We accomplished the drive to Fukuoka with minimal crying, though we did have to turn off the Hamilton soundtrack half way through because Revolutionary rap and Vivien's sing/screaming do not mix well in a small car. We parked in the free military parking lot (which I will sorely miss), then whiled away the minutes before the check-in desk officially opened by making funny faces at each other.
The flight to Seoul was only an hour. When we got there we had to collect our baggage and go back through check-in and security because of the way I had booked our flights, but the Incheon airport is so awesome that it was pretty painless. AND we got to see a procession of the Korean royal family while we walked to and fro.
It is one of the cultural experiences the airport does. I love this airport. They have great play areas for long layovers, good restaurants, beautiful bathrooms, and a craft room for older kids to make traditional Korean things staffed by workers in traditional Korean dress. Fly here!
The flight to Beijing was about an hour and a half. The airport is a really cool shape--it is very open and shows off how huge it is. We had to ride on a tram to get from the gates to the terminal and it was shockingly loud after being in Japan--people were talking to each other and making phone calls and listening to music. I forgot what that was like! We found the 72-hour visa-free travel desk without too much trouble then headed to collect our stuff.
They had us put our car seats in boxes (instead of the plastic bags we had them in) at the Incheon airport because they told us the Chinese airports are notorious for mistreating baggage. Everything and everyone seemed to be in pretty good shape for the start of our vacation though, and once we found the driver who was waiting with an "ANDREW FORBES" sign I allowed myself a small sigh of relief. So many hurdles passed!
We got all loaded up and headed to our hotel in the heart of Beijing. Our driver's name was Yang (Like John, with a yuh and a guh). He is from Beijing, is married, and has a 6 year old daughter. His wife works for the government. He had very good English and told us lots of fascinating things about what it's like to live in China.
Here are a couple that I remember:
-The price of housing in Beijing is about a thousand dollars per square meter.
-If you own a house, it only belongs to you for 70 years, at which point it becomes the government's property again, though you are still expected to pay taxes in the meantime. It sounded like no one was really clear on how this policy is supposed to work (even the government).
- He felt that tourism had increased after the Olympics, but he estimated that it was only by about 3%. He said many Chinese wonder what all the spending on the Olympics was supposed to accomplish, though he did say running for exercise got really popular afterwards.
-Drew saw lots of signs all over advertising "Blind Massage." Yang told us the government paid for people who are blind to go to massage school so they could have a job.
-When Yang was a boy you had to have coupons that gave you permission to buy the things you needed (food, clothing, bicycles, TV), and you could only receive the coupons in your city of residence, so if you went on a vacation that was not approved, you wouldn't be able to get food there. They just use money now.
-Beijing has gotten significantly larger in his lifetime. There are 6 Ring Roads that circle Beijing, and the 5th and 6th Ring Roads have both been built in the last 20 years to accommodate the growing population. You can see them on this map. The 1st Ring Road is not a highway, but it's close to our hotel that's marked in the middle of the map. The airport is the gray square in the right hand corner.
The next day we toured Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. Yang was still our driver, but we were joined by another guide named Hellen. She was wearing the perfect tour guide shirt. We never lost her in the crowd.
I know she told us what all the buildings around the square were, but I have forgotten.
The kids were not super excited about all the walking.
But if we ever started to slow down, people would ask us for a picture. And if we stopped for a picture with one person, the crowd seemed to grow instantaneously and people would be throwing their kids (who were just as displeased as ours) towards us and trying to get as close as they could to the littles and being generally very pushy.
We feel bad for celebrities now. And it also made me think about what it would be like to stand out as much as we did, but receive negative attention instead. People were smiling at us and it was still exhausting and uncomfortable--can you imagine what it would be like if people glared or crossed the street to avoid you or threw things at you when they saw you coming?
I think Rafe and Vivi might be a little scarred from the experience. They were cringing away from the slightest touch by the end of our stay in China . . .
We fled the photo hungry masses in the square to enter the Forbidden City.
But, guess what? It was full of tourists too. This was where I started telling people "no" when they would ask to take pictures.
And I started taking my pictures on the go instead of stopping.
We had to go through security to enter the second gate (I was feeling a little flustered and forgot to pick up my backpack after it went through the scanner--I had to run back for it when I realized I suddenly wasn't as hot and sweaty and try to convince them it was mine by describing the contents). Now, you might be thinking that the second gate looks a whole lot like the first gate, minus the enormous portrait of Mao Zedong . . .
And I would say to you, "You are very astute. Pretty much every structure in the Forbidden City looks exactly the same."
It is basically 180 acres of stone courtyards and hundreds of nearly identical halls/gates. We walked straight from one gate to the other, so we didn't even see the majority of it, and I felt like I was in the Labyrinth. Yang told us someone had tried to invade once and they had gotten lost inside. I was not surprised.
The inside of the halls usually had some sort of throne and lots of ornate statues around it. This was the first one. They were all so similar (to our eyes) we didn't take pictures of the rest.
Everything was lavishly decorated. The ceilings were pretty.
And the rails all sported carved patterns and images.
Some of the halls had statues in front, like these huge lions.
Here's a closeup so you can see the amazing detail.
More lions.
A tortoise . . .
. . . and a crane, for long life.
There were lots of huge cisterns so they had water handy in case one of the hundreds of wooden buildings caught on fire.
Yellow is the color of the Emperor, so almost all of the roof tiles in the city were yellow.
Hellen was a veritable fount of historical knowledge, but her accent was really thick and once she got going on her fact reciting, she was not easily stopped. Drew did most of the listening.
I was taking pictures.
I liked the clouds on the ends of the railings . . .
. . . and all the little statues lined up on the ends of the roofs.
The closer you got to stuff the more details you noticed. This was on one of the doors to a hall.
Our kids were definitely starting to get tired after walking through what felt like the 20th courtyard, and I was starting to feel like there was no earthly way of knowing exactly which direction we were going, so I asked Hellen to get us to the exit as quickly as possible. We walked through this gate . . .
. . . and into the garden. There are no trees in the Forbidden City. Yang told us it was so assassins wouldn't have a place to hide, because nothing was supposed to be taller than the Emperor's Hall, because the birds the trees would have housed would have detracted from the dignity the Emperor was going for, and because when you put a square around the Chinese symbol for "tree" it apparently changes the meaning to something like "prison." So to walk into the garden and see green trees after all the stone and wood was a wonderful feeling. That is, until people started picking up my kids for pictures without asking. "Just play dead!"
Even the walkways in the garden were beautiful. Each of these squares was decorated differently.
There were ponds amongst the trees . . .
And also a fake mountain the Emperor could climb for a nice view.
And we finally escaped!
One last view of the outer wall and the moat.
We only coaxed our kids through the last part of the Forbidden City by telling them that if they could make it, they would get to go on a rickshaw ride. We took a ride through one of the hutongs (old Chinese neighborhoods made up of alleys and courtyards).
There were many, many rickshaws to choose from. And the nice thing was, there were lots of Chinese people riding in them too, so we didn't have to feel like horrible rich white tourists making some poor guy pedal us around Beijing in the muggy heat. It just felt like a relaxing ride through the city.
We took a little detour to explore one of the residences that's open to tourists. The entrance was tucked in off the alleyway.
The way the courtyard is set up there was a lovely breeze coming in, so it was very relaxing and peaceful. And it was full of interesting creatures, so the kids liked it.
I think these are African Clawed Frogs.
And there were lots of interesting birds hanging in cages from the pergola. One of them had a huge range of sounds and could do one that was like a guy mumbling. It was hard to fully enjoy the atmosphere, however, because the people who live there were just kind of sitting there watching us, or going about their business and completely ignoring us.
It was about as awkward as Vivien's face.
They had one room set up as the "marriage room." I'm still not quite clear on how this plays into Chinese marriage ceremonies, but the kids had a fun time trying on different hats in the room.
Many of the entrances to the courtyards in the hutongs have a pair of bearing stones in front. Most of them seemed to be drums, but this house had boxes. Hellen told us it meant the family valued education.
We passed by some ladies selling vegetables on our way back to the rickshaws and the kids were quite pleased to identify the ones they knew.
I was riding in the rickshaw furthest back, so I got to watch all the pedestrians get a glimpse of Rafe, do a double take, then turn to watch him until he was out of sight. If they happened to see Annie too, ooohing and aaahing usually followed.
After the rickshaw ride we walked back to our car, where we were met by our mannequin doubles.
Then we went to a beautiful restaurant for lunch. The left wall was full of branches with stuffed, colorful birds perched throughout, the right wall was made of private dining rooms with big circular tables.
The lunch was so good! Beautiful salad, a sweet corn dish, mushrooms in a tasty sauce, black pepper beef, and Kung Pao chicken. We got some noodles for the kids, but they stuck with plain white rice.
They are not adventurous eaters. Vivi tried the black pepper beef and spat, "It spices my mouth! That's why we should not have pepper in the world!!"
They were excited for lunch to be over so they could go look at the fish and turtles in the pond upstairs.
I had planned a couple days to do laundry in the sink/bathtub and hang it out to dry during the trip so we wouldn't have to bring so many clothes, but doing laundry by hand is hard work! So, we made the kids go to the bathroom at every opportunity so I wouldn't have pee-clothes in addition to the normal laundry load. This was a sign in the bathroom at the restaurant that I've been pondering and still find mystifying.
After lunch we went to the Yuanlong Silk Factory. This wasn't part of our original itinerary--we were just killing time until our acrobatics show that night--but it was actually one of my favorite parts of our trip. You enter the store and walk straight into a tour on how silk is made. There was a series of tubes with silk worms preserved at different points of their life cycle, then right next to it they had baskets of live ones for us to look at and touch. Our guide said they call the cocoons "The White House." We appreciated the American joke.
There are two different kinds of silk cocoons. The single cocoons hold one worm and are used to make silk fabric. They boil the cocoons to kill the worms and soften up the cocoon, then they put them in a bowl and use a brush to agitate them until they can pull out a couple strands. Our guide said it takes 8 strands to make one silk "thread." They attach the threads to this machine and it spins them into the thread.
They had this old loom set up to show us how they used to make the fabric.
The other type of cocoon is a double cocoon that holds two worms. For that kind, they get it wet, then flatten it out and stretch it on metal hoops. They layer several cocoons on top of each other and stretch them on gradually larger hoops until they turn into a big fluffy circle. She rolled it into a rope and had us try to tear it apart, and we couldn't; it's very strong. Then she pushed it flat into water and the water didn't come through the other side, so it's water resistant too!
Then they showed us how they stretch the fluffy circles out into the shape of a comforter. They let us try it too, and she asked us to wait while she saw the manager about getting us a job there, because we'd done such a good job. The jokes! It kind of reminded me of the Jungle Cruise script.
Then we were free to wander around the store. We got a comforter for our future king size bed (to accommodate all the little flailing sleepers that end up in bed with us by morning) and Vivi chose a blue silk dress with a peacock on it as her treasure for the trip. Andelynn finally went to sleep for the first time that day, and then all the workers kept asking Drew if they could get her out and put her on one of the show beds so they could ogle her while she slept. Drew said no.
After the store we still had a little time so we thought we'd walk down to the Temple of Heaven, but when we got there the entrance fee was much more than I was expecting, we only had a half an hour to explore before we'd have to head to our show, and our kids were cranky, so we walked back to the store and called Yang to come pick us up. While we were waiting, one of the workers spotted us through the window and came out to claim Annie, who had woken up and was then available for holding.
The acrobatics show was crazy. We got there early so we had some time to sit and take in the surroundings.
And our surroundings had some time to take us in too
It was a really fun show. There was a group of girls that did some crazy contortionist stuff. They also did an act with Chinese yoyos, drums they balanced and flipped around on their feet, and one towards the end where there were about 15 girls all on one bicycle.
Drew and Rafe's favorite act was this one. The first thing they did was get the apparatus spinning so fast that they were basically free falling on the way down, and then the guy on top kept doing crazier and crazier stuff, like juggling while walking on top, or doing it blindfolded.
This was my favorite. They kept adding hoops to the top so they were jumping and flipping higher and higher.
Rafe fell asleep for the finale. I'm a little jealous; it was hard to watch. They started with one guy on a motorcycle in a big metal ball, and by the end there were 6 inside . . . I spent the whole act making that noise of fear that eeks out of your body when you get dropped on those tall amusement park rides.
After the show we headed "home." We stayed at the Jingshan Garden Hotel, which is smack in the middle of one of the hutongs. Yang's car wouldn't fit on the narrow street, so he would pull over on the main road and drop us off at the head of the alley, and we would walk through to the hotel.
We'd catch little glimpses of people's lives walking to and from the hotel. There is a public bathroom that everyone shares, and the streets are lined with people's laundry and stuff. Sometimes there would be groups of people hanging out in the narrow alley, talking and smoking.
Here is the entrance to our hotel. You can see the cats sleeping on the glass roof reflected in the window above the doorway.
The rooftops of the hutongs are all really close together, so the cats have excellent prowling grounds. In this picture you can see the other side of the hill that we were facing when we exited the Forbidden City on the horizon. The north gate was about half a mile away.
Here is the courtyard of our hotel.
They had grapes growing on their pergola.
There was also an endlessly fascinating fish pond. Our kids kept trying to touch the fish, keeping the workers on tenterhooks, ready to rush to the rescue should one of them fall in.
We ordered dinner from the hotel restaurant. I ordered a beef stew that was amazingly good, but Drew ordered spare ribs with yam soup that took forever, were very spare indeed, and the soup consisted of yams floating in water. You win some, you lose some.
The upper courtyard was lined with lanterns . . .
. . . and windows, on which a couple lizards were lazing during the evening.
The effect of the decor was rather lovely. Drew chilled out in the courtyard reading for awhile after the kids were in bed.
We had taken our pack and play, and we tried to have Vivien sleep in the little rollaway bed, but by 1 am everyone was usually in the big bed, which would be totally fine if they didn't love to sleep horizontally.
I was forced by little toes in my spine to relocate to the rollaway with the baby at some point. She was a tired little thing. I wish she would sleep in her car seat while we drive, but I can still count the number of times she has done so on one hand. I've never had one like her.
The bathroom was nice and had Drew's favorite ceiling-style shower head.
It was a good home base for our China adventures!
On our last full day we woke up and had breakfast in the hotel dining room. They had beautiful flower rolls, some Korean dishes, rice porridge, steamed vegetables, toast and jam, cold cereal, and yogurt with straws to drink it.
Drew felt like he was back in Romania again, drinking boxed milk.
After breakfast we drove about 2 1/2 hours out of the city to the Great Wall of China. It was so exciting to catch our first glimpse of it out the window! (Yang's favorite soccer team's logo is reflected in the windshield.)
We parked the car then walked to the entrance for the Jinshanling section of the wall. There are a bunch of different sections that are open to the public. The Chinese all go to the Badaling section. Yang said it's because of "face stuff." If you go to the Great Wall and take pictures to show your friends and family, and the pictures aren't of the most well known section, you might lose face. I assured Yang that we would not lose face from going to a less popular section of the wall--I chose it because it's less crowded and supposed to be one of the most beautiful and parts of it are not restored, so you get a good mix of old and new. We started from the ticket office . . .
. . . and made our way on a nice paved trail up to Zhuanduokou Pass.
There was a huge wall carving that seemed to be a good photo op.
There were a couple obliging tourists there who took our picture for us. And took one of us for themselves as well.
The first destination was General Tower up on top of the hill.
The steps were no small obstacle for our little hikers. The Great Wall was not designed with ergonomics in mind.
We had to take frequent breaks. But the view was not bad!
From the General Tower you could see the Great Wall stretching away out of sight to the west . . .
. . . and the east.
It was nice and cool inside the tower. Yang had us guess how many men could sleep inside. I guessed 100 which seemed like way too many, but he said it actually housed around 500 soldiers. They would sleep standing up, packed in together to keep warm like an Emperor Penguin huddle.
We continued on from General Tower with two ladies we picked up at the ticket office. Their backpacks are full of things they want us to buy after they endeared themselves to us, accompanying us along the whole trek and being very helpful.
Photographic proof for when she doesn't remember she was ever here . . .
And for this smiley guy too.
Here was the first sign of crumbliness along the wall.
And the way forward was down this steep, secret stairway . . .
There were lots of up and down sections with narrow alternate paths along either side close to the top of the wall. They told us to go down and up again for our safety . . . but it was hot, guys. So I let our crafty saleswomen take the kids down the safe way and risked the lazy way.
A little close-up . . .
Here was another crumbly tower closer to the end.
And the same tower looking back the way we came.
The stairs started getting more gnarly the further along we went.
And Annie finally fell asleep after 2 miles . . .
Here we are coming up to the last tower before our exit.
There was a little path off the wall and then underneath, through this archway.
And then we had probably 3/4 of a mile to hike back through the forest to the start. There were many declarations of weariness and achiness from the smaller members of our party.
But we did get to see this cool millipede! I forgot to include something for scale. It was about as big as my hand.
The saleswomen started bringing out all their wares at this point. We tried to tell them that we didn't have any Chinese money (which was true--we forgot to change some at the airport), but they were persistent. So, we gave them both $20 and accepted an "I climbed the Great Wall" t-shirt in hopes that they would leave us alone. It only emboldened them! They kept trying to sell us coffee table books full of pictures of the Great Wall (this was a popular souvenir item everywhere in China). I finally asked Yang to tell them we weren't going to buy anything else and they promptly disappeared.
We had lunch in a little restaurant near the trail head. There was sweet and sour something, lamb and green onions, garlic shoots and pork, and a sweet tasty egg and tomatoes dish. Yang also bought that huge thing of Coke and we drank it ALL. I had brought enough water for the kids, but not for us for a 3 mile hike on a hot day.
After lunch we drove back to Beijing. There are lots of trees outside the main city, but the longer you look at them, you realize they are all in neat little rows . . .
The government strongly supports tree planting. Yang said it's to help with the air quality. There are lots of different kinds, but it's funny to see them so organized when you're expecting wild countryside.
We passed by a couple parks in the evening. There were many old men gathered around tables, playing chess or table tennis. We also passed by what Yang called the "Date Park" where retired people go to find dates. There were some couples dancing in a clearing as we passed.
Here is the van we rode around Beijing in.
And here is the airport. It is supposed to look like a dragon back, which I thought was cool.
Goodbye to Yang! Thank you for taking good care of us!
We decided to get breakfast after we got checked in. This is Pizza Hut, of course. Every Pizza Hut I've ever been to definitely has velvety seats and silver ornamental dishes on side tables . . .
Most unfortunately for us, we severely underestimated how long the line for security was going to be. By the time we finished breakfast and got down there, this was the line.
But luckily for us, we have babies and got to use the express lane. We still had to run to our gate, but we made it with about 5 minutes to spare. On to Mongolia!
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