Danny's Long Walk

The Saturday after our 4th of July, the program’s planned trip was to the Summer Palace, a beautiful park on the outside of the city proper. Having been there that week already with my friend Bill (visiting from the US), I decided to take the opportunity venture out on my own, and started out from my dorm walking southeast, in the vague direction of the center of Beijing, with nothing but my iPod, a map, and a bottle of iced tea as my companions.

I set out thinking that my first destination would be Tiananmen square, and I might take the bus from there to another site, but I quickly decided that walking was going to be my only method of transportation that day. Walking along Fuxingmen Dajie, the street that the subway runs parallel to, might be slower, but it made for a much more interesting trip in several ways.

First, seeing the buildings, museums, and monuments along the way put a face to the names that cover subway maps and populate guidebooks. Seeing how they’re laid out, too, gives you a feel for how the streets and buildings of Beijing are organized, and how one district differs from another. You also notice some things that aren’t printed in guidebooks, such as how the biggest buildings along Fuxingmen aren’t banks or government buildings, but chemical companies like Cosco and Sinochem.

Second, walking also provides you with access to places that aren’t as frequently visited by tourists. A handy barometer of this is how many strange looks you get from the locals (although I guess that could also just be me). You also get to see plenty of entertaining non-landmark constructions, such as this bridge covered in physics equations (which I think was part of a series, as it was followed by one with a musical score). [picture missing]

Finally, walking is especially valuable because it lets you travel without knowing where you’re going. After reaching Tiananmen square about three hours after I started, I meandered South, then further East, passing through closed-down shopping districts, collapsed houses in Hutongs, the Beijing train station, and what appeared to be a large gated forest. At one point, I ventured down a dirt road with a large crowd of people, thinking I might find a market or something else of interest. After walking for about 10 minutes, the crowd dispersed, and I found myself surrounded by China Post trucks and bins of packages – as far as I could determine, I was in the middle of a postage sorting facility, and the crowd of people had been non-uniformed postal employees returning to work. I walked back out the way I came (noting a security checkpoint with an evidently lazy guard that I hadn’t seen on the way in), and headed out to the Chaoyang business district (of the CCTV building and China World Trade Center fame). By the end of the day, I had wandered for about 8 hours from the West Third Ring Road (my dorm) to the East Fourth Ring Road (past Chaoyang). At that point, I gave in to my blistered right foot and took a cab back to the dorm where I immediately fell asleep, even more tired than after the previous night’s escape from the flooded subway.

Independence Day in China

Given today’s date and the topic of this post, it’s pretty obvious that I have been delinquent in posting. For those of you following along at home, I’m sorry – I’ll try to make it up by a series of posts in the next few days about all of the antics that have kept me out of the tea bar and its lovely, almost-consistent internet access. Unfortunately, most of these posts will probably be picture-free - I've written them all and already delayed posting for a few days, but am giving up on trying to upload photos for all of them.

First up is a harrowing tale full of patriotism, hamburgers, and man’s struggle with nature. The week that ended in the 4th of July was our third full week in China, and coincided with a diminishing appreciation for the constant fare of dumplings, tea, and miscellaneous meat-covered-in-oil-and-pepper-over-rice-based-starch dishes. Up to that point, I had been pretty good about not eating any American-style food, with the exception of a trip to the local KFC for some ice cream (yes, Ellen, this is a shout-out to you on my blog). So for the 4th, the usual gang of friends and I decided to try something both novel and traditional, and made our way to Grandma’s Kitchen, a restaurant that serves such all-American selections as hamburgers, mashed potatoes with gravy, apple pie, and even Budweiser. The breakfast menu even contained a Denver Skillet, a sight that only confirmed the high regard with which people from all over the world view my wonderful home city.

With options like those, it’s hard to blame us for going a little overboard. We ordered five appetizers - onion rings, mozzarella sticks, a quesadilla (American enough, right?), chicken fingers, and French fries – after which everyone ordered themselves a beer, a milkshake, and a hamburger (with the exception of the one among us who doesn’t eat beef. The rest of us got bacon burgers to make up for it, though). It was delicious. As representatives of America - and despite it being the 4th of July, we were the only Americans in the restaurant - it was only fitting that we played the part of the overeating, English-speaking, money-spending foreigners. And spend money we did: the meal for the five of us was about 580 kuai – still less than USD $20 per person, but far more than the 50 kuai we’ve spent for a five-person meal around campus.

When we left the restaurant after dinner, the extra weight and sloth imparted by the largesse of our American spending worked against us immediately. While we had been eating on the fifth floor of an enclosed mall, the rain outside had been putting China’s drainage systems (a recurring theme in this blog, evidently) to the test. The streets and sidewalks were flooded, and while we spent about 20 minutes trying to hail a taxi, everyone else pouring out from the then-closing mall was trying to do the same . We took the subway instead, but when we tried changing trains we were forced out of the station, which had flooded. Standing in the midst of the hundred-plus people locked out of the station, we realized that we were going to have no more luck with finding taxis than at the mall, and began an hour-long walking-and-bus-hopping waterlogged trip back to our dorm. We made it back just barely by midnight – wet but content from our holiday excursion.

"This Cheng is Pretty Chang"

This past Friday, we set out for Simatai to see the Great Wall (长城, or “Chang Cheng” in Chinese, meaning “long wall”). True to its name, the wall was pretty long – but almost as long as the Great Wall itself was the ride to Simatai. I had previously only encountered Beijing-style traffic, where cars careen around corners, pedestrians and bicyclists scatter, and everyone depends on horns more than traffic lights. The traffic outside of Beijing is the same – but at speeds of over 60 miles an hour, and livestock instead of pedestrians. After the third or fourth time our 80-seater bus screeched around a blind mountainside turn in the wrong lane only to find a van of pigs approaching in the other direction, we all learned to go back to our iPods and ignore the possibility that our deaths would be even more ignominious than Emperor Chongzhen’s.

We arrived intact at Simatai in the late afternoon, and had a chance to briefly climb a section of the wall before it closed (evidently, the Great Wall closes around 6 PM). The section of the wall at Simatai has two parts divided by a river – I only hiked the longer half, which had 12 watchtowers interspersed with long sections of varying steepness. Friday evening we got to the first tower, which was a good vantage point to see almost all of the section across the river.

Saturday morning, we started out at 3:30 so we could see the sunrise (a large group of teachers and students started out at 3:00, but a couple of friends and I wanted a quieter approach). The Great Wall at Simatai, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, is one of the steepest around Beijing – some parts approached an 80% grade, with nearly vertical staircases. This made for some interesting architecture, but we also found ourselves stopping from time to time to curse the ancient Ming builders (one question that remains: why would you build a wall on the top of a mountain, one of nature’s best defenses? Do the extra 15 feet of rock on top of the several thousand already in place really make crossing that much more difficult?). We paused at the fifth or sixth tower to rest and watch the sunrise, which was easier said than done given all of the mist. In contrast to Beijing’s pollution, though, the mist moved quickly across the wall, alternately covering and exposing wide swaths of the old stonework and masking every other trace of human construction in the thick green mountaintop vegetation.

Simatai is remarkably well preserved, and also one of the few sections to retain the Great Wall’s original Ming Dynasty features. One such feature is irrigation - spigots line the wall, and gutters direct the flow of water away from the walkable areas. I took a picture, in case I ever run into the architect of our constantly-flooding dorm. Drainage, it seems, is a long-lost art.