China Trip Day #4 - Sightseeing in Beijing

It was another spectacular day in Beijing.  We met Emma, our guide from our adoption agency, at 8:30 a.m. We are the only family from Great Wall China Adoption (our adoption agency) in Beijing this weekend, which means that we had Emma all to ourselves and she was very flexible in adapting the day’s schedule to what we wanted to do.  She nixed our suggestion to rent bikes, (she actually sounded downright-terrified about this idea) but accommodated everything else. While we like seeing the standard tourist sights, we like to explore and get off the beaten track and we don’t mind a lot of walking.  Emma delivered on it all.

After visiting the Forbidden City yesterday, we headed by car across the city today to the emperor’s former Summer Palace, which in its own way was as impressive as the Forbidden City.  It’s not as big, but given that the Forbidden City is gigantic, the Summer Palace only falls into the “huge” category.  The Forbidden City impresses with its sheer magnitude, but with greenery of any kind confined to one small area inside the walls, it’s not very inviting, whereas the Summer Palace sits between a lake and a hilltop, which we climbed both for the views and to see the Buddhist temple.

In Europe, we visit cathedrals, so here in China, we’re visiting Buddhist temples, and there was more to see after the one at the Summer Palace.  We stopped at the Lama Temple, also a Tibetan Buddhist temple, which Emma described as “small.”  Thus I anticipated one building.  I’ve since learned that like palaces, temples aren’t one building, but a series of buildings.  The temple is still an active place of worship and we saw a couple of monks during our visit.  In addition to a lot of tourists, it attracts pilgrims and worshipers.  Many of our fellow tourist carried around bundles of incense, which they burned in front of each of the five gates and then prayed.  Even amidst the throngs of tourists, it was still moving to witness.  

Our driver took us next to an area of central Beijing where the hutongs still make up a good part of the street grid.  You can think of this area as Beijing’s “Old Town”.  Hutongs are alleyways, or laneways, lined with single-story storefronts or courtyard doors that lead to a labyrinth of private dwellings. This is what Beijing looked like back in the days it was surrounded by a fortress wall and the hutongs we walked along date to the 1200s.  Words like “courtyard” and “alley” are usually followed by “quaint,” but the Beijing hutongs are better described as rough around the edges.  The structures are old and many are dilapidated, the general-store-like shops catering to the families living there are tiny and crammed with goods and except for the fully renovated and modernized houses, they don’t have indoor plumbing, which now explains why we saw so many public restrooms.  

We started down the Nanluogo Hutong, which in less than a decade, has transformed itself from a commercial thoroughfare serving locals to an alley with eateries, clothing stores, and bars.  Trendy frozen yogurt stands and even a Starbucks sit next to dilapidated storefronts, some only a few feet wide, selling street food.  Emma wanted to have us try traditional Beijing noodles, so she brought us to a tiny (as in four, very small tables) hole-in-the-wall joint, and with a lot of slurping up noodles, I successfully ate an entire meal using chopsticks.  

After lunch we continued our way through the hutongs and through parts of Beijing that prompted Emma to apologize for it not being pretty enough.  Pretty it wasn’t, but I loved these glimpses of everyday Beijing life.  We cut through Behai Park, which used to be the royal gardens and finished our tour for the day at Jingshan Park.  The hill in this park was created from the excavated earth when the mote around the Forbidden City was created and there’s a beautiful view from the top where you can see the entirety of the Forbidden City.  There are quite nice views of the rest of Beijing too (even better if it weren’t for the smog) and from up on that hilltop there’s no mistaking how incredibly big this city is.  

Emma led us back to our hotel on the subway, so we got one final adventure in for the day.  The subway system is extensive and Emma says they’re working on yet more lines.  During rush hour the trains are so crowded she often has to wait for a couple trains to pass before she can fit onto a car.  That makes it all more amazing the subway system was first built in the 80s.  

We arrived back at our hotel exhausted and ready to veg out in our hotel room for the rest of the night.  We need the rest too because we leave on a very early flight tomorrow morning to our son's province, Anhui we have a busy day the rest of the day as we get ready to meet Matt the following morning.