2002-12-02 - 8:05 a.m.

Finally in Beijing

Nov. 14

When they let us off the train we followed the crowd out into the Beijing train station. We stumbled outside into the Beijing sunshine, wandered over to the taxi stand and were quickly ushered into a cab. Lily had a very tough time telling the cab driver where to go and eventually the dispatcher had to come over and straighten it out. The reason for the problem was that Lily had a very tough time understanding the Chinese the cab driver spoke. He had a heavy Beijing accent, and even with my untrained ear I could hear the difference: there were a lot more r-sounds in this guy's speech. It's like the Brooklynese of China!

Our hotel, which had been arranged as a package deal when I was still in the states, was quite a way from the train station, so we got a mini-tour of Beijing on the way in.

Of all the Chinese cities, I think Beijing impressed me the most. I can't remember when I was in such a clean, pleasantly designed city. The city seemed much more pedestrian-friendly with walkways over many of the major roads. Of course the traffic was still chaotic by the standards I was used to and everyone was playing the same "I dare you to run me over" game that everyone in Nanjing was playing.

Of course one of the reasons that Beijing looked so shiny and clean is that the Chinese are gussying it up for the 2008 Olympics. Are they proud that they're going to be hosting the Olympics? Oh yes! There were signs and banners for it everywhere. Some people we talked to also suggested that due to the big communist party meeting they'd shut down the factories in the area for a couple of days to let the pollution clear up.

The place we were staying, a rather nice four-star hotel, was in the "hotel row" near one of the major shopping sectors of the city, so the location was almost ideal. We checked in, and were assigned our room. It was off in the west wing of the hotel, and was actually indicative of a trend in our accommodations: staying at the cheap rooms in a nice hotel means that they put you off to one side.

It was three in the afternoon by the time we got to our hotel and we hadn't eaten anything substantial since dinner the night before. We were ravenous.

There was a sort of French caf� next door to the hotel, so we decided to go there. Since it was well past lunch time, the place was deserted and the staff was standing around looking bored. In spite of this the service was very slow, but maybe it only seemed like that because we were so hungry. The food was faux French, but probably as good as we were likely to get. Heh. I just remembered the name of the place: "Le Coffee Shop."

When we got back to the hotel we had to straighten out the tour arrangements for the next two days. We called CITS (the China travel service) and was told that our tour guide would call us back shortly with the details. It actually took over an hour for her to get back to us, but finally we learned that we would meet our group down in the lobby at 8:20 the next morning.

That being done, we were free to do a little exploring. Supposedly right near the hotel was a street that had been turned into a pedestrian mall that was lined with shops. The street was called Wangfujing, and it featured a large indoor mall called Oriental Plaza. As it turns out all of this was only a couple blocks from our hotel. Sweet!

To my surprise it was just about as warm in Beijing as it was in Nanjing, so I only had to wear a light jacket for our little jaunt.

It occurred to me pretty quickly that a lot of Wangfujing was aimed at tourists - there were lots of stores selling all sorts of cheap Chinese statues and the like, hardly something the Chinese themselves would be interested in.

I was really turned off by how aggressive the salespeople were in a lot of these stores. I just stopped to glance at something, and immediately two or three employees were assailing me, even trying to grab my arm. That's one thing about China - since there's no shortage of people and labor is cheap they'll so always hire too many employees rather than too few.

We then found Oriental Plaza, a rather Western-like mall, but very high-end. Since we were a little tuckered from our wanderings we stopped into a European-style coffee shop. While I was drinking my tea, I looked across the corridor and noticed a Starbuck's on the other side.

After our wanderings we were hungry again, but decided it was best to eat back at the hotel since I was still phobic about Chinese street food. Actually there were several restaurants to choose from, and we picked a Korean barbeque place.

Seeing as this was a hotel with an international clientele the menu was in Chinese, Korean and English, and there were pictures of each dish. Somehow the food looked smaller than it did in the picture. Also some of the dishes looked rather terrifying, but we hadn't seen anything yet!

Already tired, with a big day ahead of us, we headed back up to our room and went to bed.

Continued