Year of the Rabbit (February, 2011)

Beijing is not skip-able.

When I purchased my visa for China in order to go with my dad in the fall my options were to pay $150 for a one time visa, or $190 for a double entry.  I figured I might as well buy the double entry just in case.  It ended up being a good decision.

Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year, is a very important holiday in Korea, and as such we had a five-day weekend.  Dawn and I decided in November that we wanted to go to Beijing, and it was perfectly within the six months for my second visit to China (Lunar New Year is in January or February).  We bought our tickets and got very excited about the trip.  Then Dawn decided to remain home after going back to Canada for Christmas, so I was going alone.  Another co-worker, Melinda, and a few of her friends from high school who also teach here decided to go to Beijing as well, so I tagged along with them.  It was Melinda, Katie, Meghan, Nick, and me.

When we got to Beijing the city seemed to be closed and empty, nearly devoid of people compared to what I’d read and seen in videos.  We learned that Lunar New Year in China is very focused on family, so everyone goes to their hometowns for the holiday.  That means Beijing is abandoned in favor of smaller cities and towns.  Our first night we went to a local restaurant (the only one we could find that was open) and ate a delicious dinner.  We also tried our first Tsingtao, which is the most popular Chinese beer.  It was the same as Korean beer- watery and piss-like.

We went back to the hotel and played cards for a while before crashing.  We’d all gotten in at different times (I had been one of the last) but mostly we’d gotten in a little bit on the late end, and we were all tired.

The next day was the first day of the Lunar New Year.  An old friend of Katie’s met up with us.  He was Chinese, though he’d studied abroad at her university several years before.  We walked around the neighborhood and came across a huge parade, although we didn’t get to see a giant dragon like you’d imagine in every parade in China.  Maybe it had passed before we got there.  We watched for a while and then crossed the street to a nearby temple that Katie’s friend had recommended.  It was the year of the rabbit, which was both Nick’s and my year.  We thought that meant it was a good luck year, but Katie’s friend told us that it was the opposite- your year is a bad luck year.  There are only two ways to counteract the bad luck: wear something every day of the year, or walk counterclockwise three times around a stone at a specific temple in Beijing. 

That temple was the one where we were, so Nick and I walked around the stone three times, and touched it once, negating our bad luck for the year.  The temple was incredible, and everywhere we looked there were lanterns and people wearing rabbit ears and celebrating the holiday.  

We left in the late morning for lunch, and then headed on to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City actually made me a little sad that I had gone to so many palaces in Korea.  The problem is that Korean palace architecture is largely stolen from other cultures, particularly the Chinese style.  The Forbidden City was unbelievable, but it would have been even more stunning if the architecture were completely new to me.  

However, the audio tour was extremely interesting and informative, and told a large range of stories of different emperors and their wives and concubines.  It also explained the historical significance of a lot of the architecture and the individual buildings.  The city complex was huge, and we walked around it for hours.  Afterward we climbed to the top of a hill across the street from the Forbidden City and looked down at the view of the whole city at once.  

It was surrounded by a moat, and though the air was a bit hazy and the view wasn’t as clear as we might have liked, it was still amazing to watch the sun set over the Forbidden City.

That night we were hanging out in our hostel room, playing cards with a guy we had met who came from Liechtenstein.  Suddenly, we heard loud bangs and sounds coming from outside the building.  Nick and I went out into the hallway and opened the door into the alley outside our hostel, only to almost lose our faces to a firework zooming past us.  We ran back to the room to get everyone and then headed back to the door to watch the fireworks.  The alleyway, dirty, littered with trash, with three deflated and empty trash bags breezing lightly in the air, was filled with a barrage of machine gun fire as firecrackers and roman candles shot around us.  There were loud whistles and deep booms, heavier, the kind that rattle in your bones.  Sketchy Chinese men leered at us, their cigarettes glowing as brightly as the punks they were using to light the fireworks.  The narrow alley was full of bright colors and lights and loud sounds.  I felt a bit like a rat in a mazy, tested with a variable of overstimulation from every possible angle, so stunned I could hardly move, frozen in place by a strange mix of adrenaline and child-like wonder.  We walked out into the alley and stood amazed as the fireworks went off all around us.  Then one firework wobbled.  Just as I pointed it out to Nick it tipped, shooting right at us.  We ducked behind a large metal box that looked like a voltage box back home.  It was a pretty intense experience, all things considered.

In spite of the fact that we stayed up late watching fireworks the night before, we got up early in the morning to go to the Great Wall.  The van ride was a little long, but as soon as the wall came into view it was instantly worthwhile.  

The wall was hands down the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It was the only completely man-made place that made me have a sort of transcendent moment where I thought, “How in the hell did I get here?  How is this my life?  Is this real?”  The only other places where that had happened were my first morning in Koh Phi Phi (the natural beauty was absolutely stunning) and at the section of Angkor Wat buried in the jungle, where the trees and plants had reclaimed their land and begun to take over the man-made structures.  But the Great Wall gave me that feeling all on its own.
 

It was cold out, so we’d all worn a lot of layers, but we had to walked several miles along the wall, which was uneven and falling apart in places, to meet up with our guide again.  

By the end we were all carrying our coats and jackets and sweaters and wearing tee shirts.  The view was spectacular, with rolling hills and everything barren in the winter.  

The wall itself was also barren; it was almost devoid of people because of the holiday.  There were some other tourists, but many of our photos and several sections of the wall were almost completely abandoned.  

It was amazing, and so nice to be able to see the wall that way.

At the end of the stretch of wall we walked, there were no stairs to get back down.  Instead there were metal sleds attached to a track.  You sat on the sled and held on to a bar, which you could pull toward your body in order to slow down.  Otherwise, the sled just went down the hill willy-nilly.

That sounded fun to me.

I didn’t hit the brakes more than one or two times, even though there were Chinese men holding signs that said “Slow Down!” at every turn.   Before we had started to sled no one had gone down the hill for five minutes.  I went first and at the bottom almost caught the Japanese businessmen who’d had a five-minute jump on me.  I had to wait a few minutes before my friends finished their descent.  It was amazingly fun.

That night we met up with Katie’s friend again and he treated us to our first duck dinner.  The place he took us was extremely nice, and it was a several course meal.  He told us it was the most famous duck restaurant in China, and that both Nixon and Clinton had eaten there in the past.  We could tell it was expensive. But he wouldn’t let us pay.  The dinner was completely delicious.  

There were slivers of duck flesh that we dipped in sauce then wrapped in a very thin spring-roll type pancake.  There were also platters and bowls with duck hearts and duck brain.  I was the only one who ate the brain, but Nick had some of the hearts as well.  The brain was a little strange, but the hearts were delicious.  I only wish I hated ducks so I could legitimately say I’d eaten the heart of my enemy.  One day.

As I said in the beginning, Beijing is not a place that one should avoid or bypass on a trip around Asia.  It was one of the most interesting trips I’ve ever been on, and there was so much to see and do that it wasn’t boring for a single moment.

So go.  Now.  Do it.  I’ll wait.