Toto, We're Not in Kansas Anymore

March 31
This won’t get posted for a few days because the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) has seen fit to block our Internet access since our provider uses Google, and Google and the PRC are having “difficulties” regarding censorship issues. Oh well. We are in the Yellow Sea, in a thick fog with the ship bleating the fog horn every thirty seconds or so. It’s really cold out there and we didn’t bring cold weather clothes since most of this trip is within twenty degrees latitude north or south of the equator. In other words, we packed for hot, hot, hot.

After two and a half weeks at sea we’ve decided we like port days a lot more than sea days. Sea days have started to become a bit monotonous—a steady stream of meals punctuated by silly games (trivia, ping pong, and hitting a whiffle ball into a net and calling it “golf chipping”). On port days, everything happens. It’s as if we’re on “pause” for a day or two and then someone hits the “fast-forward” button. But we need the sea days to recover from the port days. If we went from port to port to port without a break we’d probably collapse.

Tomorrow we get off the ship for two days to go into Beijing. We’re looking forward to this exciting city, but we’ll probably all look like “bag ladies” (or in Tom’s case, a “bag gentleman”) since we’ll be wearing most all of our clothing piled one thing on top of another. The bone-chilling fog is scheduled to stick around, and we’ve been warned that it’s “significantly colder” at the Great Wall. We figure everyone on this ship is in the same boat (ha! A little cruise humor there…) and so they won’t be making any snide comments, and since we won’t be able to decipher what the Chinese locals are saying about our crazy get-ups, who cares? One friend advised us she will be wearing her pajama bottoms under her long pants since she has only a single pair of thin cotton pants and she’ll need the extra layer. Me? I’ve got a rather motley mix of black, navy, green and white that ought to set haute couture back on its haunches for a few months. (Although I’ve seen goofier stuff featured during “Fashion Week” in New York so maybe I’m just avant garde).

April 3
We’re back from the “Middle Kingdom.” Wow. In a word, China is astounding. An estimated 1.2 billion people live here. It’s impossible for me to explain everything we learned and saw, but I’ll do my best to hit some of the high points. First of all, China is in a time-warp. Everything is on fast-forward. All the people who’ve been here before (and even those who were here only five years ago) say China (and especially Beijing) is nothing like what they remember. The old city has been essentially torn down to make way for the new. Most of the quaint little hutong homes (the grey, one-level courtyard homes with tile roofs) have been bulldozed to build 30 and 40-story high apartment buildings. And there are always a half dozen or more of these behemoth high-rises on a very small plot of land. How anyone finds their way to their own apartment every night is a mystery to me—it’s a forest of high rises, and each “tree” in the forest is essentially the same size, color and shape.
We started our journey with a LONG drive from Tianjin (the city next to the port of Xingang where we docked) into Beijing. The new freeway (which is actually a toll-road) has cut the time needed for the trip from four hours to two and a half. But, if you really want to get to Beijing in a hurry, you take the brand-new high-speed train, which has cut the rail trip from two and a half hours to less than half an hour! It travels at speeds up to 395km/hour. In other words—that baby moves.
We had a “rest stop” on the way to Beijing and got a glimpse of the “old life.” That’s right, ladies, the famous “hole in the floor.” The smell was overwhelming. In a word, UGH.
On to the Great Wall. It was a bit of a let-down after all the hoopla about climbing the wall. It’s basically a long gray fortress that goes over mountains and into deep valleys and was, I’m sure, a bitch to build. It’s a slip-and-fall incident waiting to happen. We climbed the steep steps a short distance and then went and checked out the vendors. Not the highlight of our day, but definitely something you must see if you come to Beijing.
Next, we went on a driving tour of downtown Beijing which included going to the Olympic Village. Wow. Everything was much larger than I expected. The “Bird’s Nest” is huge, and the bubble-sided Swim Cube is right there too. They took out thousands of homes to build the site as the pedestrian mall goes for a mile or more.
The drive through the heart of Beijing’s financial and business district was an architecture student’s dream. Amazing new high-rise buildings (a zillion of them) with very unique and clever design elements. One building was sheathed in small black glass bricks, and the front side was pushed in as if a mammoth hand had left a handprint. Stunning.
We stayed at the Marriott Beijing City Wall, a gorgeous hotel, with rooms reminiscent of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It was wonderful to have a huge bathtub at my disposal and I soaked for a good long time. The only downside was getting into a malfunctioning elevator on our way to check out. It was my worst nightmare—a broken elevator in a Chinese high rise. The elevator refused to open its doors when we got down to the lobby and instead shot up to the 21st floor. At the top floor it allowed the doors to open and we were able to switch to another one. As scared as I was, I wasn’t about to attempt 21 floors of stairs with a busload of people waiting.
On day two we went to Tiananmen Square. It was really cold, with a cutting wind shrieking across the open space of the plaza. We saw a line of people waiting to view Mao’s remains (it’s a mystery as to whether it’s really Mao or a wax likeness). The line snaked completely around the square for a mile or more. We saw no Westerners in line; only devout visitors from various parts of China. Then on to the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City is mind-boggling, with 9,999 rooms all built within a span of 14 years during the Ming Dynasty (the building started in 1406; completed in 1420). Obviously, it was built completely by hand (no cranes or trucks around in the 15th century) and yet this intricate 720,000 square meters of government buildings, ornate gates, squares, temples and living areas—built in record time—remains solid. Only the emperor, his eunuchs (servants), concubines (some of whom became wives to give him sons) and trusted government scholars were allowed inside this massive area. The enormity of the Forbidden City is dazzling, and it’s good to see that Mao’s Cultural Revolution did, for the most part, spare this national treasure from demolition. Mao was pretty tough on national treasures. He took down the Beijing City Wall and he destroyed or sold a bunch of antiquities in the name of “purifying the country” from its wicked feudal past and to allow it to go forward into the future with a clean slate.
We stopped for lunch at a rather fancy restaurant that served us about 25 dishes—everything from fungus-like mushrooms to Peking Duck. It was beautifully served and interesting, but I don’t think anyone gained any weight from that lunch. It tasted way too alien for our Western palates. I asked for tea and then said, “no tea.” Instead, they served a lukewarm, milky substance that they called “rice water.” It tasted like used bath water smells. We didn’t get any rice, either. I guess our notion of Chinese food was too basic for these folks.
After lunch we hoofed it over to the Temple of Heaven. This is where the emperors worshipped four times a year to ask for a good harvest. The temple is another beautiful example of “what the emperor wants, the emperor gets.” It was also built at the same time (during the 14 years they were building the Forbidden City). The wind had really picked up at this point and we were all freezing. It felt good to get back on the bus.
China is impossible to describe—especially after only two days! But even after a short visit I can say that I feel I understand their world view a bit more than I did before coming here. The tour guide explained how saving face and avoiding humiliation are vital to the collective psyche of the Chinese people. He said his country had been invaded and disgraced by “peoples from tiny islands with no resources and only a small fraction of their population” (first England and then Japan). This humiliation paved the way for Mao and the Communist uprising to overthrow the centuries-old feudal system which had kept 99% of the population in abject poverty and prevented the country from moving forward. Although the average Chinese person today (especially the young people) will agree that Mao was not a great leader (it’s believed he was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 10 million Chinese people) he is still held in high regard as the person who brought them out of the dark ages and into modern times. For that, his many transgressions are forgiven as they bask in their newly acquired status as a world power.
As I said, it’s an astounding country with an amazing past and, from all I saw, a bright future. I more fully understand why the U.S. (and the rest of the world) doesn’t want to mess with them.
Now it’s on to Hong Kong…