Spring 2015 - Day 28 and 29: China
I had a leisurely morning since I didn't have to meet until 9:30. I got up, got ready, went and got oatmeal. When I was at the snack bar getting my oatmeal Tory came out of classroom 4 where Bus 1 and Bus 2 were meeting. She had to go call Andi because she wasn't there. Apparently she missed her alarm going off and so was late.
Yeah, I was really glad I didn't go out with them.
Right before 9:30 I went and met Annie, who was also on my bus, and we went together up to classroom 8. We checked in and then sat and waited until everyone was there. Once everyone was there we headed off the ship and to the bus.
Sitting in the classroom I checked out my passport and realized that my passport number was completely incorrect on my departure card for China. That must have been why I kept getting flagged. I have no idea how it happened because although my current passport is a replacement for a lost passport, I never registered my old passport with SAS and sailed my last voyage with my current passport.
The bus took us straight to the airport. Our flight was not until 1pm but it was going to take a while to get all of us checked in and through security.
When the tour guide said that in order to get our boarding passes we had to give them our passports I worried that there might be an issue because of the incorrect passport number. I mentioned it to our liaison, Dr. Jeff, just so that he would be aware if something happened. But I wasn't really worried about it, whatever happens, happens.
Minor things happened. The women looked things up and looked confused and then asked me if I had another passport. I showed her the other number on my departure card. She went and called someone, came back, looked some more things up, and then printed out my boarding pass. She asked me if I would prefer window or aisle, I said window and she said ok, you have an aisle.
I am not entirely sure why she asked me.
Security was not too hard to get through. Annie, Trevor, and I buddied up and went through together. On the other side was a Dunkin Donuts. Hallelujah! It was the first time I had ever seen one outside of the U.S.
I got an iced coffee and it wasn't until I had it in my hand that remembered we weren't supposed to drink the water, which also includes ice. Damn.
I drank half of it before throwing it away and I survived.
We had a lot of time at the terminal and I spent the majority of it trying to get the wifi to work. It again wanted a phone number and I wasn't about to turn my phone on just for wifi.
The plane was HUGE. I don't think I have ever been on a plane that big. It had two aisles with two seats on each side and four in the middle, for a total of 8 seats per row. And it was really long, you couldn't even see the front of the plane from where we were sitting and we were right behind the wing.
I sat next to Sam and we chatted a little but I mostly slept. Then I watched the TV shows that were playing on the TV on the wall. It only played short segments of each of them and there were subtitles so I actually knew what was happening. There was a cooking show where they were showing different ways to cook crab. Then there was a show that seemed to be about couple swapping. But all the couples were together and they had to do a task where they bought food from a market with only a certain amount of money. The losers were forced to ride an elephant, which they thought was not punishment until the elephant went into a lake and drenched them with water.
Then there was a practical joke show called Just for Laughs Gag. They did weird things like have someone watch their dog and then distract them and make the dog disappear so they thought they lost the dog. There was also one where a person sat on a bench with an old lady and then a school bus pulled up and all the kids on it had squirt guns and shot water at the person and old lady. Most of the people tried to shield the old lady but then the lady would pull out an even bigger squirt gun and spray them back.
Then there was a fashion show that featured nothing I would ever wear. Then there was a competition show that I thought was for singing but ended up being for comedy because when they let the group through they went to the judges panel and got clown noses put on them.
At least I was entertained.
The flight was about 2 and a half hours and once we landed it didn't take very long to get off the plane, congregate in the baggage terminal and make our way to the bus.
On the bus we met our tour guide! She would be our guide for the entire 4 days. Her name was Lucia. But that was her English name. Most Chinese children are given English names by their first teacher. The one she was given was Cindy but when she graduated she decided to change it because it didn't fit her. She chose Lucia because it sounded very similar to her Chinese name: Lu Xia.
We were headed directly to the center of town to go on a rickshaw ride through the Hutongs to our dinner with a family. On the way Lucia told us many things about China. She talked extensively about the traffic because it is really bad and was the reason we were going straight to dinner instead of going to the hotel first.
There are about 6 million cars just in the city and the traffic can change rapidly. Before the 1990s everyone in China was extremely poor and when their economy started to improve people would save all of their money and buy a car because it was a status symbol.
In 2008, for the Olympics, the government put a rule in place to control how much traffic was on the roads. If the last number on your license plate was even you could only drive on even numbered days, and if it was odd on odd numbered days.
It worked very well for the duration of the Olympics so when it was over they kept the rule but changed it slightly. They divided the numbers 0-9 into 5 groups. Each group is given a day that they are not allowed to drive. Monday is 0 and 6.
This worked from 2008 to 2011. But people would buy multiple license plates so that they could drive every day. So in 2011 they added a new rule. If you wanted to buy a car/license plate, you had to register. Then, once a month, they would do a draw and if you're registration was drawn you could buy a car. This caused the average number of cars bought daily to drop from 2000 to 700.
So now they control who drives on what days and how many cars are purchased every day.
The city is set up like rings. The 1st ring, or center ring, is the forbidden city. Then there are 6 roads that surround the city. The 7th ring road is currently under construction.
The family we were going to visit lived off of the 2nd ring road. They lived in Hutongs which literally translates to water well. They were named that because groups of families would build houses and then would dig a water well to share. Now it is used to describe the older part of town made up of narrow alleyways.
The families are chosen by the government because they have lived in their houses for many years. Most of the families had ancestors that were officers during the Ming and Ching dynasties. They are paid to host and cook food for visitors and are very busy during the summer months.
The bus dropped us off on a street and we were lead by Lucia to a corner. We waited there for a while until a huge group of rickshaws came flying down the road. They came up very noisily and messy but organized themselves very neatly in a line very quickly.
We all piled in, two per rickshaw. They had blankets to keep us warm. Annie and I paired up.
We rode on the rickshaw for about 10 minutes. A rickshaw is a cart pulled by a bike, I am pretty sure they are in most major cities in the U.S. These rickshaw drivers were very chaotic and I thought we were going to hit against another one a few times because we rode so close together. But we never did.
The area we went through was called bar street and was lined with restaurants, stores, and night clubs. There was also an ice skating rink on a frozen lake. Everything was lit up, it seemed like a very popular place to be and was beautiful. Eventually we turned off the main road and went down narrow streets that seemed to be mostly houses.
We were let off on a larger street and walked a little ways. It seemed like the man that lead us just knocked on a random door but when we went inside they were cooking away so they must have been expecting us.
When we entered the home we walked down a hallway and into a huge court yard. On the right side you could see into the tiny kitchen where three people were hard at work.
Right next to the kitchen was a room set up with two tables that sat about 10 each. Lucia told the vegetarians to sit in the room to the left of the courtyard, which seemed like it was normally a bed room. Annie and I ended up at the vegetarian table.
We were served family style. There were roasted peanuts, cauliflower in some weird sauce, a potato and beef dish, white rice, a mushroom and green vegetable dish. The green vegetable was unidentifiable. Jessi thinks it was bok choy, whatever that is, apparently it's a Chinese cabbage.
She wasn't with me, but she is sitting next to me as I am writing this.
There was also a beef and other unidentifiable green vegetable dish. They were thin a crunchy but didn't taste like asparagus. The food just kept coming and it was all delicious. Finally, right when we thought we were done they brought us the dumplings. There were pork dumplings and then plain cabbage dumplings. They were amazing! They were small, much smaller than the dumplings we get when we order Chinese food in the states.
When we were done eating we all gathered in the sitting room right next to the kitchen. They had cleared out the tables but it was still challenging fitting all 40 of us in there.
We were able to ask the women questions and she told us about herself. I didn't catch her name and she didn't speak any English, Lucia translated for us. The women was the owner of the household, they are not required to take their husbands name when they get married.
The house has 16 rooms, 8 people live there, her grandson was just born in January. 5 of the rooms no one lives in, they are for art work. The north and west are bathrooms. The courtyard is 100 years old and is 300 meters. In the summer they have the meals in the courtyard. It is beautiful with many fruit trees. She showed us pictures of what it looks like in the summer.
They are happy to have the visitors because they get visitor fees. Their family specializes in paper cutting, where you use a small blade to cut out images from paper. They had them hanging all around, they were intricate and beautiful.
Someone asked her how many children she had and it was then that we were all reminded of the one child birth policy. It was weird to learn about a family that actually had to follow those rules, you always hear about them but this made it very real.
Lucia elaborated on the policy more later. There are 56 nationalities within China, the main one is Hun. If you are Hun nationality you are only allowed to have one child. If you are from one of the other 55 minority groups you are allowed to have two. If you want to have an additional child you have to pay 3 years salary.
Recently they changed the law. Now, if both you and your spouse are from one child families you are allowed to have two children.
Also, if you are one of the 55 and are allowed to have two you can sign a contract saying that you will only have one child and then the government will give you money every month.
Lucia has an older brother and after he was born her parents signed the contract saying they would not have any more children. Two years later her mother got pregnant again and her mother-in-law wanted her to have an abortion but she refused and had Lucia anyway. After Lucia was born they had to give back the money they had received from the government for two years.
The laws are very strict, I could not imagine what it would be like to be restricted in that way.
We also were taught how to make the dumplings and after she finished talking we were given the chance to try making them. I did a pretty good job, I could probably make them myself at home!
We then were able to go see their art work and had the opportunity to buy some. It was beautiful, I bought three things. One is very colorful and was of a dragon and a bird, another was small and was of just a dragon, and the third is a circle of all the zodiac with my zodiac, the monkey, in the middle.
When we left the house we got back on our rickshaws and were taken back to the starting point. Thank goodness for the blankets, it was cold!
Once we all returned we piled back on the bus and went to our hotel. We were staying at a Howard Johnson! That is the hotel my university uses as overflow housing. Annie and I switched roommates so that we could be together.
A lot of the people were going to go out but the two of us were exhausted and Lucia had told us that getting a taxi was very challenging so we decided it was better to just go to bed.
They did have wifi but China blocks a lot of things including Facebook, Instagram, and Gmail. We learned that the way to get around it was to download a VPN so I managed to connect to the app store and install the VPN. It worked!
So both Annie and I were able to get on Facebook and Instagram. All I wanted to do was post a picture on Instagram but it just would not work. I think that everyone was on the wifi so it was running really slow.
I took the hottest shower, it was amazing.
We went to sleep very early. Probably before 10. I slept great, the bed was much more comfortable than the ones in Japan.
We had a wake up call at 7:00 am. The ringing phone scared the crap out of me.
We barely made it down to breakfast. We got ready really slowly so we only had time to shovel in some fruit and a pancake.
We piled back on the bus and headed for Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Our schedule for the day was busy and involved a lot of walking, mostly through the Forbidden City.
On the bus Lucia told us about Tiananmen Square. It is a huge political center for Beijing and because of that it is heavily guarded. There are thousands of cameras all over it and the square is patrolled by soldiers and security guards.
She mentioned the protests of 1989 and told us that the information about it is varied within China. On the internet you can only find things the government wants you to know and if you ask people about it they will tell you their point of view or what they experienced. Because of this the truth is ambiguous.
After that she didn't mention it again and told us that she couldn't talk about it while we were in the square or we wouldn't see her after that.
She warned us about the 'hello friends' vendors. She called them that because they will say hello friends to you. They will aggressively try to sell you things and may also be pick pockets.
She then told us that some people may want to take pictures with us and that it was ok. Those people were nice people. Many Chinese people who are from rural areas don't see many foreigners so when they come to the city and see one of us they want to take pictures with us so that they can go back and show it to their friends.
We got off the bus right outside of the square and first went through security. Because we were with a large group we didn't have to actually go through security but were let through a separate gate. We then went down some stairs and through a tunnel that went under the road.
I didn't realize we were in the square until Lucia told us that we were. There were a lot of buildings surrounding the square and there was one large one in the middle that we walked by.
In the 1950 the area where the square is was used as office buildings for the forbidden city but those were torn down to build the square. In 1979 when Chairmen Mao died the built the building in the middle of the square in his honor. He rests in the building in a crystal coffin. They believe that crystal can keep the body inside the coffin so that the person will have a good next life. You can get tickets to go in and pay your respects.
We walked through the square all the way to the end where the gate to the forbidden city is. On all three sides there were other buildings. One has a hall that seats 10,000 people. There are also 34 smalls rooms in that building, one for each province in China.
The building on the other side is a museum. So, to the north is Tiananmen Gate, the south is Chairmen Mao's building, the east is the museum, and the west is the political building with the large hall. While we were there they were flying the flag of Argentina next to the flag of China meaning that some important figure from Argentina was visiting.
The Chinese flag has 5 stars on it. The large one represents communism and the four small ones represent the four main kinds of people in china: farmers, soldiers, workers, and students. The red on the flag means bright future and happiness while yellow is their color for royalty.
After standing in the square for a while we went down some more stairs and through another tunnel under another road so that we could go through Tiananmen gate. Tiananmen literally means heavenly peace gate. It had five tunnels going through the gate. Only the emperor can walk through the middle one and only high ranked officials can walk through the next two. We went through the one all the way to the left.
To enter the forbidden city you must go through 5 gates. The first was the gate we went through when entering the Tiananmen square. The second was Tiananmen gate. We would then go through three more before finally entering the forbidden city.
It is called the Forbidden city because at one time it was forbidden for any commoners to go there. It hasn't been forbidden since 1925. The city is said to have 9,999.5 rooms. A room is considered the space between 4 pillars.
They started building the city in 1604, the first 11 years were spent only collecting materials. The would only accept the biggest and strongest trees. The trees must be over 500 years old to be considered strong enough. Many died collecting materials because they would go up into the mountains during the winter to choose the trees and would stay in the mountain until summer came so they could use the water melting from the mountains to move the trees back to the city.
After they collected all the materials it was built in four years. There are two parts to the city, the outer and the inner court. The inner is the living section and the outer is the working section.
Back in the day it was the woman duty to serve the family. Woman could only marry once but men could marry as many times as they wanted. Every 3 years the emperor would choose a new concubine/wife/empress.
During the Ching dynasty the emperor was in power for 60 years and so chose a wife 20 separate times. The women would be brought in from all over China and told to stand in a room. They would make them wait in the room for longer than they were told they would have to. If any of the woman relaxed, let down their guard, or misbehaved and didn't act properly, they were eliminated. The ones that lasted would be presented to the emperor. The first one he chose would become the empress, he would then choose others that would still stay in the city but would have lesser roles. The women would each have their own living area.
At one point in time the emperor died and the only living heir was a 6 month old baby. The empress used the baby to control the country. She would use a yellow curtain to separate her and the child during public appearances. That child lived until he was 19 and after he died she chose a 4 month old to replace him and controlled the country through him for another 34 years.
Genius. Women are geniuses.
The city took us about an hour to walk through. There were a lot of statues and things that all were symbolic and meant different things. It is too much for me to repeat, you would all be so bored. I loved visiting the city, it is such a huge cultural hub for China is really made me feel the vastness of their history. I could not imagine having a history that long and needed to learn it. And I thought our history classes were a struggle.
When we left the city we headed to lunch. Lunch was served family style with a lazy susan in the center. They would bring over plates of food and just pile them on to the lazy susan and we would spin it around and around to serve ourselves. They served us white rice, french fries, a fried fish dish, a beef dish, lots of vegetables, and a potato dish. For dessert there was watermelon.
In the afternoon we visited the Lama Temple. It is a temple located in Beijing and it houses the three treasures. The first is the largest Buddha carved out of a single sandalwood tree. It must have been a freaking huge tree because that buddha was ginormous. The second are three buddhas representing the past, the present, and the future. The third is a giant piece of art containing 500 monks on a mountain. Every single monk is made out of a different material.
People go to the temple to pray, just like how people visit temples every day in Japan. Many pray with incense and we were given some so we could try. They had huge metal troughs filled with ashes and a small circular container containing a flame. You receive a pack of incense at the beginning and then only use between 3 and 8 at each stop. You shouldn't use 4 because that is an unlucky number and you shouldn't use 9 because that is how many you would use if you were the emperor. In front of every building of the temple there is an incense station so as you go through it you pray multiple times.
Going to places like that makes me feel very out of place because I feel like I am intruding on someones private time. Many people in China are buddhists and so come to the temple to pray to the god they believe in, I was there as a tourist and at times that didn't feel right.
When we left the temple we headed to a street market near the Hutong we had visited the night before. We were given about an hour and a half to explore the market and shop. Lucia warned us to not buy most of the food unless it was packaged and to not buy tea if it was not sealed. Some people will go outside of tea houses and go through the garbage to collect the used tea and then resell it.
I didn't buy much on the street. Just some post card and stickers. But we found this really cool candy store where the were making candy. It was tube shaped hard candies that have a little design in the middle. They make them in one long tube and then cut them apart into tiny pieces. When we went in there they were in the process of chopping up the tubes. I took a while bunch of photos of the guy in action and he must have noticed because he handed me a section of it over the wall. It was strawberry flavor and it was delicious. Walking around the market we saw tons of people eating french fries with a toothpick, apparently french fries are really big in china.
After the market we headed right for an acrobatic show. None of us had any idea what to expect. The show started at 5:30 and we had really good seats for it. While we were sitting and waiting for it to start I brought up my frustrations with my phone and how it wouldn't get service no matter what I did. The boys sitting in front of us advised me to turn my roaming on, since I was international my phone needed to roam in order to find the cell tower. I did not know that. I was always told that roaming was really, really, bad so I kept it switched off. But as soon as I put voice roaming on it found service! Hallelujah!
The acrobatics show was mind blowing. It reminded me a lot of Cirque du Soleil. One guy stacked and balanced on chairs, there was a hat juggling act. Some girls did some crazy balancing all while riding bikes. At one point a giant rotating contraption came out of the ceiling and two guy got in the two circles and then spun it around while they were in it. One of the guys walked around the outside of it blind folded. It was very suspenseful. I feel like I described that poorly but I am not sure how else to.
The craziest act was the very last one. The back of the stage split apart to reveal a huge ball made out of metal. Then a guy on a motorcycle came out, went in the ball and rode around it in circles, even going upside down at one point. Then another guy came out on a motorcycle and joined the first one in the ball. Then a third, then a fourth. The audience was going crazy, one lady was shouting no no no behind us. Then a fifth and a sixth! They went all the way up to seven motorcyclists riding around together in this tiny ball. It wasn't that tiny but it seemed tiny when all seven of them were in there. Absolutely insane.
We all left that show with our minds blown.
The restaurant we went to for dinner was a roast duck restaurant. Apparently roast duck is a famous and popular thing in Beijing because of the way the ducks are raised. The ducks only live for 60 days. The first 15 days they are allowed to live freely and run around to build up their muscles. Then they are captured and fed 3 to 5 times day to fatten them up. Then they they are allowed to run around again to string out their muscles.
Like lunch it was lazy susan style and we were brought plates and plates of dishes. There was white rice and french fries again, a beef dish with mushrooms, orange chicken, some green vegetable that I couldn't identify but was the most beautiful green color, and a peas and pork dish. The roast duck was brought last. I had eaten a lot before that but the duck was the most delicious thing I have ever had. The skin looked greasy but it was actually really crisp and the meat was so flavorful, I could not get enough of it.
They gave us a plum sauce to eat with it and some tortilla like thing that we used to make little wraps. It was so good, it was hard to stop. The roast duck was definitely my favorite meal of the trip.
After dinner we went right back to the hotel. Annie and I didn't even want to try and go out, we were exhausted and we had to meet at 7:45 the next morning. The both of us just passed out.
