Last weekend (oh dear, was it 2 weekends ago now? It was March 11th...) I went to Beijing with 2 of my friends partly to see the (in)famous sights of Beijing and partly to see one of my best friends from middle/high school, Grace! My friends Vince and Lahela took a midnight sleeper train with me out of Nanjing on Thursday night and we slept until the morning. We finally arrived in Beijing at 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday. Luckily our hostel was right across the street from the train station, so we settled into our room and I immediately left for Tiananmen Square (They really should just translate the pinyin into English, it means Gate of Heavenly Peace).
Anyway, I finally arrived at Tiananmen and called Grace on her handy dandy Chinese cell phone. I was next to the portrait of Mao, but unfortunately she was across this huge highway that separates Tiananmen from the big portrait. So I went through this underground tunnel only to be met by a long line of people waiting to go through some sort of random security check. Also they only had one female security guard and they were only allowing her to check all the women so it was going rather slowly. So I finally arrived on the other side of the street and saw Grace's golden locks of hair across the square (and her red Commie jacket). So I ran as fast as I could towards her and then gave her the biggest hug of my life. It was great to see someone familiar from home! I don't really remember but I may or may not have jumped on her and/or started crying...
After that we went to eat Beijing Roast Duck at this super fancy restaurant (literally the nicest restaurant I have ever stepped foot into on the continent of Asia). They took us into this room with two tables, one of the tables was HUGE, enough to seat about twenty people and the other table was smaller, enough to seat about ten people. So Grace and I sat down at the big table with her and her classmates. Then, after some sort of confusing game of musical chairs of sorts, Grace and I found ourselves at the adult table, aka the table for all the teachers and Penn State graduates now living in China. So we were like "um ok" and continued to make awkward conversation with the adults. I seriously felt like a kid at the adult table on Thanksgiving or something. Haha, it was really fun and the food was delicious!
After that, Grace went back to her hotel and I met up with Vince and Lahela and headed off to find Grace's hotel at People's University. We got off at the university's subway station and attempted to find the address that Grace's TA had given me earlier. After walking for a good 45 minutes, we decided to get a cab and flagged one over. Shortly after getting in the cab, Vince says: "Sarah, this isn't a cab. This is just a guy driving a car around illegally. He doesn't have a meter." So we were like, "Alright, let's just give him the address and hope for the best."
Right after I gave him the address, he got on his cell phone and called someone asking where the hotel was. Still completely normal, nothing unusual. But then I realized that his breath smelled like alcohol and Vince and Lahela (in the back seat) were like "Um this is really sketchy slash creepy." So after about 5 minutes of him randomly driving around and asking his friend for directions, I told him "Ok you need to stop the car right now, we didn't know that this wasn't a cab, we are uncomfortable, you don't know where this place is, and you don't have a meter." Thank God he pulled over and let us out of his car without asking us for a cent.
Feeling defeated, we called Grace, but we weren't able to get clear directions so we kept looking for the address. Finally a university student noticed that we were lost and offered to help. He talked to Grace on the phone and he realized that we were on the opposite side of campus from Grace. So this Chinese guy, who didn't even know us, walked with us all the way across campus (a good 15-20 minute walk) until we finally found Grace. Props to China for having the nicest people in the world. We invited him to come out with us, but he declined. Our group got in two cabs and headed to a bar that Grace's TA had told us about.
Grace and I got in a cab and my friends got in another. We were only able to show the cab driver the address and since Grace and I had both never been there before, we didn't really know where we were going. So the cab driver dropped us off on this street and Grace and I got out and walked around looking for this bar for which the only directions we had were "Follow the hipsters." Finally we decided to get another cab, but this cab driver didn't know the bar either. Finally, after much trial and tribulation, we found the bar, a small place called D22. After arriving, we settled in, eating sweet popcorn and waiting for some show to start that Grace's friend had heard about, and had come to interview the performer about life in China. Finally the main act came on: it was a Dutch guy dressed up as Zombie Elvis. He was a one-man band and was very talented. It was really crowded by the stage, so we went upstairs in the loft and watched from above. Probably the weirdest music I have ever heard in my life, not going to lie about that. But it was entertaining and certainly an experience. Vince absolutely LOVED it and was beaming when we left the bar, and wouldn't stop talking about how great it was. To each his own, I guess. Some white guy by the stage was drunk/high on something was trying to make a most pit by pushing everyone around and caused a huge scene. Minus 1 for us foreigners...
The next day Lahela and I woke up early and headed off to go to the Great Wall. When we arrived at 10:33 am, we found out that the last bus to the Great Wall left at 10:30 am and that we would have to come back tomorrow. Minus 1 for our Lonely Planet Guide that told us the last bus leaves at 5:00 pm. (Vince swears that the Lonely Planet Guides are a work of evil and burned his when he was traveling over winter break in Hainan. To be fair, their section on Nanjing is HORRIBLE). I digress.... So Lahela and I met up with Vince after his disastrous run-in at the train station. He was buying us train tickets, but was having numerous troubles and had to wait in line 3 different times. In the end, he accidentally bought first class tickets (because they only told him the fastest trains and the fastest trains only have soft seats). If you have ever bought train tickets in China, it is seriously the most stressful experience of your life. I myself had accidentally bought tickets for the slowest train on the way from Nanjing to Beijing. There are seemingly thousands of Chinese people pushing on your back and hurrying you, not only that, but the train clerks are behind a glass screen and it is hard to understand them. Anyway, so we met up with Vince and he was embarrassed about his mistake (because the tickets ended up being really expensive) so he wouldn't show us the tickets (because the tickets have the price on them). This is important for a later part in my story.
So we decided to go to the Summer Palace together, which is a huge complex of ancient quarters from past emperors, and one of the most famous is the summer vacation home of the only female emperor, Emperor Wu Zetian. It was absolutely beautiful and unfortunately my pictures didn't really capture the beauty, but instead captured the smog. After that we went to Wangfujin Snack Street and I ate a scorpion! Lahela ate a starfish and Vince ate some other crazy sea creature but I forget which one. After that we went to try to meet up with Grace, but her and her friends' cell phones ran out of money and after a series of unfortunate events, including Lahela getting sick and throwing up her starfish, we were not able to meet up with Grace that night. The next day, Lahela and I set off to see the Great Wall only to discover that it was snowing... snowing a lot! Lahela, who is from Hawaii, said that it was the first time she had seen so much snow (after all, the first time she had seen falling snow was only a few days earlier in Nanjing).
When we got to the bus stop, it turned out that the buses to the Great Wall weren't running because of the snow! So we ended up having to get a "small car" as they call it (a private car, basically) to take us to Badaling, the town closest to Beijing (about 2 hours away) where a part of the Great Wall is. We shared the car with a Taiwanese couple. When we finally got to Badaling, there was at least 6 inches of snow on the ground and still falling steadily. Lahela and I definitely didn't have the right shoes to be climbing great walls in the snow. It was freezing! We finally made it to the top of one of the points and we went as far as we could go considering the snow situation. We took the obligatory pictures and then made our way slowly down the icy, slippery and snow steps. Definitely was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but luckily we were in China so that wasn't a problem.
We had to wait around for the Taiwanese couple, and finally we headed back to Beijing. The driver and the Taiwanese couple were talking about Chinese history, particularly about the Ming Dynasty-- I swear the driver didn't stop talking the entire way back. So they were talking history and so apparently the couple expressed a lot of interest in this particular topic because we stopped at not one, but four historical spots on the way back. One was some sort of "fake" forbidden city gate, one was the "fake" Ming Tombs (the real tombs are in Nanjing), one was the residence of the first Ming Dynasty's grandchildren and some other souvenier shop. Lahela and I wouldn't have cared except that our shoes were soaking wet and we were absolutely freezing. We kept telling him that we wanted to get back to Beijing, but also didn't want to be impolite. After all, the Taiwanese couple were into it 100%. Finally we told him that we had to get back to Beijing because our train was going to leave soon (it was a little bit of a lie, I'll admit). Luckily they didn't speak English so we could complain all we wanted, mostly "This is the car ride from HELL!!!!!"
After that we met up with Vince at Silk Street, which is basically just a huge marketplace with a bunch of foreigners trying to bargain for cheap stuff. I got a pair of jeans and Lahela got a skirt and a dress. After that we made our way back to our hostel and did homework until 9:00 pm (we were on a 9:45 pm train). We arrived at the train station at 9:15 pm and were confused because we didn't see our train on the board that announces the platforms for the trains. We went to the service desk and asked and they were like "UUMMMM your train doesn't depart from this station, you need to go to the South Train Station!" So we ran outside, grabbed a cab, told him to hurry up, he responded by telling us that it was unsafe to drive fast, proceeded to speed to the South Train Station, and arrived only but 2 minutes after our train left. Thank God that at least we were able to exchange our tickets for free tickets for the next day... But we would be stuck in Beijing for another day, had to pay for another night at the hostel, and miss a whole day of classes (we would have to miss 4 hours of class and we're only allowed to miss 6 hours of class the entire semester). Needless to say, we were pretty much freaking out about what we were going to do. Vince felt terrible and kept saying how it was his fault, but it really could have happened to anyone.
It was kind of ironic because over winter break my friends and I experienced somewhat similar mistakes regarding plane tickets. Namely that some of us had let other people buy our tickets, thus resulting in similar "f*** ups" and sleep-in-the-airport experiences. I promised myself that I would never let someone else buy the tickets for me, and here I was standing in a train station because I had let someone else buy my tickets for me and had not insisted on being a control freak about it (read: I didn't insist on checking the tickets myself-- it said on the tickets it was from the Beijing South Station, but Vince didn't see it.
Anyway, we got ourselves together, went back to the hostel (thank god they had a room open for us) and went and ate McDonald's (comfort food). It actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because the next day I had time to go the Forbidden City, which I would not have been able to do otherwise because it was closed that weekend. In case you are wondering, the Forbidden City really is a city-- it's HUGE!! We pretty much did homework for the rest of the day (we had to make up the work we missed in class). On Monday night, we made sure we were at the train station (the south one this time) an hour ahead of time. On Tuesday morning at 5:30 am we arrived in Nanjing. We had to wait a half an hour for the subway to open at 6:00 am, got back to campus, went to class at 8:00 am and did the rest of the things we had to do that day smelly (we hadn't been able to shower because we all live in a homestay) and tired. Finally I made it back to my home, tired but happy, and showered for a long time....
No comments:
Post a Comment