BEIJING!

March 27-30 I took a trip to Beijing with 2 great friends

Tiffany and Chrissy. We scoured TripAdvisor and badgered friends for great finds, tips, advice, and/or warnings. We left husbands, children and most of our worries in Singapore and did our best to fill our brains and hearts with as much Chinese history, culture and experience as possible in four days.

Our driver, "Shane," a kind hearted, loud-talking young man we found in the local classifieds, was intent on giving his home town a good showing. His livelihood dependent upon us (i.e. “tourists”), he also did his best to make a buck, though we were fairly adept at ferreting out the most obvious scams (we are still unsure whether our crazy "chance" meeting with the Last Emperor's nephew, a famous Chinese calligrapher, was really divine luck or whether we were taken). It really doesn't matter as we had a lot of fun, and came away with a great memory of this meeting as well as our own personalized scrolls. For $50.

My favorite part of our trip was definitely hiking one section of the Great Wall known as "Mutianyu." About 70km northeast of Beijing, it is older than the “Badaling” section of the Great Wall and is one of the best preserved, surrounded by lush woodlands and streams. It used to serve as the northern barrier defending the capital and the imperial tombs.

movie of some of the hike...

We also toured the Forbidden City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_City). Built in 1406-1420, it was the Chinese Imperial Palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. For almost 50o years it served as the home of the Emperor and his household, as well as the political center of Chinese government. Covering 7,800,000 sq. feet, it would take weeks to absorb its magnitude and historical heft. We saw many of the 980 surviving buildings, but obviously just scratched the surface of all that was there. The Last Emperor (1987, which won 9 Oscars) was the first feature film ever authorized by the People’s Republic of China to be filmed in the Forbidden City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093389/).

Other things I don’t want to forget:

• Sharpening my intrinsically terrible negotiating skills against the experts at the Silk Market and Hongqiao Markets.
• Dinners at LAN (food was excellent: Sichuan and Guangdong cuisines prepared slightly Western; French designer Philippe Starck created an interior which one person called an “art gallery jostling for space with a second-hand shop in newly rented premises”) and Moulin Bouloud, a French restaurant in a spectacular setting in the pre-1949 US ambassador’s residence just off Tiananmen Square.
• What it was like to be cold again after living in Singpore for so long (it was in the 40’s/low 50’s for most of our trip).
• How to count to 10 on one hand (maybe just Beijingers do this?).
• Juggling with the hawkers at the Old Hongqiao Market.
• Wondering where all the people were??? Beijing is China’s capital and second largest city after Shanghai, with a population of 17 million plus… I imagined more crowds, more hustle and bustle, a city teeming with life and people. Maybe I am getting old but we never saw the “hot spots” or crowds I expected.
• How grateful and lucky I am for the opportunity to travel and see this part of the world and experience a culture so different from my own with great friends.