Day 3 - Part IV Break Time!

Time to stop for a break.  

The Forbidden City in January is cold, and no matter what time of year you are there, it is huge!  So we stopped for a snack.  

Odd thing the 1st; all hot drinks are 20RMB ($3.25) or more.  Soda - about 4RMB ($0.70), talk about your cheap calories!  I thought maybe just the western drinks (coffee, "cappuccino" and the like...) nope, even the poor quality, but hot, Chinese tea was in the 20RMB range.  I think it may have something to do with the "luxury" of the fresh, hot drink.

Odd thing the 2nd; all the cafes and stores we went into were heated like crazy, yet incredibly drafty.  So inside you'd be caught in these conflicting breezes.

Odd thing the 3rd; the Forbidden City is HUGE!, and yet the bookstore employees had to take their lunch break (about 58 seconds long from what I saw), in the tiny bookstore, sitting at a table piled high with books.  (The table had shelves under the table top where they had to precariously prop their food)

Odd thing I didn't buy, because it wasn't worth carrying home - Mao's Little Red Book... IN RUSSIAN!!!  This is funny because other than starting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Russians had little time for the CCP, and looked down on them as a rule.  So these things must be fossils!  Incredibly cheap plastic cover and bad binding.  I wonder what happened to the Chinese when their Little Red Books wore out.  Were they issued new ones?  Was it a sign of their fervor?  Or was a disintegrating LRB a sign of disrespect to Mao?  All these questions...)

Odd thing the 4th; This bookstore had some of the oldest books I had ever seen for sale as "new."  For extra fun, all books that were from before the US & China were on good terms would have several languages (French, German, Arabic, Greek, Russian and some others) but no, or minimal English.  Newer books not in Chinese are primarily in English.

Odd thing the 5th; there were only a few shops to buy "Forbidden City Souvenirs," like this book shop.  They were all tiny, and yet every single one of them contained an inventory that was about half completely unrelated to the Forbidden City.  For example, this books shop had postcards of "Famous Porcelain in the Shanghai Museum," large books on the Great Wall (this is where I saw one of the Old Books sold as new) and on and on.  While I was in China, the China Daily printed a story about how there are over 1 million objects in the possession of the Palace Museum at the Forbidden City, I bet there were photographs of less than 300 of them in all the materials I could find in that book shop.  There were certainly more items than that on display.  It was just bizarre.

Amusing thing; all over the Forbidden City there were large signs in Chinese and English explained things.  They had at one time been sponsored by American Express. Apparently AmEx is bad odor, or something... because the "Provided by American Express" was sloppily painted over with a poorly matched brown paint.

Bonus odd thing 1: According to the AmEx signs just about everything was built in the same year.  While I am suspicious of that and think maybe this was just laziness on the part of a researcher, part of me also thinks that if you have access to tens of thousands of slave laborers I suppose this is possible.

Bonus odd thing 2: A few of the pavilions were noted for "burned down 3 times due to lightening started fires" or "burned down 5 times due to lightening started fires."  As a student of history I have read more than once that palace eunuchs would burn down a building if their looting had gotten to bad.  Really - ya' had 5 lightening started fires you couldn't put out - even with all those vats of fire fighting water in all those proudly displayed giant bronze caudrons?  Really?

After the suspicious drink pricing, the odd souvenir scheme, the weird heating regimen, and plenty of odd signs, when we stopped for lunch we were in for a nice surprise.  The restaurants in the Forbidden City had tasty, well balanced, reasonably priced food that came piping hot in large servings!  Well, at least they got that right.  Having been to too many zoos, aquariums, science centers and museums in the US where the badly take advantage of you by serving the saddest flabbiest, saltiest, driest, most suspicious food ever, at ludicrously high prices,  (Yes, Baltimore Aquarium, Washington DC Zoo, and Seattle Science Center, I'm looking at you!) this was a welcome surprise.  (Strangely tasty food at the very sad Beijing Zoo as well... but that's another story).

The highlight of wackiness of all the breaks we took - the 4 Star rated toilet.

Yes... I even took a picture of the sign.  Not of the facilities... they were just ehhh.

  I later learned I had my expectations set all out of whack for 2 reasons.  After further research, I came to believe 1 star anything in China must have a (damp?) dirt floor, no heating and and no plumbing.  And the Chinese HATE or FEAR (or both) the number 4 - (apparently the word for 4 is a homophone for terrible misfortune) - thus most star systems only register on an odd number scale.  (So regard with the proper amount of wariness the highly vaunted 7 star hotel near the Olympic site.)

Enough about break time, time to get back to the tour.

Vacation!

The China - Japan diaries are taking a break so I can finish getting over this dumb pneumonia.

A week in the sun!

Day 3 Part III - getting around in the Forbidden City.

Ah, yes doors.  Down the center of the Forbidden City is gate after gate after gate.  A huge psychological effect for someone coming in the front.  But the super-duper private garden and home area of the emperor is just 1 wall (a thick high one sure) away from the outside.  In the past there was supposedly a defense of some sort out there, but compared to the front, getting out the back was a simple matter.

But along the sides, and beyond the grand, ridiculous, pavilions of the Forbidden City is a gated chess board.  

The area where the "royalty" of different degrees resided or did stuff is a claustrophobic's nightmare.  Typically a person (a concubine, a nephew etc.) would be assigned on of these minor pavilions.  They would have the building - typically a main room and some smaller rooms - these also suffered from the "one board of pierced wood" thick issue.  So if you weren't invited to travel to the Winter Palace - where things were warmer - you got to spend a huge amount of time figuring out how to stay warm.  (Warm baths were not an option... the Chinese have never really taken to immersing the body in water - and even today, hot water plumbing into houses is limited...see a later entry).

Say you were a 74th or 75th concubine, or royal but distant nephew, someone destined never to spend time with the Emperor, except at the largest festivals or events.  Outside your smallish pavilion would be a courtyard, and the pavilion and courtyard are encased in a square wall about 4 meters high (maybe even more, 15 ft?) anyway the walls tower over head, and there is no likelihood of seeing over without a serious ladder.  One may exit the courtyard through solid doors (when closed they as much a wall as anything else). into a "hallway."  This is a corridor, open to the sky, also surrounded by the same high walls.  And there are the same solid doors at either end.  At each of these doors you enter into another "hallway."

Each courtyard exits onto its own horizontal (East-West) hallway.  These all in turn connected to vertical (North-South) hallways that connect a series of the horizontal hallways.  So you feel like a chess piece trapped in this walled grid - each square, encased in walls and bordered by hallways with doors at the end of each horizontal line segment.  And not all of the doors were marked with characters, so even if you do read Chinese, you might have to resort to counting your way about.

And then there are the spirit steps.  Every singe door also has board at the base 4" to 12" high (depends on many things...) you must step over.  So to simply go from your pavilion to a friend's pavilion even one square over, you have to step over your step to get out of your pavilion (1), the one for your courtyard gate (2), the one at the end of your hallway (3), walk along a vertical hallway past the right number of  doors, another to enter the correct horizontal hallway (4), one for your friend's courtyard door, (5) and then, at last the one into your friend's pavilion (6).  Phew.  These spirit steps are there on the belief that bad ghosts and spirits float along right at ground level, so the step will block the spirit from getting in.  It is also believed that these spirits cannot cross water, and can only travel along a single line, so many temples, tea-houses, and other special spaces will have a bridge with several right angle turns over a pond, leading to an entrance with a spirit step (and some may even have a screen beyond the spirit step as a last blocking maneuver.  A spirit would get stopped by the screen, while humans can walk around it.)

If you ask me, all those doors and spirit steps most likely did at least as good a job keeping things trapped inside the palace to haunt a particular space, as they ever did keeping things out.

And then, 6 steps means 6 doors (at the absolute minimum).  And at many doors in the palace there would have been a "door opener,"  an actual position assigned to palace eunuchs.  So a visiting dignitary - and for all I know, palace residents as well - would move through the palace having to tip eunuchs 1 door way at a time.

If this was the everyday physical bureaucracy that reigned inside the palace, and still remains for anyone to see, no wonder the system imploded.  I can only boggle at all ceremonial and mental impediments that were in place along side these physical impediments.  And no wonder the Chinese felt as if Westerners just crashed around with no regard for the civilized way of doing things!

Day 3 Cont. Part II - Enter the Forbidden City!

  

We walked under the Meridian Gate (that's the gate with the Big Picture of Mao - where he used to give speeches... like the Emperors did too.), 

and into a courtyard much like any courtyard in front of a big tourist attraction.  It was full of ticky-tacky souvenirs only vaguely related to where we were.  Army hats, wind-up elbow crawling army foot soldiers, staring down a rifle, and other shiny-spinny stuff.  All the military stuff I had seen up 'til now (of the toy variety - not so much the real stuff) left me scratching my head as I would return to the hotel, and watch filtered BBC showing Hu Jintao saying that China has no interest in Military Hegemony.

(Special Note - while BBC was reporting the massive Mafia Bust, on CNN, Ricky Gervais was joking around with that guy who replaced Larry King.  That's CNN?)

One decidedly odd part about the ticky-tacky souvenirs was they are government sanctioned ticky-tacky souvenirs.  Somewhere, someone, on a committee at some time said, "Yes, these guys can sell this stuff in front of the Palace of our deposed Emperors."  Because there was 1 medium sized stall of this, not the chock-a-block one finds outside the Puyallup Fair or somewhere similar.  And as I was to learn later, most enterprises pay a portion of profits off the top to the government as a privilege of being able to do business.  Sort of like taxes, but it seems more in the way of a protection racket.  Especially since this change from all enterprises being run by the state, and now switching to things being run by individuals.  Sort of like the government realizes, individuals will do a better job, but they still want a hand in the cookie jar.  It just seems schizophrenic to me - and more and more so the longer I was there.

After we passed the gambit of noisy-flashy stuff we saw our way to the ticket office.  We 'New York Walked' our way through the "need-a-tour-guide-need-a-tour-guide" phalanx, and at last made it through the next gate that lets you in to the real inside of the Forbidden City.

The audacity of the place struck me as I came out into the plaza.  It was a bit like walking out onto the deck of an air craft carrier - that same human audacity to build something so huge - to hold it in a human mind.

Another thing began to weigh in on me as we walked through gate after gate, and saw pavilion after pavilion.  This palace has very little inside.  Yes, the pavilions have a roof and four walls, doors that open and close, but the walls are just one board thick, and are often pierced with designs - more screens to let light and air in rather than capable of keeping anything out.  The dress of the Chinese Emperors appeared to make a whole different sort of sense, as did the references to dogs kept in sleeves and on laps, and surrounding oneself with braziers (small charcoal burners) and wearing 4 or 8 or more... layers of robes.  I was wearing lots of clothing - and moving around, and I was freezing.  Pity the official who must sit still.  And wait.

a line of braziers in front of one of many thrones

I also began to get the feeling that visiting the "Palace Museum"  as it was called must be a soul-rending experience for many a museum curator.  The few artifacts that were in cases were housed more or less as one would usually see.  With a few oddities.  The sticky tack museums use to hold down items to prevent earth quake damage is usually clear - if you see it all.  Here - plenty of neon orange, and flashy turquoise were much in evidence.  While one area might be nicely laid out (like the wedding paraphernalia of the last Emperor of China), there would be weighty jade statues placed any ol' way (but tied down with fishing wire for earthquake safety), with paper scraps of their 17th century labels hanging off like pitiful ragged paper ribbons.

Or a fantastic jade carving all of one piece - with working sliding doors (well at one time), but carved as part of the piece - and translucent, but one of the sliding doors had been broken - and just left hanging crazily.  What was going in in this place?  

        The quilts at the doorways to hold in heat were an interesting touch.  Literally, large, heavy, thick, slightly over-door-sized quilts were hung over each set of double door sized opening.  And you pushed the quilt aside to enter any warmed or "temperature controlled" room.  (Heck - it could have been 50F degrees in these rooms, it just felt so much warmer than 18F.)  The "Spirit Step" did make sealing in heat with these 'door-quilts' easier, as there was substantial bottom edge to the door as well.  

Next time - The weirdnesses of the doors, halls, and getting really lost really easily.

Day 3 Part I - Using the Beijing Subway

Having seen the Big Breakfast Spread, the family decided we didn't quite need SO much food every day.  So we retreated to the hotel coffee shop the next morning.  They apparently use the same bakery, so the donuts, muffins and other pastries were just as unbelievably delicious as the ones at the buffet.  The coffee drinks were well made, and I heard no complaints from the hot chocolate drinkers.

Of interest - at the entrance to this coffee shop (and in other prominent spots in other Wester Style hotels, I would discover later) was a display where one could buy honey from "The Farmers of GuanBa."

In glass jars no less.

If you can think of something (in 10 seconds or less)  you would less rather pack in your luggage to take home as a souvenir, I dare you.  A glass jar or honey.  Really.

Anyway, we picked up Lonely Planet and headed for the Beijing Subway.  For those of you who haven't been to Beijing since before the Olympics... yes Beijing has a subway, and unlike so many other things we saw in Beijing, this appears to be robustly built and is happily and constantly used by locals on a daily basis.  In fact, during the few times Tavin and I used it during "rush hour" times, there was NO personal space, and much strap hanging was on.  Several Chinese we talked to were somewhere between pleased and surprised that Tavin and I used the Subway daily and liked it so much.  Sure there are still parts of Beijing that are hard to get to one the Subway, but it made getting around, overall, a breeze.

Side note about the Subway - it is definitely a manifestation of the weird control-freaky nature of the Chinese Government that would pop up now and again.  While you can buy a reloadable pass, it appears  one needs to speak or read more Chinese than NONE.  Most Beijingers are still learning the system so no one looked at me strangely as I squinted over the screen.  In fact, as I gained confidence, people would watch me.  Anyway, there was usually someone at a booth selling tickets - this is good because the machines have a spotty service record.

And this is where it gets odd.  Tickets are 2 RMB.  Machines only accept 10RMB bills and higher, and 80 out of 100 did not give change.  And you cannot purchase extra tickets... well you can, but tickets you buy are only good at the station where you buy them, and within 2 hours of purchase.  The ticket machines will accept the 1 RMB coins.  But if I handled more than 6 of those in my entire time in China, I'll eat a shoe.  

One time I was at a station where no one was at a window, and only 3 out of 8 machines were working, it was like the inside of a chicken coop.  You HAD to buy at least 5 tickets.  Everyone in Beijing has a pile of 1 RMB bills, but the machines only accept 10 RMB bills. (or 1 RMB coins).  I didn't have any coins - and neither did the Beijingers.

The upshot is, I bought the 5 tickets - and learned about the "that station only - within 2 hours of purchase limitation" and so ended up with 2 good tickets, and 3 souvenirs.  

This is what a subway ticket looks like.

If I had ever run into that situation again, I could have bought the 5 tickets, and sold the other 3 to people for small RMB bills.  But, alas, never had the chance.  And one wonders what the police/army presence would have made of that?

So we made it onto the subway, and headed for the Forbidden City and Tienanmen Square.  They are right across from each other - and have 2 stops.

Yes - you walk out of the subway stop into a post card of a visit to China.

Here is one of the guards.

Here is our version of the postcard!

Welcome to China - Yes, it is bloody Cold!

And then we went into the Forbidden City.  Visiting in January, I learned more about WHY the Chinese Emperors dressed the way they did than I ever would have at any other time of the year.

Day 2 - Part VI Ice Bumper Cars are Cooler than Ice Skates

The BEST Ice Activity Ever!

After the ALMOST of the frozen swimming pool, we just had to push on a little bit farther.  So we moved around the bend, and a few steps further on, until we saw this: 

As we closed in, we saw that it was not ice skating either.  It was better.  Ice bumper cars. 

We went to the window, and paid for two cars.  Since there was nothing going on, noone questioned my decision to give a little kid his own car.  And I had the money, which is about all one really needs as a reason in China - for certain classes of things.  There was a freshly cleaned fish in a plastic bag that hung from a branch by the ticket window that looked remarkably similar to the fish we saw frozen in the ice.  Which is when it dawned on me what the piles of ice chunks here and there around this ornamental lake. 

  People ice fish here - in clear defiance of the signs.  My gut told me it was most likely the employees before or after hours - or on closed days.  And they saw it as a perk for working there.  The "No Ice Fishing" signs apply to outsiders.

That mystery solved in my noggin, we hit the ice!

Darn it! Can't get the video to upload.  Go see it on Facebook.

  There were also ice bikes and ice desk chairs for rent.  The ice desk chairs where a bit blood curdling as one pushes oneself around using what looked like a large slot-head screwdriver blade welded to a metal pole.  One for each hand.  You use these to push yourself along like a skier stranded on flat ground.  It didn't seem too bad in these deserted conditions, but I can't help wonder what goes on with the crowds during the madness of Spring Festival (Chinese/Lunar New Year).  The ice bike was a pretty standard cruiser bike with the wheel touching the ice in back for forward momentum and some blades in front for steering.  A frame was also in place to keep you upright pretty much, no-matter-what.  There was an older man riding around and around on a yellow one of these as we capered about in our ice bumper cars.  And he kept staring at us like we were a particularly lively zoo exhibit.  I'm pretty certain that classification fit.

Well, after all that, there was little to do but walk all the way home.  We had passed a large, shiny new mall full of prestige brands (Solana Mall for those in the know), and it occurred to me this place might have a western-ish grocery store.  

Bingo!  So we stopped in and stocked up on liquids, cough drops (man that air was dry!) and a few wacky treats on the comfy side of familliar just for fun (cucumber flavored Lay's potato chips - they were potato chip color.  And seaweed flavored Pringle's - green of course).  On our way out, I did spy something odd from home.  

And what the busy home cook needs when in search of that last minute New Years treat, 

 500g of Peking duck in a stay-fresh foil pouch, for just 19.90 RMB.

We arrived back at the room and collapsed.  What a day.  Alec blew in from Singapore just about frozen to death (he'd just come from the equator after all).  We talked a little about the day, but since we'd all been up really early, dinner needed to happen soon.

We went to the Chinese fish restaurant in the hotel and were served a delicious dinner of an appetizer, steamed fish and vegetables.  As we were blundering about the menu, our waitress informed us that with one set of choices, 

"Oh, that will be too much!"  

Sort of the opposite of, 

"Super-size me!" 

Or, 

"do you want fries with that?"  

And this would continue to happen our whole time in China.

As you can see, Tavin is a big fan of fish steamed with soy sauce... all the way down to the fin tips.

(Won't touch caramel, or whipped cream.  Blessings as they come, I s'pose....)

Tavin was so tired he just about fell out of his chair.  So I took him up to the room where he put himself to bed while Alec and I chatted about more about our mutual adventures.

And then it was bed time for us too.

Day 2 - Part V Let the Fun begin.

Closing in on the Ice... yet distracted on the way.

Suddenly we saw a giant lady bug.

  

As we got closer we saw it had a door for a mouth, it was a building of some sort.  And as the signs had been promising the "Amusement Area" we figured this made sense.  Then the green sign with an arrow, that said "Toilet."  

Yes, the enormous ladybugs are the public bathrooms (strictly BYO-TP affairs - and only the Handicap stall contains a "throne."  All the rest require one to recall skills of the backpacker.  Even, my son informs me, on the boys side.)

And there are other ways the park is kept clean.  The translation - SO close.  And yet...

Next we began to spot the feral cats.  OK, semi-feral cats.

  

The park appears to leave food out for them.  Ya' know how all zoos seem to have squirrels.  This park has cats in the same way.  Except they aren't always perching on garbage cans.  But they were doing all the rest of the stuff; darting in and out of bushes, lurking on the edges of paths peering at you, scrambling up buildings.  And cats, unlike squirrels, bask in the sun.   

Many of the usual suspects for a "Fun Fair" for the kiddies were there, the silly little trains, like this one with the "Monkey King" theme.  

There were roller coasters of increasing thrill, and those semi-parabolic boat-rides, 

or as I like to call them, barf-o-matics.  

There was even a vaguely disturbing pirate-themed "go-round" of sorts,

where you sit in tea-cup shaped things, and shoot water cannons at manically happy, candy colored, cartoon proportioned animals in pirate get-ups.  OK, swords and spears I'm down with, the pirate theme and all.  I'm even willing to give into nun-chuks, they're Chinese cartoon pirates after all.  But the cheerfully grinning, purple elephant holding a thoroughly modern pistol, 

aiming it at the kids who need to be "Under 1.2m" 

was rather bizzarro, in a sinister way, to me.  

In the middle of it all was an enormous round building covered with brightly colored hexagons.  

Not until we made it around to the front could we at last figure out what it was.  It was a baby play space.  With a clear purpose.

Super-socialized Super-babies!

There was a lego store 

so your kids can whine at you, and plenty of space to fly kites.  But at last we made it to the prize, almost. 

A frozen swimming pool did tell us we were on the right track.  But this was just a place to rent little wooden boats and push yourself about on the frozen surface.  And a little midway - again, so the kiddies can whine while you say, "no."

 Tomorrow.... At last, the ice we have been searching for!