China – Shanghai hutongs, breaking the Great Wall and Beijing Duck
We left Hong Kong to head inland to Fuijian Province and a place called Wuyishan. We had to transfer trains in a place called Nanping and arrived at a station where no one spoke English. This of course, didn’t phase us since we are very good at getting the tickets we want – well that is until someone says no……..
And the “no” just wasn’t a simple one either, but a long drawn out explanation that lasted about 30 seconds, all in CHINESE, of what and where and when and why we couldn’t get tickets to Wuiyshan….hmmmm. SO we told her that we didn’t understand and so she wrote us a note explaining the problem……..BUT it was written in Chinese characters!! Again, we said we didn’t understand so she politely took back the paper and started to write something else, all the while taking her time to make it nice and neat. When she finished, she passed back the paper and seemed happy that she had finally written out the explanation very clearly. But again, it was written in Chinese!! We were laughing at this point, but a bit worried about how we would get out of this town…….so we walked away with our little note and stood in the centre of the small station and tried to figure out what to do next. I figured that standing here for a little while may make us look pathetic and then maybe someone would try a little bit of English to help us. We at no time felt unsafe here as it was a little town in the middle of the day, so standing and waiting seemed like a good plan. We just wanted to catch the connecting train that we knew passed through the town.
A couple of minutes later a man that had been talking to the lady in the ticket window came up to us and said, “no ticket here”. Then pointed at the note she gave us a minute earlier and said “taxi here”. OOOOHHHHHHHhhhhh!! So we took a taxi the this place on the note. About 20 minutes later we arrived at the Nanping west train station and easily bought our connecting train ticket there!
Wuyishan was nice, but the rain kept us out of the mountains, that and the price of the ticket was $15 CAN each! A bit over priced probably due to the upcoming holiday…..China likes to take advantage of all the travellers and ups the prices accordingly, including hotels. We paid 250RMB to stay in this hotel now, but when the hoilday started, we were informed that the price would jump to 880rmb!! That’s over $100 CAN!!! And this place was NOT that great at all. We left 4 days later to head to Shanghai where we thought we would have better luck being entertained during the holiday season.
Shanghai is a beautiful city. very clean, very modern. Lots of shops and western restaurants. Old Shanghai was also just a few steps away from our hotel, the subway is amazing and even the food served in our hotel was great. There was a place that looks like Granville Island complete with Starbucks, little cabarets and a steak house where we indulged with martinis, wine and steak!! We toured the Science Exhibit of the human body in the museum, cruised the Bund and hung out on Nanjing Lu watching people walk by. After 10 days here (the holiday was 7 days long), we made our way to Beijing. We know that we eventually need to get a visa extension, but attempting this during the holiday just would not prove successful, so we waited.
Beijing was very, very different from Shanghai. Considering it’s the country’s capital we expected it to be modern as well. But the subway uses paper tickets that a lady validates by ripping off the end! What do they do during rush hour??!! The plan is that computerized ticket systems are to come into effect VERY soon, but it looked pretty far off to us.
Beijing is so spreadout that we didn’t really venture too far away from our hostel. We stayed at both the Leo Hostel and the Far East Hotel which are both located in a little hutong area with amazing back alleyways, BBQ stalls, local restaurants and the famous QuanJude Duck restaurant where we indulged ourselves on a whole duck!!! They actually brought the duck out to a table next to us that had 5 people sitting at it. Although they looked at us VERY strangely, they eventually brought it to our table and cut it into pieces in front of us! We even got a commemoration card for the duck we just ate!!! It was delicious! And even though they presented us the head on a beautiful platter, it didn’t phase us. Although we didn’t eat anything from the head (where would we start anyhow?!), I did poke at it though ’cause I know Sarah would have wanted me too! And I poked it good!!!
We saw the Temple of Heaven and took in a ride in a cyclo back to our hostel when the rain started. We purchased the ever-cool Chairman Mao watch waving like a son-of-a-gun!
We visited the Forbidden City to see “forbidden things” and took Kehan with us as our guest. Kehan is a Chinese girl from Shandong province who we met during a visit to a museum that she works at. She was so impressive with her knowledge of the collection she spoke about and when she told us she had never been to the Forbidden City we knew we wanted to bring her with us. The next morning when we picked her up, she said that she stayed up all night reading about what we may see today…….we told her not to worry. She wasn’t our guide, just our guest to see it with us.
We also took in the sites and sounds of Beijing from taking in a spectacular and VERY moving Kung Fu show about the life of the Shaolin monk complete with acrobatic feats only a Shaolin warrior could pull off and fantastic music and gorgeous stage costumes and settings. We walked The Great Wall in absolute amazement and were lucky to find a tour that went to a “secret part” in a farmer’s field where we were the only people we saw……this part of the wall was unrestored and exactly what we had come to see….it was just absolutely amazing we were here…..seeing all of this history. China is such an amazing collection of history, it really just blows our mind!
Beijing’s PSB office told us that it would take 7 days to process our extension, so we passed on this as well and opted to try in a smaller town where we heard that it would be less buracracy…..hmmmm
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