The Hike of My Life: Jiankou Great Wall

Yesterday was one of those experiences that I almost hate to try and convey using just words and pictures because I know there’s absolutely no way I’ll do it justice.

It all started out with a two hour trip out to the outskirts of Beijing to the mountain ridge of the Xizhazi Village. There we had an awesome lunch looking out over fields of lavender, ensconced by mountains, over the top of which wound the Great Wall. Pretty sweet scenery.

After lunch, it was time for our hike along the Jiankou Great Wall, an unrestored portion of the wall which was apparently important during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644). The agenda the coordinators had given us warned us that compared to other sections, the mountain was a bit “higher and steeper” and “more winding and varied”. They had no idea. Our first clue probably should have been the sign when we entered the village which read “This portion of the Great Wall is not open to the public”.

We started out what was supposed to be a two and a half hour hike up the mountain and across part of the wall, with an hour climb of bushwhacking and slipping and hoisting ourselves up a one and a half foot wide “path” of mud in the rain using the branches of trees. Our “tour guide” was a local farmer I think, who was just chillin’ and swinging from branch to branch smoking his cigarettes, while the rest of us were literally fearing for our lives.

In retrospect though, that part wasn’t dangerous at all compared to the path along the Great Wall itself. Usually, when people “climb” the Great Wall, they mean they walked along the nicely restored road which connects the picturesque turrets and took postcard like pictures to show their friends back home. We literally CLIMBED the Great Wall – unrestored, with rocks falling and a barely cleared path along the very edge of a VERY tall mountain where one false step could’ve been VERY bad news. (The program had never taken students to this section, and our coordinator was freaking out). Anyway, since nobody did die, I can now say that it was a pretty incredible experience – one of those once in a life time things you definitely don’t get to do everyday (and I’m not even sure I could do this again if I wanted to, since I’m pretty sure it was illegal to be up there in this location and our “guide” was in no way legit).

We were inside of a cloud most of the way, so the visibility was pretty poor, which was bad for pictures, but probably good for our psychological well being since we couldn’t see the extent of the thousand-plus foot fall endangering us. Since we ended up refusing to go down some of the ways the “guide” wanted to take us because they were just absolutely insane, we ended up trekking around up there for a good 3 hours or so before venturing down the same treacherous way we came up. (Sorry if this is sounding dramatic, but I’m not at all exaggerating – this was probably one of the most physical demanding and definitely the wildest thing I’ve ever done). I’ll let the pictures try and tell the rest of the story:

View from our table at lunch. Not too shabby.

Beginning the ascent


Our guide (and his cigarette smoke)




CLIMBING the wall. Vertigo much?



Ah!

So worth it from the top, though.

Attempting to navigate our way down. This was taken mid-wipeout. One of MANY wipeouts.

In other news, I found out this morning that a Starbucks out by a lake near us has wi-fi, which makes me very, very happy.

Wangfujing and Silk Street

After Chinese class today, we ventured over to Wanfujing Dajie, which is the shopping hub of Beijing, with a bunch of huge malls with Chinese and Western stores and alleyways full of people who will grab your arm as you walk by and try to convince you to buy everything from chopsticks to posters of chairman Mao for about 15 times (or more) what they're worth. It's a really fun place though - definitely bustling. My favorite part might have been the fountains which were dancing to "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" which I found to be a little ironic in China. And I saw some of the most exotic snacks I had seen yet...

At the entrance to the snack street. We posed for a quick picture, then these Chinese men came over and started taking pictures of us taking pictures. Haha.

Scorpion Kabob, anyone? How about a seahorse instead?

This guy kept trying to get me to eat these grapes he had?

After that we took a really long walk over to Silk Street, which is basically a 4-story black market full of stalls of people with "Louis Vuitton" and "Gucci" stuff. It's a huge place for haggling and bargaining, and also a lot of fun. I'm usually super non-confrontational, but I for some reason I got really into the whole haggling thing today, and just followed my friends around and knocked down prices for them. I also spent a whole lot of the time just chatting with the people selling the stuff, which was SUPER interesting. They were really fun to chat with, even if they were really suspicious of me wanting to know about their lives (My favorite line was "You are too happy. Why are you so happy? You need to calm down."). They all have been to language schools teaching them how to sell things to Americans so their English is pretty good and it was amazing how much you could get them to cut prices by asking a little about their family, etc - that, and telling them in Chinese that we were sisters, which I learned how to say in class today :).

"Proving" that the purse is real by setting it on fire?

Our new black market salesmen friends :). So much fun.

We head out to go hiking on the Great Wall tomorrow, which should be pretty awesome.

"Stop White Pollution"

I saw this on some lady’s bag yesterday walking back from lunch. I think it’s referring to the bad smog here, but I found it amusing nonetheless.

Some notable events of the last couple of days:

- Hardrock Café Beijing. I got my t-shirt :).

- My bike breaking on the way to the subway – yes, this would be the bike I rented the night before, meaning it made it a grand total of oh, 700 yards before the chain snapped. Yeah, made in China! I guess that’s what you get when you pay $15 to rent it for a year.

- Getting on the wrong subway to go to work

- Getting on the wrong bus on the way back from work … in a thunderstorm.

- Almost experiencing death by taxi. It was close. Like 4 feet close going about 45 miles an hour as I was trying to cross a street on foot (the little green walking man was lit, but that means nothing here).

- Attending a meeting the company had which was some sort of orientation for a new product they were selling. Except the meeting was in Chinese, so I didn’t learn much.

- My lunch experience yesterday in a crazy packed-with-Chinese-people cafeteria:

My friend Pato to my supervisor lady: “What’s that?”

Supervisor: “Pork”

Pato: “Does it have a bunch of bones in it?” (He basically had bones for lunch the day before)

Supervisor: “No bones.”

Pato: “Ok, I’ll have that.”

Me: “Me too”

…a few minutes later when sitting at the table:

Supervisor: “What do you call this in America?”

Me: “Um, pork. Right?”

Supervisor: “No that no pork”

Pato: “I thought you said it was pork”

Supervisor: “That no pork”

Awesome. Apparently it was some type of fungus. So I had tomatoes for lunch. Other than the food, lunches are actually really fun. They all try and teach us Chinese and then laugh at us as we try to repeat what they said.

- Getting an offer to come live with my co-worker at her house after knowing her for literally 20 minutes the first day.

- Drifting off to sleep every night to the sounds of heinous singing attempts wafting up into our room from the KTV (karaoke) bar housed on the floor below us. (No one is exactly sure what goes on on the second floor of this hotel, but we have some guesses, and we’re pretty sure it’s in defiance of the second stipulation of this sign, which is posted in and outside of the elevator.)

First Chinese Class, First Day of Work, First Squatter Experience

First Day of Chinese, First Day of Work, First Experience with the Squatter

Yes, so the last couple of days have been full of firsts.

First Day of Chinese

Monday morning started off oh so right – with a fresh plate of hotcakes from a McDonalds we found about a 10 minute walk from the hotel complemented nicely by some yogurt from a convenience store I figured I ought to consume to fight off the osteoporosis since I’m not about to try and get my calcium from the un-refrigerated milk here. After breakfast, my roommate Stephanie and I decided to go try and figure out if a big Chinese looking building a couple of blocks from the McDonalds was anything significant. Turns out it was the Beijing Drum Tower, which, along with the Bell Tower, used to mark the north and south points of the central axis of the Mongol capital way back when (i.e. like 1200?). Anyway, it had some very steep stairs, great views of the city highlighting the contrasts between old and new and featuring the smog, and lots of big drums up in the top. Apparently, the tower acted kind of like an ancient Big Ben, as a guy would bang out the time ever so often for the city’s residents’ information. We got to see a drum beating demonstration and a bunch of their ancient time-telling devices which are pretty fascinating and clever.

After a stroll around another part of the old neighborhood it was time for our first Chinese class. Perhaps the most hilarious 3 hours of my life, or at least the first 30 minutes, which we spent learning the pronunciations of all the pinyin letters. We did a bunch of consonant differentiation drills, the first of which just happened to be differentiating between ‘m’ (“muh”) and ‘f’ (fuh). Please just put yourself in my shoes for two seconds, imagine a 60+ year old Chinese teacher repeatedly yelling “muh! fuh!” and try not to laugh. Impossible. The rest of the class was actually really hard, with moments of hilarity dispersed throughout of course, and a little discouraging because I learned that basically everything I thought I had picked up the last few days just from being around was completely tonally wrong, and being tone deaf as I am, it’s going to be a little challenging to get people to understand what I’m saying.

First Day of Work

The place I’m working 3 days a week is called Telestone Technologies. The biggest part of what it does is design, manufacture, and distribute products to wireless communications companies in China (like our AT&T) so that they can provide better coverage in more places. So for our first day of work this morning, each company was supposed to send a representative to the hotel to pick us up and show us how to use public transportation to get to the city. The pick up time was 9:00. Ours (I’m working with another guy from Chile named Pato) came at 10:00. Then we spent the next 2 HOURS riding a bus to a subway, riding a subway, switching lines and riding another subway, switching lines and riding ANOTHER subway, then getting on ANOTHER bus, then walking about 10 minutes to the building. This city is ginormous and apparently a two hour commute isn’t all that uncommon, but we got there literally at noon. Everyone was very nice and welcoming though - and after our long journey offered us a lot of water, which we were really grateful for, until we sipped it and remembered that they serve the water hot here (so I put it on my desk for later so it could cool down to room temperature).

After a couple of introductions (most people there spoke at least some English), the lady who had brought us there took us to eat at a restaurant nearby. I had rice with some sort of diced pork (who knows what pork parts), cucumbers (I am becoming all about cucumbers), and some sort of soup (the best identification of which I could get was “it’s from the sea”). Interesting. But not bad – AND I was pretty proud of my first public chopsticks performance. I’m getting better.

In the afternoon, our supervisor gave us a power point introduction to the company and instructions to spend the rest of the day reading their brochures, so now I’m all educated on repeaters and splitters and signal amplifiers and base stations and antennas? I also spent a little while helping out woman who sits in front of me who wanted to put an adage at the top of one of the marketing materials for a new product and wanted me to pick out an appropriate one in English from this sheet of “famous” adages she had found on the internet. My choices were things like “a cat has nine lives” and “do as you would be done by,” so that was interesting, but we finally decided on something along the lines of “he who does not advance moves backwards”. We’ll see how well that one sells? Later that same woman offered me an apple, which I originally refused because I wasn’t hungry, but she then insisted that it was “a gift”, so now I have a giant apple. We got home around 8:00, so I grabbed some chicken nuggets from MickeyDs and rented a bicycle before coming back here for the evening to go to bed, since we’ve got to leave for work again at 7:00am! Yikes!

Oh yes, and I also had my first experience with the squatter today. That was also interesting. I can’t figure out how to make it work without removing my pants completely. Suggestions are welcome.

A "squatter"

And just as a p.s., I was almost really impressed by Chinese airline service as we came back yesterday and the (non-English speaking) lady at the desk of our hotel started signaling to me to come over. She handed me a package, which I was kind of confused by since I wasn't expecting anything, but she insisted it was for me, and someone who speaks a little Chinese said that it was from the airline. I opened it and it was a knock off iPod shuffle without earphones or anything, but hey, a nice "we're sorry we lost your luggage gesture" I guessed. Well, this morning the same lady came knocking on our door and found the box in our room and took it back. Apparently it wasn't for me after all.

Getting ORIENTed

First of all, my bags finally made it, which has been a great relief since, as the airline still couldn’t locate even which airport the one which contained all of my clothing and toiletries was in as of Friday morning, I had pretty much given into the idea of having to buy and wear the Hello Kitty dresses they sell on the streets nearby to work for the first week.

Finally dressed in clothes I haven’t been wearing since Tuesday morning, and with deodorant and toothpaste again (which is wonderful seeing as how it’s about 90 degrees with oh, 99% humidity), we’ve spent the last couple of days being tourists and getting oriented with the area. We spent Friday learning where the nearest subway, banks, bike rental places, and subways were, and yesterday we took a bus around to see all the big sites like Tiananmen Square, Beihai Park, and the new Olympic Stadiums, which are AWESOME.

Group Shot at Tiananmen Square

Me n Mao :)

The New Olympic Stadium - "The Bird's Nest"

The most interesting part of the last couple of days has definitely been meal times. Since it’s been an orientation period, the program leaders have taken us out for traditional Chinese meals, which for me, of course, have been, uh, “stretching” experiences. Even with an open mind (or at least much more open than it is in the States), I’ve been able to eat about 1 out of every 6 dishes they bring to the table (meals are all family style with a giant lazy Susan in the middle with more food than anyone could possibly eat), and then I can get about another 45% of what I do want to eat into my mouth because my chopstick skills are rudimentary at best, though I’m improving quickly out of a need for survival! (I also found some plastic forks at a Starbucks we found last night which I stowed away in my purse for future emergencies).

My favorite part of traveling is always seeing the differences in how other countries go about the seemingly mundane details of everyday life. Things like the squatter style “toilets” and Coca-Cola labels in Chinese have kept me constantly amused. My favorite part of yesterday was definitely going necessity shopping for the first time. We had to pick up a few things like hangers and toilet paper (which is definitely not readily provided) in a grocery store located in the basement of a department store in which there is no discernable system of organization at all whatsoever- we FINALLY located the hairdryers next to the pocket knives and calculators after an extensive game of charades with a not so appreciative Chinese employee. Adventures of trying to discern what was what (little did you know that large jars of peanut oil look INCREDIBLY much like apple juice) in the grocery store were highly entertaining/scary as well.

We have today free before we have our first day of Chinese classes on Monday and first day of work Tuesday – both of which should be pretty interesting. Feel free to let me know what you’re up to too. Anything is English is comforting.

First Impressions

It's now 9:32 pm on Thursday, and I'm pretty exhausted. Haven't been in a bed since I woke up Tuesday morning in Austin, but it's been a pretty exciting trip. I did have 6 hours to burn in the LA airport yesterday evening (or I guess technically Tuesday evening - I'm so disoriented with time right now), but those passed fairly quickly between phone calls, randomly running into a friend from high school who was on his way to serve 2 years in the South Korean military, making faces at myself in the glass windows, walking laps around the terminal, playing a nice politically incorrect game of guess the destination of the plane at this gate based on the ethnicities of the people in the boarding area, and demolishing a half-can of BBQ Pringles. It was 3:45 am Texas time by the time I boarded the plane so I conked out for a good portion of the 14 hour trans-pacific flight to Hong Kong, then had to rush to the connecting flight in Beijing. An escort dude helped me get through security and all that quickly but unfortunately my bags apparently weren't quick enough as they didn't show up in Beijing when I did, which has been a little stressful, but we'll just do what we can.


The place I'm staying is pretty interesting. It's in the very central part of the city in the hutongs, which are basically the "old" part of Beijing. Walking around you see all the elderly Chinese men (with their shirts raised up so their bellies can get air - it's hot!) playing Majong and smoking and kids peeing on the streets and what not. Other than this internet access in my room, which is sweet, the hotel fits into the neighborhood pretty well. There is, for example, more than one dysfunctional toilet placed at various places in the hall on my floor, including right outside the elevator, but all in all, it should be pretty good. :). Tomorrow we have an orientation deal after which I will hopefully feel a little more oriented, and I'm super excited to start learning this language!!

The sweet view from our room - Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon much?



Street View of the Hutong


The Summer Style Here

One of the several random toilets in the hall in the hotel. This one welcomes you right when you exit the elevator. The first day there was half a watermelon in the bowl part.

I'm too tired to compose much more right now. Gonna go try and track down these suitcases so I can get a shower and go to bed. Hope y'all are great!