuff I was offering you.
A.: Yes but I did want my vitamins!

So, because I say no to her herbal medicines because who knows what’s in them and how long they’ve been around, I’m not entitled to my multivitamins?

As it turned out, spring in Southern China was reviving my long-dormant allergies. Still, I wanted my vitamins. She found them later and everyone was happy.

***
We concluded our morning in Beijing with a visit to a Kung Fu school and then a jade factory. We arrived in Shanghai that evening and saw an amazing acrobatic show—like Cirque de Soleil but not over the top. I loved Shanghai and will tell you more about it tomorrow.