We’re back from a few days in China. It was a great trip – we packed in a ton of stuff to see, and had a pretty good experience on our first tour package trip.
On Tuesday morning we dragged our suitcase out to Okubo station in the sweltering heat and humidity, and I was already dripping with sweat at 7 a.m. Luckily once we got on the train we were in air conditioning all the way to Beijing. At the airport we picked up our tickets and checked in our bag, and it was a breeze getting on the plane. The flight was pretty short (just over two hours) so we landed in the early afternoon, and walked through the newly built (and quite beautiful) Beijing airport. Customs and Immigration went smoothly and we met up with our tour guide just outside the gates.
The guide’s name was “Shin”, a Chinese guy who spoke pretty good Japanese. He gathered about 30 people that made up our group, and then led us to a bus. We followed his wrinkled yellow flag along like well trained sheep, and then sat inside the bus and took off for the city center. Beijing was also hot, but I was happy to find out that there was significantly less humidity, and the heat was a lot easier to deal with.
On the bus ride in I was busy taking in the sights. Beijing is an enormous city, and spread out rather than dense. Looking at all the high rise buildings it took me a while to figure out why they seemed strange, and then I realized that there was hardly any advertising anywhere. The ads were limited to some billboards on the side of the road and the storefront names. Everywhere else was clean and empty, and it sure seemed strange to look around and not see billboards and giant neon signs. I guess I’m a little used to the flash and advertising density of Japan.
Shin was busy briefing us on what to expect during the trip, and some of the quirks in his Japanese speech kind of threw me for a while, but eventually I got the hang of understanding his Japanese. He characterized three days of sightseeing in Beijing as being similar to a war, and warned us that we’d be exhausted by the end of it. To some extent he was right, but not in the way that I think he intended at the time.
Our first stop was to get some bottled beverages near an art exhibition that seemed to be near a campus of some sort. The tap water in Beijing is not suitable for drinking (at least, that is what they said) and so we stocked up on a couple of beverages. We then got back on the bus and drove around the Olympic buildings before arriving at our first “shopping stop” near the center of town.
These “shopping stops” were an eye-opening experience for me. These places seemed to be at a bizarre intersection of both Chinese and Japanese culture, and when viewed through a third culture (mine) it made for a fascinating sociological study.
This shopping stop was in a large building filled with shops selling jade sculptures, and as we followed Shin inside we were given small coupons for 20% off of the items within. Shin led us to a table and introduced a Chinese guy who proceeded to make a sales pitch to buy various pieces of jade jewelry. Kuniko and I rolled our eyes and waited in the back of the crowd for the guy to finish, and walked around the showroom. We were stuck until Shin decided to let us get back on the bus, so we walked around for about 20 minutes. Nobody was really buying, but the place was full of Chinese salespeople who spoke enough Japanese to try to push through a sale. The salespeople weren’t really aggressive, though, and soon everyone was just sitting around waiting for Shin to let us roll out. Shin sat over at the snack bar smoking a cigarette and drinking a soda, and when he finished we went back to bus and headed out.
This system has obviously been around a long, long time. The signs everywhere in the shop were in Japanese, and the prices seemed especially high to me. What surprised me most was the scale of the system – it seemed like the whole city block was dedicated to handling tourists in buses. At first I was a little peeved that we were wasting valuable time standing around some shop when we could be exploring a new country, but as Kuniko pointed out later, the all-inclusive price of the trip was dirt-cheap, and this was why. After the first day I learned to see the comedy in these situations, and it became entertaining.
The next stop on the bus was to a part of town that was under development. The long street looked like a much larger version of Main Street USA in Disneyland. The street was full of tourists, but the shops weren’t open yet, and the whole thing was framed by a huge temple and Chinese religious gate that made a big impression. There wasn’t much to do but take a few pictures and take in the size of everything. It was like Japan but on a grander scale – everything was much more spread out.
From there we went to have dinner at a nearby restaurant. Shin had made arrangements for a nabe dinner, and it was almost exactly the same as a shabu-shabu dinner in Japan. As we sat down they asked if we wanted beer, and I went ahead and ordered one. As soon as it arrived the asked for 30 yuan (about six dollars) and so we paid it and wondered how much we were being overcharged. All the food was included in our original price, and the restaurant provided free hot tea as well. While we ate hot nabe soup in a hot restaurant on a hot day in summer I realized that the only thing that was cold in the room was our beer. The lady next to me asked for some cold tea, and was told that it cost extra. Cold dessert was also offered, but that was extra. I marveled at their ingenuity. The rest of the folks at our table sweated heavily, and suffered through the dinner. The food was great, but it would have been even better in winter.
After dinner we boarded the bus and headed back to our hotels. Shin got on the intercom and told us that since there was nothing of interest near our hotels and it was probably dangerous to walk around on our own we should arrange entertainment through him. He offered tickets to some kind of Chinese kabuki style show, as well as scheduling a massage in your room. We went with a massage for Kuniko, but we figured it would be interesting to walk around on our own and see just how dangerous it actually was.
We dropped off about half the bus at the theater for the kabuki show, and then we went to the hotel. By then it was almost time for the massage, so we checked in to a decent-looking hotel, and went up to our room. The room was nice enough, and definitely felt foreign – it had the same vibe as some of the hotels we stayed in during our trip to Vietnam. It was as if the whole thing was empty and deserted the day before you arrived, and it would be empty and deserted again the day after you leave. Hard to explain, but it was comfortable enough.
Soon after we got to our room our doorbell rang, and a Chinese lady came in and went to work on Kuniko. She was really nice, and did a pretty good job. Kuniko fell asleep near the end, so I tipped the lady and sent her back downstairs, and then I joined Kuniko on the bed and crashed right out.
