Day 1, Friday, April 16 (Beijing)
I can’t believe that I’m in China again. Most Americans don’t ever get the chance to go at all. Those few who are lucky to visit usually only go once. Here I am in China a second time, this time on a Healing Journey of exploration. We six from Marco Island arrived almost at dawn at Beijing airport, the same one where five other friends and I had arrived just two years ago. The huge international terminal opened in 2008, just two days before our last arrival. It still looked new this year. And, since our plane landed around 5:30 AM, Beijing time, the airport was, as before, almost totally deserted.
After we gathered our luggage, zoomed through immigration, and were waved through customs, our Wild China guide, Chris, met us at the gate to the outside, the COLD outside. He was young, earnest looking, and thin. He wore glasses and had a habit of pursing his lips together that made him look younger than his 30 years. He turned out to be an excellent guide and a thoughtful young man.
Inside the airport it was cold. Outside, it was icy. The temperature was in the low 30’s. Despite the frigid air, a smog haze hung over the city. The air was foul and smelled of burning coal. We all were very glad that we had our warm coats, hats, and gloves with us. Most of us also wore several layers underneath the coats, Florida wimps that we are.
Best Western Hotel, Beijing
After an hour’s ride during which we didn’t see much due to the haze and our bleary condition after flying for more than 12 hours and missing sleep, we arrived at our hotel—The Best Western Beijing. This hotel bested any Best Western I had ever slept in before. The spacious lobby with its tasteful decorations and amply-staffed registration desk felt more in line with a much more regal chain.
Due to our arrival at such an ungodly hour, our rooms were not yet ready so the hotel reluctantly offered to put us up in the rooms reserved for locals so that we could take a shower and nap until it was time to check into our proper room. I say “reluctantly” only because they thought us Westerners might be insulted by being given a small, windowless room on one of the lower floors. Chris informed us of this. Apparently, he had insisted that we were exhausted and wouldn’t care. In fact, would be grateful! We were.
The room was very small, but it was very clean with some lovely, though modest, decoration. The lack of a window gave us a slight claustrophobic feeling, but the shower was hot, the heater worked, the tea boiler brewed us a cup of Jasmine tea (it’s Spring—more detail later), and the beds, though rock hard for Chinese tastes, were heavenly. We showered and slept the sleep of the dead for a few hours.
After waking, we went to the lobby to inquire when we would be moving to our permanent room and to buy some water. I talked briefly to a young man and woman who staffed the gift shop. They actually understood my Mandarin, such as it was. I blew a kiss to the language CDs of Rosetta Stone. On the previous trip, after laboriously learning a little basic, survival Chinese, I had arrived all ready to try out every one of the 75-100 words that I knew. No one had understood me as I pronounced the tones all incorrectly and spoke too slowly, giving my words and sentences no meaning at all. But, this time, the young man asked my age (in Mandarin), as did others in the days that followed. When I told him, he was properly and politely shocked. Since, despite wrinkles, I don’t yet have gray hair (great genes), he probably didn’t have a clue. I bought two bottles of water.
The hotel gave us our new room on the 15th floor. It was very large with yellow, smoggy light streaming in through a large, picture window. The usual hot water boiler sat on a counter. Vases sat on glass shelves. The beds were softer for Western tastes. I preferred the hard ones.
After getting settled a bit, Jan and I bundled up and went downstairs in search of lunch which that first day was on our own. Jan and I opted not to leave the hotel in search of food but instead to try the small restaurant in the hotel. I actually had to ask for chopsticks. I guess the hotel was trying to be American, but at that point, we had yet to encounter anyone who spoke good English. This was OK with me. It gave me the courage and the excuse to dive right in and try out the little bit of Mandarin I had learned over the previous two months.
We encountered Pam and Jerlene in the restaurant. They had shared a pizza. Jan and I sat at the table they were just vacating and ordered noodle soup which sounded soothing after our long, tiring journey—Chinese comfort food. Jan ordered mushroom, and I asked for beef. The beef was grisly, and the soup was greasy with a greasy, unsavory flavor. It was not good at all. I tasted Jan’s, and it was very good. A cute waitress served me Jasmine Tea in a glass. Pam and Jerlene laughed at my dilemma—how to drink the tea through all those strands. I figured out that as the water cooled to a drinkable temperature, the strands fell, and I could drink a properly seeped tea. It was delicious.
After lunch, Jan went upstairs, and I went alone to a Bank of China a block away from the hotel. Upon our arrival, Chris had showed us where the bank was located in case we needed it. He had to spend the afternoon picking up the rest of the group from the airport.
Bank of China
Since we had a few hours of free time, and I wanted to stay awake to adjust to the 12-hour time switch, I decided to change a bunch of the 100 Yuan notes the Bank of America had sold me for smaller bills. Having only the equivalent of $15 bills in a country where prices were usually low was ridiculous. No one would be able to give us change, and we stood a good chance to be cheated.
The Bank of China proved to be quite an experience. Bundled up against the biting cold with a scarf over my mouth against the coal-smelling smog, I managed to cross a side street, maneuver around construction and several fences, walked through a crowded parking lot, and arrived at the bank.
At least four armed guards stood around the bank staring at everyone. A bunch of people sat on benches in the middle of the bank. Numbers flashed on a moving screen above the tellers, first in Chinese and then in English. An automated voice announced in Chinese and then very accented English that “number _____ could go to Window ___.” I realized that I needed to get a number, but where? Then, with gestures and the word “number,” I asked where I could obtain one. A nice young lady directed me to a machine in the corner of the bank. I pressed a button and received number 133.
Following the example of everyone else, I sat down in a hard chair and waited until the canned voice told number 133 to go to teller number five. Luckily it was also streaming above the tellers, or I would have been in trouble. On that first day, the Mandarin was spoken too fast for me to get the number, and the English was too unclear to understand either.
I went to my assigned teller. She did not speak English and looked a little worried. She initiated the transaction by speaking to me in Chinese. I gave her 700 RMG. She asked “qi ba yuan ma?” (700 Yuan?) and when I replied “dui,” she looked much relieved. I managed to convey that I wanted smaller bills.
That transaction still required a passport. I probably could have managed the exchange with gestures, but it was satisfying and so delightful to be understood even through a grill no less, that I walked in the clouds all the way back to the hotel. 60 hours of hard study had paid off in the short span of an hour. To most people this does not sound very exciting. To a life-long linguist, who also taught foreign languages, this was a personal highlight.
Foot Massages and Mandarin
I arrived back in our hotel room to find a lady there giving Jan a foot massage and another lady waiting for me. I lay on the bed, and she promptly began with my shoulder. Since she, too, spoke almost no English, I told her with gestures and a few words of Mandarin that I didn’t want her to do my neck. The massage was very hard and deep, but it felt heavenly afterwards. I actually think she may have realigned the bones that had been out of whack. It stopped hurting! But, both Jan and I did ache the next day. Jan even had some bruises.
Then, buoyed by previous success, I got up the nerve to try a limited conversation in a mix of the two languages with Jan’s masseuse who spoke a few words of English. We talked about our children (mine had one son). Like the man in the gift shop, they wanted to know my age. She also asked what I paid for my running shoes. I told her that I still worked. They also told me that they were very surprised that they understood me. So was I. Thank you once again, Rosetta Stone! Terrific method!
Dinner and the Group
Dinner in the hotel was in the large dining room. It more than made up for my lousy lunch! We met three of the four others in our group and Shawn Cartwright and Yinong Chong. Shawn and Yinong were our Tai Chi/Qigong teachers from the Traditional Chinese Culture Institute International at Washington D.C.. Yinong, who over the course of the following two weeks shared with us some of her wealth of knowledge about Traditional Chinese culture, has a PhD in her own right and co-founded TCCII with Shawn. Over the next two weeks, Yinong would give us a series of absolutely fascinating lectures. But, we all learned much, much more from Yinong than she gave us in her lectures. It seemed as if around every turn there was a lesson to be learned or something new to be explained or explored.
Donna, Ted, and Jiji, the other three in the group, proved to be very compatible. We chatted amicably, getting to know each other over at least 15 dishes which included a chicken mix in a pumpkin shell, lotus root in several forms, two types of dumplings (one beef and one veggie) plus a host of vegetable dishes, each better than the last—baby bok choy, broccoli rabe, asparagus in two different forms, straw veggie mix, etc. We topped off our meal with fruit for dessert that included the usual watermelon. Someone had carved a beautiful flower leaf with the watermelon rind to decorate the fruit plate.
After dinner, exhausted from our travels, we stumbled up to our room and slept the night through, thus eliminating any traces of jet lag. I wonder why it didn’t work the same way on our return home. It took us a week to adjust back to US time.
A side note on Restaurants in China
For those of you who are reading this and have not yet had the pleasure of traveling to Mainland China, I would like to note here that, for all of our meals, we were given a pair of chopsticks, usually wooden, a saucer-sized plate, and a small bowl. There usually was a Lazy Susan in the middle of a large round table. Wait staff placed dish after dish on the Lazy Susan which we spun slowly, usually the “polite” way—clockwise. Most meals consisted of at least a dozen dishes plus soup.
Alice, a Shanghai-born CPA, joined us from the US the next day. Although Alice objected to the practice and always asked for serving spoons or extra chopsticks, we often had to use our own chopsticks to grab morsels of vegetables, meat, tofu, or whatever from each platter and put it into our bowl. I noticed that the Chinese put all their food on one plate or bowl.
At first we Westerners separated all the dishes and used our saucer-sized plates for that purpose, only using the bowls for the soup, but we soon learned to use the bowl for everything, one flavor blending into another. The plate was for bones and refuse. Still, using the bowl, I took from one dish at a time (except the rice) so as to savor the flavor of each one. Rice bowls catch sauces which blend to finish the meal.
The rice always was sticky, clinging together nicely so that we could easily push it into our mouths with our chopsticks, holding the bowl close to our mouths. In fact, the locals eat with the bowl raised near the lips. Dessert always consisted of various fruits and always with watermelon, called “Western Melon.” The wait staff are always dressed in lovely, usually colorful uniforms, with each restaurant’s costume being unique. Napkins are rare, and you usually have to ask for them. There often are decorative pieces of cloth on each plate as you take your place, but these are not napkins as we quickly found out. Napkins are very much like thin Kleenex and usually come in tiny cardboard boxes, often with a picture of the restaurant or area on them. They are not at all like the napkins we use. Usually restaurants provided only a few boxes of the “napkins” at our table. We felt totally spoiled at those few restaurants that were generous with them.
I know that paper was invented in China, but there sure is not a lot of it being used. We often needed to provide our own toilet paper, were not automatically served napkins, and there was no Kleenex in the hotel rooms.
