September 26 - China: Beijing
New Summer Palace
We met at 8:30 for a tour of the New Summer Palace with Grant, Ted and Ivy and guide named Lucy. Grant had arranged for the guide yesterday, but last night people began to back out of the trip one by one. I'm happy with this because I like the smaller tours.
We took the subway to the end of the line, and then caught taxis the rest of the way. The Summer Palace is a huge estate built around a large lake. It's very picturesque with weeping willows, arched bridges, and pagodas. But Lucy - cute as she was - was a bit hard to understand. So this is what we got as the gist of the palace: it was built for the Empresses Cixi who was particularly powerful and revered. One of the pagodas on a tall hill was built for her 70th birthday. Much of the Palace was destroyed by fire in the 1850s, but re-built again. There was something about her not baring a son but one of the concubines did, but I never quite got the relevance of it.
The palace is not a large one-building palace like we're used to seeing in Europe. Instead, it's a complex of halls, pagodas, and temples separated by gardens and water. There is a covered walkway along the side of the river that leads from the main halls to the ladies' halls. It is 700+ meters long and has 8000 paintings on the ceiling that are a variety of landscapes, deities, and people. It was beautiful to walk down.
We didn't have time to see then entire Palace (that would take all day), but we ended our tour at the Marble Boat. This is a large marble structure on the water that was designed to look just like a large paddle-wheel boat. Of course, it didn't move because it was marble and would sink. Here, the Empress hosted many dinners and parties. We didn't get to go in, of course, but it was lovely to look at.
Silk Market
We shared a taxi with Ted and Ivy to the silk market that Stanley recommended to us yesterday. It was just outside the Temple of Heaven and had four floors of different silk products. We bought some scarves and some pieces of material for Mom's quilt. (Sorry Mom, I know you said we should get cotton but we just can't resist!). Between myself, Jon, Ivy, and Ted we spent enough to get the "free gift" which were a pair of embroidered cotton hand towels. I gave them to Ivy because what in the world am I going to do with hand towels? We only have one bathroom and the towel rack holds bath towels. Besides, what good is only one hand towel? I think it would look rather silly without its mate.
Oriental Mall
The four of us took a taxi back to hotel, but we were hungry so we had the taxi drop us off at the Oriental Mall instead. This is a looooooonnnngg building built by a real estate mogul in Hong Kong. He wanted to build the "tallest building in China" but couldn't because of height limitations. So he instead built the "longest building in China", which really doesn't matter to us except that there's a mall in the basement which has a Schlotsky's deli. I've never been to Schlotsky's before, and may not even consider it a good deli by New York standards. But it was SO GOOD to us because we've been eating oily Chinese food for a month. I had the warm roast beef sandwich on sourdough and Jon had the turkey and ham on wheat. Delicious!
After lunch, Ted and Ivy went back to the hotel and Jon and I went to walk around the mall. He's looking for some hiking shoes to replace both his hiking boots and running shoes. But of course no place in China is going to have his size. Most store employees look at his feet and laugh. So we walked around some more and found the Dairy Queen where we enjoyed Blizzards. There was also an interesting photo exhibit in the middle of the mall with photos from different countries. Some of the pictures were extraordinary, but others looked like they were blow-up snapshots from someone's vacation. Either way, it was fun to look at.
Post Office Internet Cafe
The post office was handily right across the street from our hotel. Inside there was a very nice Internet Cafe with great terminals. So we went in to check email for a little while.
We've discovered that - somehow - a specific CD of random western music has been widely distributed around China. I don't know what the CD is, nor do I know why these particular song were put together into one compilation or how everyone has it. But I do know that we seem to hear it everywhere. The CD includes Lionel Richie "Say You, Say Me", Righteous Brothers "Unchained Melody", Bryan Adams "Everything I Do", among other songs. The first time was in Huangshan in the Internet Cafe where we spent many hours, and one of the kids sang along to Lionel Richie: "Say Me, Say Me". Jon swears the CD also has "Happy Birthday" on it because we seem to hear that everywhere we go too.
Anyway, the Post Office is no different. Although "Say You, Say Me" (or Say Me, Say Me) was sung by someone else. Who knows? Maybe some sort of government-approved music or something.
Mah Jong at the Irish Pub
The Post Office closed at 7:00, so Jon and I went to a pizza place around the corner for dinner. "The Pizza Factory" was apparently established in 1979 in America and has expanded to Beijing. On the walls around the little restaurant were framed photos of the other Pizza Factories: Colorado, Washington, Idaho, California. Pretty funny, but the meatball subs were definitely good. And the guy making pizzas definitely enjoyed his job - he was tossing pizza crusts up in the air with a huge grin on his face.
We'd arranged to meet Mel and Ken at the Irish Pub down the street at 8:30 so we went there afterwards. We ordered some beers and sat out on the little terrace watching people walk by. This pub was very nice, although very deserted as I suppose the Chinese don't have much interest in Irish Pubs. It's clearly here for the westerners. But the owners tried to make it as genuine as possible, and the Chinese waiters were even wearing kilts!!
Ken and Mel came with Grant (they had gone to Schlotsky's for dinner) and we broke out the Mah Jong set. The table we were at had slits in it, so it was a bit hard to "shuffle" the tiles but we made due. The waitress came to watch us play and eventually brought us a newspaper to put beneath the tiles. This made it much easier to shuffle.
We didn't stay out for too long as we have an early drive tomorrow morning, but we were there long enough to each have a drink and win a game or two.