Some More of Beijing

A lot to type, and time is money so I will get right down to the nitty gritty. Since the last time I blogged a lot has happened. I have done a lot of sight seeing and seen so many cool things that it is hard to write about each one in detail. I guess I will start with some of the sites I've seen and then go into a few little stories about how crazy China is. After haning out with the Canadians for the first few days I needed a change of scenery, so I switched hostels to meet some people and was fortunate to meet a few Americans and hung out with a guy from Idaho recently until he left today. We spent a day going to Tianamen Square and the Forbidden city which was very cool. It was truly amazing seeing the square and the giant picture of Mao at the entrance, and the entire place still has a Communist feel to it. The Forbidden City is actually connected to the square. There are so many tourists there, almost entirely Chinese. Cody and I were one of maybe ten westerners I saw the whole day. Everywhere you look there are soldiers parading and doing drills with AK 47s and Kung Fu as signs of Communist strength. Its really kind of eerie, and you are surrounded by about ten thousand Chinese tourists who grew up being taught that Americans were the Devil. It is funny to see Chinese tourists though. While walking around Bangkok you can tell who the tourists are and who the Beijingers are. The tourists wear dark clothes and worn no-name jackets and have a weathered look to them while the Beijingers are all wearing fake designer clothing and Nike sneakers. The Beijingers also do not stare at me as much as the tourists, who all stop and stare like I am more interesting than the 700 year old palace they are in. The Forbidden City honestly was not all that spectacular. It was cool to see in person and because I am into the history behind it, but I really expected it to be more Grandiose. While in Tiennamen we were bombarded by Chinese people who claimed to be art students who wanted us to come to an art show. This is one of two scams that you will find almost all over Beijing. They are quite friendly and speak English very well and take you to a place where they claim is a free art show. Once there they force you to pay a crazy amount of money or they will call the cops who are also in on the scam. The other classic scam is the tea house scam, where they invite you into a traditional tea house and force you to pay or they call the cops again. They prey on stupid Westerners. That night we went to the famous Wangujing Night Market where a lot of the crazy foods you would find on Bizzare Foods are located. It is a tiny street, about 10 feet wide and about a football field in lenght and stalls are packed all along both sides. Each one sells similar foods, ranging from various types of skewerd meats and fruit, to the more delicious insects, scorpions, spiders, snakes and other interesting eats. What is funny is that all the Chinese that are eating there will not touch the bugs and other interesting foods, they just eat the fruit, soups, and meats. To get your eat on you just walk up to the stall and point to what you want and the guy throws it on the grill for a few minutes. The prices are kind of high compared to the rest of beijing (about 3 USD for a skewer of scorpions) but like wise Ryan Cooke once said, "do it for the story." I ate quite a bit of crazy things but I will just talk about scorpions, snake, and seahorse. Scorpions just taste like paper. They use a nice spice but to be honest they are pretty tasteless themselves. The bigger ones have sort of crab taste to them. I would definitely recommend the bigger black ones. Much better flavor. Snake tastes like chicken as lame as that sounds. They cook it for so long in a sweet and sour sauce that it is very tender. Seahorse was by far the weirdest. It has a very salty taste to it. Quite crunchy and it felt like biting into a bunch of fish bones. Would not recommend it for anyone. We finished that day off with a Chinese massage. It was around 20 USD for an hour. It was much different from what I imagine. It was almost like the masseuse beat me up for an hour. She was so small but very strong. At one point she was essentially standing on my back and at other times she was punching my legs. Very weird. And to answer the question on everyone's minds, no happy ending. The next day we spent exploring the Summer Palace on the outskirts of Beijing. I really enjoyed it except for it was blistering cold the entire time and windy. Aside from that, the place was enormous and you could spend days exploring. The palace itself is a number of palaces that encircle a lake, and just as its called, was the summer palace for the royal family (the forbidden city was their normal residence). It was pretty spectacular. That night I bought a ticket to an Acrobatics show which was amazing. Every part of the act was something incredible. There were so many highlights. One guy could juggle 8 balls at once. At one point they fit 11 girls on one bicycle while riding it in circles on the small stage. Just seeing the amount of strenghth and flexibilty exhibited by these people was crazy. Definitely glad I sprung for the 20 USD ticket (things are so cheap here). After a few days of exploring Beijing I finally went to the Great Wall yesterday. I went to the Mutinayu section, which is not very touristy and for the most part in its original state. After a two hour busride we arrived at the wall to a fresh layer of snow. It as around 32 degrees outside and perfectly sunny so the weather was perfect. We took a chairlift up to the bottom of the wall (it runs along the top of a mountain range) and began to walk to the highest point. The wall is so much larger than I imagined. It was very steep as well which gave us a pretty good workout. What was the craziest thing to me was that there were people selling drinks and souvenirs on the wall that had walked 2 kilometers from the town below and then traveled all the way along the wall, which at times is at an extremely steep incline with thousands of steps, carrying 25 pound bags of stuff. Some of them were older women that seemed like they were in their 70s or 80s, all when it was close to freezing outside. Hell of a way to earn a living. Ater about three hours of going uphill we got the highest point. I was taking a picture when all of the sudden someone startled me from behind. It turned out to be a buddy of mine that I traveled with all over New Zealand. I had no idea he was even in China. He just happened to be on that part of the wall, on that day, in a place thousands of miles away from where I met him. We made plans to meet up later that night. The walk down the wall was much easier because we could almost run down the steps. The way down was so much fun though. Instead of the chair lift they have a tobaggan run. It is very long and you can go extremely fast. It was not safe at all and it seemed like there were no safety regulations. I was going maybe 20 MPH downhill on this old metal chute with a little plastic luge. It was so much fun. Anyways so after getting back into Beijing, I met up with my buddy and we got dinner and had Peking Duck, which was amazing. So much better than any duck I had ever had before. We then proceeded to go to a Chinese night club where the Chinese girls wanted nothing to do with us and we essentially made asses of ourselves. The only girls that gave us the time of day were prostitutes which is not exactly my style. A great day all around though. It was so insane to see my friend again. I was definitely pretty happy about that. Small world. Truly amazing. Anyways I am getting kicked off the computer right now because they are closing. I will try and blog tomorrow about my overall thoughts of Beijing. I am deciding whether or not I want to stay a few more days or go ahead and fly to BKK. We will see. Until next time...