Wanderlust

Beijing, China.

Friday night we went to see the Chinese Opera. I was really excited about it after hearing the old men sing at the park and really just hearing lots of random people singing around Beijing–on the street and in our hostel. But it wasn’t really what I expected. The costumes and make-up were really beautiful and the choreography was interesting and incredibly precise which was impressive, but the singing was horrible! I’m sure people like it. Obviously the Chinese like it or it wouldn’t have survived this long (one would hope). And we even met a girl in our hostel who really loves it. But to Steve, me, and (apparently) the rest of the audience it was like listening to some sad, desperate animal slowly die a very painful and drawn out death. It was awful!

The opera we saw was really three separate skits (which was a little disappointing on its own since there wasn’t one continuous storyline to follow like a play). I don’t know if this is standard or just what we got. The first skit started with a woman (a.k.a. dying animal) singing from offstage. There were two screens beside the stage with the Chinese characters and English translations of what she was saying. She had escaped a nunnery in order to find her love and live happily ever after. The whole skit was her trying to find a boat to catch up with her love; finding a boat and having trouble getting on; and rowing around looking for him. We never met the love or found out what happened with them. But the saving grace of this skit was the old man rower who was silly and antagonistic to the annoying escaped nun. Half hour later we changed to the second skit which was entirely just one woman in an elaborate outfit singing and twirling around. It was pretty boring and painful and the audience (which consisted mostly of Westerners and a couple handfuls of Indians) got audibly restless. About halfway through this half hour segment people started talking and not really trying to be quiet. I was embarassed for my fellow Westerners who were being so rude to the performers regardless if they (or we) were enjoying it or not.

The final skit started out well with four guys doing acrobatics and running around. And then from off stage we heard a woman’s voice and almost everyone in the theater very loudly sighed/cringed. It was awful but sort of funny that all these people from around the world had the same automatic reaction. Luckily this skit was slim on the singing and heavy on acrobatics, with the woman ‘fighting’ the four men in order to get a sacred herb to save her dying husband. She won, of course, in a crowd-pleasing show of juggling and flipping. It was nice that they ended with a big crowd pleaser since otherwise I think most people would have come away disgruntled. It was all-in-all pretty fun, even though we didn’t make it for our Peking duck feast beforehand since we were both stuffed from lunch!

Sunday we got up at 6 a.m. to go on our tour to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. We had a breakfast in the hostel as part of the deal with eggs, toast, bacon, and sausage. It was nice to have some Western food after eating only Chinese food for so long (not that I’m getting sick of it. On the contrary it’s still absolutely delicious and very satisfying). The day was pretty dreary with lots of haze and very humid. When we got to the Wall (about two hours by van) Steve and I opted to walk the 40 minutes up the steps instead of paying extra for a ski lift up. I thought it would be easy peasy after Machu Picchu, but after so long of walking on only flat ground it was a challenge (not helped by the fact that the humidity was so high it made it a little hard to breath). But we made it up and walked around for 2 hours stopping to eat some snacks we brought and try to cool off. While we were there I was very disappointed about the haze since I didn’t think I was getting any good photos, but now that I look at them they turned out much better than I thought they would. It even looks a little neat and mystical with the haze lingering around the wall. So, that’s a relief.

We had four hours total to explore before meeting the rest of the group for lunch, but we were tired and hot and had seen all we wanted to after only a couple of hours, so we headed back and I took a bunch of pictures of bugs and flowers along the way down. We had about an hour to wait before the rest of the group came, but between the iPod and a Steve’s book we stayed well entertained. I even discovered a praying mantis hiding in the flowers right in front of me which I took lots of photos of! He was a fun subject since he didn’t move very much!

Lunch was also included with the tour. I expected it to be some crappy bag lunch, but we ended up going to a restaurant where we got free beers, sodas, and tea and plate after plate after plate of food! I wasn’t sure if it would ever end! A lot of the dishes were the same as ones we’d already had around Beijing, and none of them were quite as good as our little restaurant at the end of the alley, but it was still all very tasty and we all ate way too much.

On the van ride back the humidity finally got its way and it rained and rained. Steve and I lucked out on the very back seat all to ourselves, so we both curled up on the seat and slept most of the way back. When we got back to the hostel we sat and talked to one of our roommates and made a new friend, Nicole. She’s German and has been studying Chinese in Shanghai for the past year. She’s on her way back to Germany now and is very nice. She invited us out to a show at a bar near where are school is (so pretty far away). The show was a blind singer who played the guitar and a bassist. We had a little bit of a misadventure getting there since it was still raining pretty hard (it was nine at night now and we’d gotten back to the hostel around four) and we had to walk quite a bit since the bus we wanted didn’t come. We ended up getting the help of a very nice Chinese guy who Nicole spoke to when we couldn’t find the subway stop when we got off another bus we took. It was all very confusing and very wet with a lot of the roads turning into giant lakes that you had to try to avoid while also not getting hit by buses, cars, scooters, and bikes! But we finally made it to the show, an hour after it was supposed to start, but luckily they were just starting when we arrived. The bar was very tiny and was filled with mostly Westerners who were more interested in socializing than listening to the singer. We got a choice seat on the second floor balcony where we got to look right down on them. It was really lovely. It was all in Chinese, of course, (except for on Nirvana cover song that was half Chinese and half English and was twistly funny in that the chorus was “something in my way”) and Steve and I tried to pick out words here and there that we recognized. The singer’s name was Zhou YunPeng (周云鹏) and he’s a legendary folk musician (according to the bar’s web site). It was really nice, and I’m glad I was able to find his name so now I can look for his music later on.

We had a lot of fun at the bar and with Nicole, but we didn’t get home until after midnight (we took a cab back which was nice and only about $5). And then somehow both Steve and I ended up talking to people until two in the morning! It was nuts! It was fun, but I was so tired after waking up early and hiking that as soon as I laid down I was out. Unfortunately since the next day was Monday (today) we still had to get up at 8:30 for our Chinese class! But we both made it to class and through the lesson (which it turns out will be our last…). We discovered a dumpling restaurant right around the corner from our hostel that we had somehow missed all this time, and we both pigged out on yummy dumplings filled with meat and veggies!

We were both pretty exhausted after staying up so late and getting up so early, but we were told that the earliest you could book train tickets was four days before the day you wanted to leave, and since we wanted to leave Beijing Friday night for Pingyao, we wanted to hurry and try to get the tickets and hostel reservation squared away. The rush was due to the fact that October 1st is the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese celebrate a week before and a week after by returning home to their families. We’d been warned that it can be very difficult to get around during these two weeks but since we don’t want to stay in Beijing any longer (by Friday it would be almost three weeks) and we have a lot to see in the next month before going to volunteer in Guilin we decided just to push through as best as we could and try to be flexible. It turns out that starting Friday the only spots available on trains was standing room! Which means that all of the beds and seats had been booked for more than four days out, so our information was sadly incorrect. Our only option was to take a hard seat (apparently inappropriately named since they’re not actually the hard benches I imagine but are just regular seats with less leg room than the soft seats and so also cheaper) on Thursday night. We decided to think about this a bit since it would mean missing one day of our class and possibly cutting out some of the things we still wanted to see in Beijing before leaving. We were also now really concerned about getting transportation out of Pingyao. We only want to stay there a couple of nights since it’s a small city with not too much to do and the main appeal is that it is one of only two left in China with mostly older architecture and the original walls. Most cities (including Beijing) are tearing down all of the older homes in order to modernize. It’s really quite a shame both because it displaces a large amount of people (the giant Olympic Green was built over an entire hutong neighborhood and everyone was forced to leave) and because the older houses are really charming and add to the appeal of China. The food is great, but I don’t think I’d come here for it alone. And the constant crowds, smog, and people hawking loogies and spitting everywhere (restaurants, buses, streets, it doesn’t matter) don’t really draw me in. But all of the history is fascinating. And the little neighborhoods and villages that seem stuck in time are much nicer than the touristy areas. But I digress. We needed to decide whether it was worth risking getting stuck in Pingyao for longer. We had asked also about trains to Xi’an, our next stop after Pingyao and a much bigger city with more sites nearby to occupy us. But there were none out of Beijing. After trying to fight through our exhaustion and disappointment about the train in order to try to figure out a possible other route (maybe go to Shanghai first and then backtrack up to Xi’an…) we decided that it was worth the risk to stick to our itinerary and in the end the distance from Pingyao to Xi’an wasn’t very far (about 7 hours, if I recall correctly) and there are a few cities and sites along the way that if we had to we could take a bus ride and spend the night as we went. But by the time we’d decided all of this and gone back to the lovely help desk girl who has been wonderful, the Thursday hard seats were all taken and only Wednesday was open for the same! We decided to just take them and not risk it any longer, so now instead of leaving Friday night we’re leaving Wednesday night… in two days! Ahh! Because of all of this we’ve decided to stop going to our Chinese class which I’m pretty bummed about. But in the end in order to take it seriously and get anything out of it we’ve had to stop going to sites during the week. The class takes all morning (even though the actual class is only 1 1/2 hours, it takes forever to get there and back) and then after lunch and relaxing a little we have to practice in order to keep up, then to bed early so as not to be too groggy during class! It’s been fun, but pretty intense. On the downside we lose the class and a good chunk of money since we’d already paid for ten classes, but on the bright side we’ve learned a little bit of Chinese and now have the books, tapes, and knowledge about pronounciation and tones in order to be able to keep it up on our own.

We’re going to spend the next two days seeing all of the last things we want to see in Beijing before heading out, so we’re becoming tourists again. Which is good. I’m excited about our first real move in China and seeing a different place. I’m a little sad about having to spend the night on a chair instead of a bed on the train (it’s a twelve our train that leaves at 7 pm and I was looking forward to stretching out in the bed after so many nights on buses in South America). But I guess I should be used to it after three months of sleeping on buses. I know I can do it, which is good. And at least there will be a bathroom and room to walk around (I hope at least! Maybe all of the aisles will be packed with people, too!).

(Silly side story: Before booking our train tickets with the hostel–who charge a little fee for doing it–we tried to book at a ticket booth on our alley. We were sort of lazily waiting for someone else to finish and talking just a little way back from the window to give him space. When he was finished we were stepping up and this man swooped in front of us out of nowhere! It was so unexpected and neither of us knew where he had come from that it was almost comical. We’d read that people in China don’t really wait in line like the rest of the world and that they basically just crowd around, but so far in Beijing we hadn’t really experienced it. The window was a little low and the man was leaning his arms against it with his butt sticking out. We decided not to let anyone else–who we imagined were lurking around every corner–come in front of us, so Steve stood right behind the man’s tukus. Steve made some comment about being so close to his butt and he hoped the man didn’t fart on him, and in perfect comic timing about half a second later we heard the very obvious sounds of passing gas! We both laughed hysterically and Steve ran out of the way! It was crazy! I’m convinced that the man could understand English and did it just because of what Steve said, but it could have just been a strange–and gross–coincidence. Potty humor at its worst. Poor Steve!)

Tags: Beijing, China, Chinese Opera, The Great Wall

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.