China?

Today we arrived in Beijing – touchdown at 9:30AM, see the life-sized Olympic mascots at 9:40 and are at the baggage carousel by 9:45. All is going smoothly, well that is until my bag never shows up. Ulises and I both checked our bags onto our Air Berlin flight, thinking it would make traveling easier and given that it was direct, what are the chances that the bags would get lost, we’ve check them at least 10 times before now with no problems.

Of course this logic train was quickly derailed by the actuality that the airline lost my bag, it never made it on the flight, and (as I would find out in a day) had in fact been sent to Algeria. An hour of sitting in the lost luggage office, talking to people in broken English, and running through what was lost in my head resulted in a swift nervous breakdown outside of the office and a torrent of tears – which really have just now started to transition into righteous vengeful anger directed at Air Berlin.

The day must go on, so we hopped into a cab after the cabbie had a 10 minute conversation with the lady at our hotel to try and figure out where the heck the Super 8 in the technology redevelopment area was (I can tell you it was in the 5th ring of the city, which means “the middle of no where”). About 45 minutes later we were at our hotel, trying to check in and finding out exactly how difficult it is to communicate when the only means of doing so is numbers and pointing.

Ulises and I have not yet been to a country where we could not get the gist of the written language. Even in Greece the majority of letters are Romanized – however in China, I have no idea how to read that the little upside down y symbol with an squiggly mark to the right and a pointy hat on top means pork. It was like immediately being rendered illiterate and in mute – except for two words – Thank you and Hello.

We got into hour hotel room after we finally figured out that the extra 300Yuan we were being charged was for a key deposit (apparently these are still done in places), and we decided that with only three days here, we had best set out to see the city. So with some English language instructions that the manager had written up, we had a taxi drop us off at the bus stop, got on the 723 bus to Qianmen, and an hour later us and 10,000 of our closest friends were standing in Tiananmen square in front of that famous picture of Chairman Mao. We walked around the square, looking at all of the floral displays that had been created for the Olympics, and people watching as everyone chugged water in the 100% humidity and 90+degree heat.

The thing that became obvious quite quickly is that everyone else seemed to be people watching us back, and not just watching, but also staring really. I shrugged this off as a figment of my lost luggaged, overheated, and illiterate mind, and continued to walk towards the Forbidden City.

Now Beijing is huge – not just huge, but huger than huge. It is somewhere around 17Million people, with an extra million or so added on for the Olympics. There is barely space to walk, but people find places to sit, socialize, and come to sudden stops, wherever they can. It’s worse than walking through a crowded shopping mall at Christmas with an army of moms pushing strollers into your Achilles tendons, while speaking in a language you don’t understand and talking on their cell phones at the same time.

So, we are walking wedged between the masses of humanity, which are all forced to cross the streets underground for security purposes. This also means that each crossing has a security checkpoint where your bag will be scanned and you must sip your bottled drink to prove it isn’t harmful. While very official looking, the checkpoints are not walked through by everyone, so I’m not entirely sure what they are supposed to do. We finally make it across the street (really this took like 20 minutes) to get to the Forbidden City, only to find that when we reached the gates, the Forbidden City had been closed for the evening. So we got to see the parks and three sets of gates that lead up to the city walls – but didn’t get a glimpse inside.

To swallow some of our disappointment, we decide to try and be productive by purchasing our train tickets out of Beijing. There are 4 types of tickets that you can buy on the trains here:

-Soft Sleeper (4 cots to a private cabin with a door that locks)
-Hard Sleeper (6 cots to a cabin, which is open door)
-Seats (regular old assigned seat)
-Standing (yup, this is exactly what it sounds like)

So we were trying to get tickets in a soft sleeper for the overnight train to Pingyao, the next city on our itinerary. By the time we got to the front of the “English Speaking Agent” line only to find out that she didn’t speak English, we discovered that there were no more sleepers at all to Pingyao, only seats. Not knowing what else to do, we booked seats and crossed our fingers that the 10 hour ride wouldn’t be that bad.

Seeing as we hadn’t eaten all day, we were exhausted and famished and dug into a very foreign delicacy that they call KFC…at least we know they don’t serve pork here…I think. For a bit of a laugh, check out this Daily Show clip, which sums up our KFC experience quite well. Thank you Colonel.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=179212&title=chasing-the-dragon-mysterious