Wednesday, July 16 Today started a bit crazy.  We were tired after spending a late night trying to distill our belongings down to a volume that would fill one less bag … in the end, it didn’t work.  We realized laying in bed that the station listed on our train tickets didn’t match any of the names of stations on our maps and that we needed help deciphering the nickname.  At breakfast we asked our host, who was very helpful, but nervous about the city traffic and our ability to get to the station on time.  She hustled us out the door and hailed us a cab.  She was great and we HIGHLY recommend our B&B, The Mao’er Hutong B&B, to anyone in staying in Beijing.

We made it to the station with plenty of time to spare.  We figured out our train car and sleeping berth with ease and made friends with three recent university grads soon after boarding.  They were happy to practice their English and were headed to their hometown of Datong.  Josh took a few naps on the 7 hour ride and Jeannette even caught one herself.  We saw some amazing views along the way including beautiful mountains, rivers, countryside and more.

When we finally arrived in Datong, our new train friends all took photos with us before parting ways.  As we exited the station, the local CITS agent (Official China Gov’t Tourist Person) grabbed us.  It was just what we wanted for Datong.  We reserved train tickets, both for tomorrow night’s overnight train ride to Pingyao and for train tickets for the next night’s overnight ride from Pingyao to Xi’an.  The second tickets we will pick up in Pingyao from the local CITS person there (who actually runs a hostel), but it is nice to have it out of the way.  In addition, we decided to buy the CITS transportation package to see the Yungang Caves (easy enough to get to by local bus) and the Hanging Temple (not easy to get to without arrangements).  This was nice because Jeannette really wanted to do both and we couldn’t figure it out otherwise.

After taking care of business, we took a cab to our hotel, in the center of Datong.  It is very different from Beijing.  That said, Datong-ers speak very highly of their city and are very proud of the city’s history, full of periods of great glory and now they are proud of their bountiful coal supplies and boast of providing Beijing and all of their province with power.  After we checked into our hotel, a very nice one, we walked around to get a quick sense of our bearings and then headed to one of our best dinner’s yet at Deyue Lou.  As it is so close to Mongolia, Datong is the place to get some mutton hotpot, and that is just what we had at this Muslim-run restaurant.  They didn’t speak a word of English or understand a word of our attempts at Mandarin (not even Tsingtao) or our attempts at charades.  We just started nodding yes in response to every question.  After the craziness of our ordering (the waitstaff was incredibly attentive and helpful), the food was amazing.

On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at the city’s Drum tower to have a look and called it an early-ish night.  We did notice that Datong is a bit off the tourist path, most notably we get the same stares as anywhere else, but here people are surprised enough that they aren’t prepared in any way to hawk their wares, we do get the occasional “hellooo!” especially from young children emboldened (and directed to do so) by their parents.

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Tuesday, July 15 Today we started with another lovely breakfast cooked by our B&B host. We left feeling nourished for the exciting Great Wall adventure we had planned. We used the local bus system to get there (as opposed to the tourist buses) and still feel quite accomplished by this fact; we even made it onto a special speedy bus.

We went to the Badaling section of the wall. We climbed and climbed. We did the side with crazy steep undulations first. Jeannette stayed strong throughout, though Josh was worried for a bit about his not-so-athletic wife. We should also mention that Jeannette did the climb in flips. This concerned Josh greatly, but Jeannette had blisters from walking in wet shoes yesterday. She felt quite confidant in her 4 years of San Diego flips training, and has previous flips experience running a mountain forest in Bulgaria on her resume to support her claim of flips as valid footwear for the day. The flips served her well on the Great Wall climb.

The guidebooks all say that Badaling is the most touristy, but this super hilly part of Badaling had just a nice sprinkling of people. The other portion of Badaling we did second was nuts, but in a fun way. And all the tourists were Chinese, which made us feel like we were experiencing something more authentic than super touristy (though the Disneyland-esque theme park feel you have to navigate through to get to the wall at all in the first pace is unnerving). We got some amazing photos all along the climb, then decided to take our life in our hands and ride the “sliding car” down the mountain side, as we couldn’t readily tell how to get off the mountain without redoing every undulation again. Plus, all our Chinese tourist comrades were doing it and if they were going to ride in a rickety old amusement park ride that burns brake rubber down the side of a sheer cliff, so were we. Needless to say, it was the most dangerous thing we’ve done so far on the trip, but there’s still time and Jeannette still hasn’t had the fried-lamb-on-a-stick-street-food she wants that even Josh is afraid of… When we made it down the mountain, lives intact, we took our bus back to Beijing.

We walked back to our hutong to document it with photos and went to Passby Bar for an amazing dinner and then we accidentally drank 1.75 L of beer. It’s awkward for us to order beer by the milliliter and we were surprised when Josh’s beer came in a pitcher. Though now, we want to try to find a pitcher like that to buy.  We took some nighttime shots of the hutong and did some more shopping. We bought a nice tea set. We’ll have to see if it makes it home in one piece.

Then we had the stressful job of packing our shopping and combining our stuff into manageable bags. We are excited for the rest of our trip but we loved Beijing and our hutong and our B&B and are a little sad to be leaving. Josh is especially sad to be leaving his home of 5 weeks. Tomorrow we leave for Datong.

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Monday, July 14 We had a great Chinese breakfast at our B&B. We took took care of some travel business and found a contact to buy our plane tickets from Xi’an to Guilin through our B&B host and also bought our train tickets to Datong. We started our Beijing sightseeing for the day by climbing to the tops of both the Drum tower and the Bell tower. It rained all day but we still managed to see a ton of sights and maintain a steady level of dampness along the way. We did some major Hutong exploration, found some sweet hipster hangouts, and bought more tees for Josh. We then went to check out Confucius Temple and the Yonghe Gong, a Tibetan Lama Temple. Here, Josh took a quick snoozer on Jeannette’s shoulder while a few girls took photos of him (Jeannette saw the lens on zoom) on the sly while he kept still. He has had quite a few girls ask to have their pictures taken with him while he’s been here, because they say he is “handsome”, “hot”, “cute” or “David Beckham”. By the time we finished the Yonghe Gong it was about 4pm and we were famished. And wet. We cabbed it to the 798 Art District, a repurposed electronics factories now used for art galleries, exhibitions, studios, cafes, etc. We checked out Josh’s new favorite warehouse space and grabbed a bite to eat at one of the cafes. We then began a misadventure trekking through the rain for about 2 hours before finally cabbing it the last bit of the way to check out the Olympic sites, specifically the National Aquatic Center and the National Stadium (aka the Nest). The buildings were awesome to view lit up at night and we did get to see so many different parts of “real” Beijing on the way. At this point it began to rain harder so we grabbed a cab and hightailed it back to our fabulous B&B to dry out and catch some early shut eye before climbing the Great Wall tomorrow.

P.S. We see a fair showing of Celtics gear. Being worn and being sold… NBA Champions…
We say go Celtics to the kids sporting a jersey whenever possible and they seem to enjoy it.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008 This morning we got out the door a bit late at 10am because we felt the need (read: Jeannette felt the need) to reorganize our stuff so we knew who had what and where everything was. We started the day right away by walking to the Forbidden City and from there on to Tian’anman Square. We walked over to the Opera House for a closer look before taking the subway to the Temple of Heaven. Before we could go any further we hit food crisis and popped into an all locals supermarket and pointed at prepared foods from the deli counter for lunch. We got many many smiles as we sat at the nearby tables with the locals to eat straight from the plastic bags. Then we headed into the Temple of Heaven grounds. Josh was certain we needed to view the buildings in the opposite order than we were headed, so we walked through the side gardens first and took many photos Chinese birds and saw many different forms of Chinese exercises occurring. Then we saw the buildings in increasing order of grandness. We headed back to the subway, stopping first at the Pearl Market (decidedly not our scene), and went to Ritan Park with the Stone Boat Cafe where we had drinks and apps and saw a classmate of Josh’s, Pam! From there we subway-ed to Wangfujing shopping street and Donghuamen Night Market of crazy foods where we parted ways with Pam and returned to Wangfujing where we are having street cafe beers before a nice walk home.

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Saturday, July 12, 2008 We are together again after a month apart. We are checked in to our lovely bed and breakfast, the Mao’er B&B, in the Mao’er hutong. Not only do we SO HIGHLY recommend our B&B, but we also superly recommend walking around our particular hutong.  And that link about the Mao’er hutong is very informative about hutongs, hutonging, and specifically about our hutong.  We walked around our neighborhood, saw the Bell and Drum towers, walked around Houhai and are now sitting down to dinner and cold beers. A couple more pictures follow the jump.

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I can’t tell which mapping program is better so I have included two maps.

We are headed in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning in the upper right (i.e., Northeast) corner in Beijing.  Since the green and red push pins are not labeled with the appropriate city names and do not tell us “geographically hindered” people what cities they are “tacking”, here’s the list in chronological order:  Beijing, Datong, Pingyao, Xi’an, Guilin, Yangshuo, Shenzhen and ending in Hong Kong.

Map #1

Map #2

Here is the first map zoomed in a bit differently.  The map of the states beneath it is set at the exact same scale just so you can get an idea of how far we will be traveling.

Sunday, June 22 Today a smaller group of us went for a long bike ride to see some of Beijing. Although somewhat crazy, as it turns out, seeing Beijing by bicycle is great and pretty easy to do. We first rode to the new collection of olympic buildings. The information/media building, nanatorium and stadium, “the bird’s nest” were all highlights. The skyscraper with a silhouette of the olympic torch is also interesting. We next were treated to home visits of several relatives and acquaintenances of our Chinese TA. It was nice to see the interiors of several homes and meet our TA’s family. They all lived in mid- and high-rise buildings from about the 1950’s and onward.. We next rode through the more traditional Beijing city fabric of the Hutong (alleyway) and Siheyuan (courtyard house). These tiny streets and mostly beautiful old houses are a terrific part of the city. Many thousands of acres of these streets are razed each year as the Beijing redevelops and densifies. We finished our ride at the city’s Bell and Drum Towers. Cental features of the main North-South axis. Although it may seem like a quick list of sights, this bike ride lasted about 10 hours. After the ride, it’s back to work, ignoring studio is over.

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Links added by Jeannette and subject to change