Beijing, it Turns Out, Does Actually Suck

I'll qualify that in a second, because the Chinese people are a prideful bunch, and I don't want to offend the hordes of them that tune in daily (ha). In fact, the only thing that every taxi driver in Shanghai with even the slightest command of English wants to know (in addition to your destination) is what you think of Shanghai and China.

That's sort of the problem, I guess. Those taxi drivers - the English understanding ones - all seem to live in Shanghai. There is very little English in Beijing. That's part of my qualification above - the biggest problems I had with Beijing weren't problems with the city so much as they were with me being in a foreign place without the ability to speak the language.

So anyway, when Staci and I visited Beijing at the end of April for four days, I didn't like it very much. We took an overnight train from Shanghai to Beijing. I thought an overnight train would be fun, and I was worried about money at the time, and it was cheaper than flying, and we saved a night in a hotel, and... fuck you, I really like trains, okay? The experience reminds be of being young and sleeping while my dad drove to Capitola (a six-hour trek). My parents would build beds in the back of the van, and we'd get transferred into the car at 4am, asleep the whole time. By the time we woke up, we'd be a half hour from Santa Cruz. I can't really describe why I like it so much, except to say that it feels productive to be sleeping and going somewhere at the same time.

Our train was a little awkward though, because we shared a four-bed compartment with a middle-aged Chinese guy. He seemed nice and all, but its such a small amount of space that it was a little uncomfortable for strangers to share. I'd definitely spring the extra $100 for the private compartment if we did that again.

So we arrived at 6am on Wednesday, and luckily managed to check into our hotel (Wangfujing Grand Hotel - it was great!) a little after 7am. We were lost for an hour while cabbing, asking for directions (pointless!), and walking around to find it. Thank god we did because from what I could tell, I was about twenty minutes from being castrated by my loving lady friend - she was acting tough, but I'm sure memories of the night we almost had to spend in a freezing Cinque Terra phone booth were lurking in her still-groggy mind.

That day, Wednesday, we walked the Wangfujing shopping district, which is a crowded sea of shops, food stands, and people. After that, we headed over to the Forbidden City, and took a (lame) guided audio tour. The tour route spit us out on the north side of the park, so we needed to walk all the way around it to get back to Tienanmen Square. A rickshaw driver tricked us into paying way too much for a ride that ended up being only halfway back. Tienanmen Square was impressive, but a little boring.

That night, we headed to the Silk Market, which is a warehouse-sized flea market known for being the Mecca of fake products. That experience deserves its own blog post, so I'll hold off except to say that we purchased a few items but decided to leave when the shouts of "I Hate Americans!" in my face got too intense to continue shopping casually. Awesome.

This is long already, so I'll write up days two, three, and four in another post.