Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 47 - Saturday June 25th 2016 - Beijing, China

So it was an alarm morning for the two of us. It’s fair to say that there was a lot of excitement around today. Finally getting to see some of the buildings and historic monuments you had grown up with looking at in Encyclopaedias and photographic books but before that we needed to get through the bathroom and have some breakfast.

There was also the job of getting the washing sorted to be collected by an outside laundry company “Laundrytown” as they are called. The plan was to just leave it with the concierge of the hotel which sounds easy but was actually a little complicated. We seem to be in the one hotel where they don’t have one good English speaker so getting them to understand what we were trying to do proved a little difficult but we left our two bags full of dirty clothes with them to be collected in the hope that by Monday evening we would have them back and we would have enough pants and socks to see us through until the cruise on the Yangtze.

Our guide Randy was waiting for us down in the reception area of the hotel along with Mr. Pound outside in the Red Flag car. Our itinerary for the day was as follows, Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, The Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven so a lot to see so we knew they were all going to be quite whistle stop tours but hopefully we would see enough to feel like we had been there, understood more and could take those memories with us for the rest of our lives.

As we drove towards Tiananmen, once more facing the Beijing traffic you realise just how busy Beijing is. The population of Beijing alone is the same as the whole of Australia, so that’s like the space of the whole of Europe. Beijing has motorways seemingly everywhere. They cut through the city many of them suspended over and below each other all with cars bumper to bumper. You don’t see any old cars in Beijing either, apparently you are not allowed to bring them into the centre of the city. On top of the cars you have the bike lanes, full of silent but deadly (as you don’t hear them coming) electric scooters that weave in and out of everything. Traffic lights are on the whole ignored by the drivers and the pedestrian is definitely a second class citizen when it comes to crossing a road.

The Beijing skyline is made up of modern glass construction, some outstanding architecture mixed with 1960 style low rise office buildings and apartment complexes. The new is taking over the old and Beijing is just getting bigger and bigger, its already something like 120km across.

So back to Tiananmen Square our first stop of the day. It just so happened that the Russian President, Putin was in town so the square had both the Chinese and the Russian flags displayed prominently. You have to pass through x ray security to access the square and the Forbidden City but then with Chinas most important building all facing into the square this makes complete sense.

The square itself is the largest military square in the world, all grey and concrete and granite. To the centre of the square stands an obelisk dedicated to the peoples heroes, the revolutionaries that fought for Chinas so called freedom. On each side of the square stands Chinas elite buildings, those of national importance. These are the mausoleum of Mao ze Dong, to the sides you have the people’s parliament building (like a house of commons so to speak, but as our guide Randy told us its far from being for the people) and then you have the Beijing National Museum and then on the the last remaining side the famous gateway into the Forbidden city with the infamous painting of Mao ze Dong hanging above the gate.

It’s hard not to be here as a westerner and not think about the student rallies that took place here, the famous scene of a lone student standing in front of a tank standing up for their beliefs and for democracy. Those images shook the world.

Our guide told us that despite the media reports about twenty students were killed on that day, standing up for their beliefs. It was hard to take in as when you look around you in Beijing it does not feel like this massively oppressive state. The young all look like every other western teenager you have ever seen, everything seems available in abundance and apart form not being able to use google, twitter or facebook everything feels relatively normal.

The square itself is just that, a large open space for China to show its great military might in.

We left the square behind crossing the road by the underground subway and joined the swathes of people all trying to get into The Forbidden City or the Imperial Palace Complex as the Chinese now call it as you are no longer forbidden to enter.

The Forbidden city from the outside gate is like a fortress of wall, painted in a reddish orange colour of earthy tones, it’s only the roofs of some of the buildings that sit on top of this wall that make it not look like a jail of sorts.

The gates itself are huge, made of lacquered timbers with gold tipped nails like large round domes. These nails are all painted in gold as that is the colour of the Emperor and touching them is meant to bring good luck. The city is huge, really huge but to get to the actual palace complex you have to pass through three gates in total, each gate leading to an inner courtyard. To the sides of the courtyards are small houses, we would call it a covered colonnade but these were, and are for, the military personnel and the servants that would run the palace. For male servants to work in the actual palace they would have to go through severe pain (I would guess) and become unerichs.

The Chinese government have actually removed most of the antiques from each of the palace buildings so in a way they have been bleached of their luxurious past. You still see the highly decorative ceilings, all hand painted and the decorated columns but all the silks and the rugs and lacquered furniture that you associate China with have been removed.

We made it through the final gate and into the Palace complex itself. Using the work complex is important as there is no palace as such, it’s a series of rooms that all had a different use. There would be the meeting room, the secret meeting room, the bedroom, all of these being standalone buildings within the walls. The Emperor had 3000 wives but his first wife the empress was the most important and she had her own set of palaces as well. The only communal room they shared was the bedroom but he would also take his other wives (the concubines) to share this bedroom. This was one of the few buildings that you could still see with the beds and the furniture still in place. There were lots of silks and deep red carpets with dragons and animals featured heavily.

To the rear of the palace buildings was the emperor’s private gardens, apparently this was something he loved to do himself, plant trees and design this section of the garden, it is a truly beautiful space.

We left the Forbidden city behind, we still can’t decide if we were underwhelmed by it? It’s a magical place full of so much complex history but it’s been stripped back to the bone and with that maybe some of its beauty and character have left as well. We’re still glad that we went, it’s for filled another lifetimes ambition but because we wanted to go so much maybe that’s why it just missed the mark. Still I’m happy to say that we saw it and we have an opinion.

Our next stop on our tour for the day was actually lunch. Our guide Randy knew that we like spicy food (we had that conversation in the red flag car) so he went ahead and ordered for us. Our meal was in a hotel restaurant but it was obviously a hotel more for the Chinese rather than westerners. A four course meal came out, the soup, we couldn’t eat it, don’t actually know what it was but it has some kind of polenta floating in it and was really custard yellow, one sip and we moved on.

Luckily the two main courses were great, chicken with green peppers in a chilli sauce and shredded pork in a hot and sour sauce. This was a lot of food for this time in the day for us and we did our best. It was yummy but we left some, hope they were not offended. For dessert it was just some simple pieces of water melon, just what was needed to refresh the mouth after eating all that chilli.

So back in the car and into the mounting Beijing traffic we headed off to our next destination the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace can also be called the Dowagers Palace as that is who resided there and made it what it is today. It is the most preserved palace in the whole of Beijing. The dowager is the emperors mother and she is a very famous woman for being evil in Chinese legend, so much so that they call her the Dragon Lady. The actual living quarters of the palace are relatively small but it is the gardens that are absolutely outstanding here. Complete with a manmade lake that you could not see an end to the gardens are now a national park, the lake full of small pleasure craft. Along the lake there was an incredible Buddhist temple cut into the rock, towering over the tall trees of the garden. The lake had many islands that were linked by many bridges one of them with seventeen arches symbolising each of the emperor’s children by both the empress and his other 3000 concubine wives.

The summer palace is a real escape from Beijing; you certainly get to understand why Randy our guide said that this was his favourite place in the whole of Beijing. We walked around the lake, taking in the views, looked into some of the many pagoda style buildings and saw some examples of the furniture and living conditions of the royal family and the time of the fall of the emperor and the establishment of the so called peoples China.

It was time to move on again and our next stop was certainly not planned by us, it was one of those stops that always seems to happen when you book a guided tour, the ones where the guides get paid for bringing you, and today we were being bought to a Chinese tea shop.

Now we don’t drink tea so this was going to be difficult but we did as we were asked and walked up into the tea shop ready for the sales pitch.

To be honest it was actually quite interesting. They talked about how tea drinking is actually quite a ritualistic thing here in China and how the process of cleaning the pot is so important along with the right temperature hot water. We tried about five or six teas all in very small handle less pots. There was fruit tea, tea with ginseng and jasmine, rose tea and a tea that tasted very woody, all of them having different properties for health, wealth and whatever is up with the body.

The poor girl doing the demonstration must have thought these two guys are going to buy nothing, no commission for me but she was wrong! Trevor was seduced and we walked away with a box of fruit tea and two Chinese tea mugs (the handless type) that change pattern when you add the hot water (we got a panda and a great wall).

It was time for our last stop, the temple of heaven.

So if you drew a straight line across Beijing from the Forbidden City it would eventually lead you to The Temple of Heaven. It’s all to do with Feng Shui, the positioning of things and the temple needs to be in the north. This temple was only to be used by the emperor and he would visit here twice a year to wish the people a good harvest of food and to celebrate the solstice. Animals would be sacrificed inside and there is actually a mock-up of this inside the temple, rows of pretend baby calf’s!

We also learned about the different colour roof tiles (high shine glazed ceramic coatings on terracotta tile). The gold roof tile as seen in the forbidden city is for the emperor only, blue tile as seen at the temple of Heaven is to be nearer to god and heaven and the green tile is for trees and nature so depending on the setting of the building depends on the colour of the tile. The Temple of Heaven is unique to every other building we have seen so far in that it is circular. This has a meaning in that it is a whole, one piece, no joins for the prayers to escape or corners to hide in. It’s also one of the most decorative of all the temples that we have seen and again like the Summer Palace it is set inside a sizable park with views back to the newer Beijing. The park itself plays host as a meeting place of many elderly Chinese people and under the trees and the pagodas and covered walkways they would sit in group playing cards, this has apparently become a way of life for them and you will find them here every day.

By now it was late afternoon ant the temperature had reached 37 degrees so it was very very warm and muggy which really takes a toll on you when you are up and about being busy, trying to get around as much as you can. The traffic in Beijing really is slow and sometimes in can take over an hour to get to your next port of call so it makes for long tiring days and we were certainly feeling it.

Our tour for the day was at an end and it was time to return to the hotel. We had seen so much that was all a bit of a blur right now but I’m sure that it will all come back when we look over the hundreds of photographs we have taken in just one day here.

We crashed when we got back for a good hour. It was shoes off, sweaty t-shirts off and just do nothing. We were not feeling that hungry at all after our huge lunch and to be honest after two Chinese meals on the trot we were not really feeling yet another rice dish so we headed out into the pedestrianised area for something quick and simple.

Now please don’t judge us but we ended up in KFC ordering our meal by pointing at pictures of food as there was no English being spoken at all. It did the job but was hardly a taste sensation. We went for a quick walkabout after dinner, taking in more of the commercial areas but we were done for the day and in desperate need of some downtime.

Back at the hotel we just chilled, we opened the bottle of wine that the cruise beverage lady had given us for messing up our cruise account and sat back and watched videos, wrote some more blog (we are still not up to date) and set the alarm for the following morning.

Today has been a bit of an assault on the brain, trying to take in everything that you get to see in so little time but it is fair to say that Beijing has felt so different from what we imagined. We feel safe here, we have not encountered any animosity or felt uneasy in any situation.

The alarm was set for an even earlier day tomorrow as we go further afield away from Beijing, it’s going to be another busy one!