more Beijing
Continuing from yesterday's overdue update...
We wanted to go out of the city for a few days during this trip, since we are spending nearly three weeks here in total, and after browsing through some travel guides in a bar on Monday night, decided on Xi'an as a destination. Flying was a bit on the expensive side, so we came up with the idea of taking an overnight train and thus also having the chance to see some of the Chinese countryside en route. The train ticket booking system, however, proved to be rather confusing! The tour desk operator at our local hotel could only find us "hard sleeper" tickets for Thursday and couldn't do anything for Friday - possibly because tickets only apparently go on sale four days beforehand and we asked on Monday - as well as charging an extra 50RMB per ticket commission. We figured we'd try booking on our own, so on Tuesday morning we headed to Beijing Train Station.
Once there, we were quite baffled by the lack of English signs and the ENORMOUS crowds at the downstairs ticket desk. However, we somehow managed to get tickets to Xi'an by going in the VIP queue (probably because we didn't speak any Chinese), but then discovered that we couldn't buy our tickets back! (According to the ticket seller, we'd only be able to buy them in Xi'an, which was a bit worrying as we were arriving on Saturday morning and wanted a ticket back for Sunday night. Visions of being stranded 14 hours away from the city were enough incentive to pay the extra money and ask the hotel to book them for us, which they were perfectly able to do... I have no idea why we couldn't!)
At the station, we also met up with Shaan and a friend of hers, Vanessa, who is also on the AYA programme. We had lunch at a a Japanese restaurant (sushi train, mmm. I couldn't help comparing the prices to Yo(ink)! Sushi, where I had lunch just before leaving Manchester... the entire bill here was about the price of one or two plates there!) and then Shaan came with us to the Forbidden City for a bit before heading off to catch her train home. It was great having the unexpected chance to see someone from home when both of us were in a foreign country!
The Forbidden City is quite immense: ceremonial halls, huge courtyards, residential palaces and imperial gardens all locked away behind imposing stone walls and surrounded by a large moat. Various bits, including the main reception hall, are under repair at the moment, so we had to make do with a picture painted on the screen surrounding the scaffolding for that. Apparently the City is constantly being repaired - paint touched up, courtyard stones replaced etc - and is so large that it takes ten years for the workmen to get around all of it; and when they finish they have to start repairing the first bits again. In any case, the contrast between the recently retouched bits and the (I guess) ten-years-old paintwork was quite striking. The colours on the painted archways and gates which were done earlier this year (they were being painted when Shaan was there earlier this year, she said) were vivid and beautiful, compared with the old faded paint we saw elsewhere. While we'd probably be horrified at the thought of touching up a historic work of art every ten years, I'm quite glad they've chosen to keep the Forbidden City looking at least a little like it did under the Chinese imperial reign: it may not be in use any more, but it is still splendid. I found it hard, though, with the hordes of tourists packing their way into every area and pressing noses against palace windows, to imagine what it must truly have been like when the Imperial Family and their court were the only ones to sit in its gardens or walk through its stone courtyards.
After a couple of hours looking at one impressive building after another, we had tourist fatigue (trans: tired feet) and decided to go for a cup of tea at a place (you'd think we'd learn by now) listed in the guidebook. Of course, after we'd walked out of the Forbidden City and halfway up one side (a considerable distance), it wasn't there. Footsore and frustrated, we opted to get a taxi around to the other side and the Donghuamen Night Market, which actually starts up at 3 in the afternoon and is not really a market but a street full of food. The hawker stalls stretch the entire length of the block, with all manner of exciting foods on display and being prepared right in front of you, ready to be popped into a polystyrene container or a plastic bag or handed to you on a stick and eaten right there in the street.
At the very first stall, we were astonished to see, in addition to the skewers of meat, fish, calamari and various internal organs, as well as the more exotic scorpions, cicadas and seahorses on sticks (we'd seen these at the Wangfujing market the day before, so were by now accustomed to them), whole starfish skewered and ready to be deep-fried! Each was larger than the size of my hand, bright orange and slightly spiked on the outside. I couldn't imagine how one would go about eating them, but (after a short interval of working up my courage) decided I had to try. The starfish, once deep-fried, was crunchy on the outside, with the little tube-feet being all crispy, and squishy on the inside, salty and sea-tasting - sort of like the inside of prawn heads, not that I imagine many of you will have eaten those either. Possibly not an experience I'd seek out and repeat, but something to say I've tried once!
Time to go... more later!
We wanted to go out of the city for a few days during this trip, since we are spending nearly three weeks here in total, and after browsing through some travel guides in a bar on Monday night, decided on Xi'an as a destination. Flying was a bit on the expensive side, so we came up with the idea of taking an overnight train and thus also having the chance to see some of the Chinese countryside en route. The train ticket booking system, however, proved to be rather confusing! The tour desk operator at our local hotel could only find us "hard sleeper" tickets for Thursday and couldn't do anything for Friday - possibly because tickets only apparently go on sale four days beforehand and we asked on Monday - as well as charging an extra 50RMB per ticket commission. We figured we'd try booking on our own, so on Tuesday morning we headed to Beijing Train Station.
Once there, we were quite baffled by the lack of English signs and the ENORMOUS crowds at the downstairs ticket desk. However, we somehow managed to get tickets to Xi'an by going in the VIP queue (probably because we didn't speak any Chinese), but then discovered that we couldn't buy our tickets back! (According to the ticket seller, we'd only be able to buy them in Xi'an, which was a bit worrying as we were arriving on Saturday morning and wanted a ticket back for Sunday night. Visions of being stranded 14 hours away from the city were enough incentive to pay the extra money and ask the hotel to book them for us, which they were perfectly able to do... I have no idea why we couldn't!)
At the station, we also met up with Shaan and a friend of hers, Vanessa, who is also on the AYA programme. We had lunch at a a Japanese restaurant (sushi train, mmm. I couldn't help comparing the prices to Yo(ink)! Sushi, where I had lunch just before leaving Manchester... the entire bill here was about the price of one or two plates there!) and then Shaan came with us to the Forbidden City for a bit before heading off to catch her train home. It was great having the unexpected chance to see someone from home when both of us were in a foreign country!
The Forbidden City is quite immense: ceremonial halls, huge courtyards, residential palaces and imperial gardens all locked away behind imposing stone walls and surrounded by a large moat. Various bits, including the main reception hall, are under repair at the moment, so we had to make do with a picture painted on the screen surrounding the scaffolding for that. Apparently the City is constantly being repaired - paint touched up, courtyard stones replaced etc - and is so large that it takes ten years for the workmen to get around all of it; and when they finish they have to start repairing the first bits again. In any case, the contrast between the recently retouched bits and the (I guess) ten-years-old paintwork was quite striking. The colours on the painted archways and gates which were done earlier this year (they were being painted when Shaan was there earlier this year, she said) were vivid and beautiful, compared with the old faded paint we saw elsewhere. While we'd probably be horrified at the thought of touching up a historic work of art every ten years, I'm quite glad they've chosen to keep the Forbidden City looking at least a little like it did under the Chinese imperial reign: it may not be in use any more, but it is still splendid. I found it hard, though, with the hordes of tourists packing their way into every area and pressing noses against palace windows, to imagine what it must truly have been like when the Imperial Family and their court were the only ones to sit in its gardens or walk through its stone courtyards.
After a couple of hours looking at one impressive building after another, we had tourist fatigue (trans: tired feet) and decided to go for a cup of tea at a place (you'd think we'd learn by now) listed in the guidebook. Of course, after we'd walked out of the Forbidden City and halfway up one side (a considerable distance), it wasn't there. Footsore and frustrated, we opted to get a taxi around to the other side and the Donghuamen Night Market, which actually starts up at 3 in the afternoon and is not really a market but a street full of food. The hawker stalls stretch the entire length of the block, with all manner of exciting foods on display and being prepared right in front of you, ready to be popped into a polystyrene container or a plastic bag or handed to you on a stick and eaten right there in the street.
At the very first stall, we were astonished to see, in addition to the skewers of meat, fish, calamari and various internal organs, as well as the more exotic scorpions, cicadas and seahorses on sticks (we'd seen these at the Wangfujing market the day before, so were by now accustomed to them), whole starfish skewered and ready to be deep-fried! Each was larger than the size of my hand, bright orange and slightly spiked on the outside. I couldn't imagine how one would go about eating them, but (after a short interval of working up my courage) decided I had to try. The starfish, once deep-fried, was crunchy on the outside, with the little tube-feet being all crispy, and squishy on the inside, salty and sea-tasting - sort of like the inside of prawn heads, not that I imagine many of you will have eaten those either. Possibly not an experience I'd seek out and repeat, but something to say I've tried once!
Time to go... more later!