The Great Wall
I attempted to send a couple of emails from my hotel in Japan, but did not quite succeed. Two things were going on at the time. Actually, three. First of all, I couldn't find my itinerary. Secondly, the keyboard at the hotel kept switching back and forth from Japanese to English. Thirdly, I had woken up with an urgent need for Kaopectate/Immodium/Pepto, which kept interrupting my efforts at communication. Fortunately, my rule #1 for international travel is to bring a lifetime supply of Kaopectate. I have never failed to need it.
I was rather worried about the intestinal distress, since we had two hour plus long train rides to Narita, the usual hassles with immigration to go through, as well as a ten hour plane flight, followed by a two hour one. It's not every morning that you wake up wondering if you should pack an extra pair of underwear and pants for the day. It was pretty bad. Thus, I left Japan in an extremely weakened state (much as I entered it). However, if you do ever find yourself urgently in need of plumbing, it might as well be in the country with the most advanced toilet technology in the entire world (if not also in several galaxies, and possibly the whole universe). Japanese toilets really are that good. If you measure the level of civilization of a country by the sophistication of its toilets, Japan is a world leader. I could go on and on about this, and I will later, but perhaps I should pick up in China, where I left off last time.
If you recall, we were leaving for Beijing on Saturday morning. Had spent the previous night on Halleck's couch (again), but still seemed to be breaking out in new bites (although not on the face, which was an improvement). Spots still large and unsightly. We rose at 5 am, in order to be ready for the 6 am bus which was supposed to be waiting to take us to the Great Wall, and then to our deluxe accomodations in Beijing. No such luck. We had been assured that we would have a much larger bus this time. However, when the bus arrived, it was the same one that had initially picked us up at the airport two weeks earlier. The one that was far too small - it contained seating room only, with no space for luggage (do Chinese people not travel with luggage??), so we had had to travel the two hours with all of it sitting on our laps. This time, after two weeks of shopping, we had accumulated more luggage, and also two additional people (who were going with us as friends and guides). The driver folded over one of the seats to show that there was (slight) room for luggage, but this left only 7 seats, instead of the 9 we needed. We were told repeatedly that there was no other bus.
After much gesturing and several telephone calls, it turned out that there was, indeed, another bus (which for some reason no one had wanted to bother with giving us), so we left at 7 am. Apparently, this is typical of the Chinese, and of Chinese "service". My instructor had lived for a year in China several years ago, and when someone asked her husband what Chinese he had learned in the course of their stay, he had learned the following: "don't have", "it's broken", and "wait". That pretty much sums it up.
Anyway, we finally left, I turned up my mp3 player, and drifted off to Dido. When I woke up, we were driving through mountains covered with trees. These are not the rounded, full-bodied mountains of Pennsylvania, for example, but closer to the jagged, sharp mountains of Costa Rica. If I were any kind of good geologist, I would be able to tell you why this is. In any case, they were beautiful. We began also to catch glimpses of an impossibly steep, winding wall which kept disappearing into the mountains, covered with people moving along it. If you go to China for nothing else, this is worth seeing. It's not so much that the Great Wall is great because it's massive, but because it is mind-bogglingly long, and impossibly steep, and winding.
When we got to the section of the wall which we had come to see, it began to rain. Hard. People crowded against our bus, trying to sell umbrellas. The wonderful thing about China is that if it started to downpour at Six Flags, for example, a single umbrella would go for well over $10, probably more like $20. Actually, you probably would have to buy an ineffective, cheap plastic poncho for something like $8. These umbrellas were oversized, fairly well-made, and selling for 10 quai, which is about a dollar and twenty cents. And that was BEFORE bargaining.
Shops lined the road to the Wall, with cashmere scarves and pashminas selling for about the same price as the umbrellas. I got two very touristy sweatshirts (for Faith and Laura) saying "I Climbed the Great Wall" for about $5 each. Another of us got hers for slightly over $3. Money is almost meaningless here. You find yourself bargaining in an impassioned manner to get the price of something down from 60 to 40 quai, but then you realize that you're talking about the difference between, respectively, about $7.50 and $5 -- for something that would be worth three or four times as much in the US.
The Wall looked just as it does in photographs and postcards, and we were at the most famous section, in Badaling. It was breathtakingly steep - virtually inaccessible to the elderly, and the safety rail was evidently a recent addition. There were signs saying things like: "no spitting on cultural relic" which still didn't quite ruin the mood. I wondered briefly if anyone is ever tempted to pee off the Wall, and later met someone in Japan who had indeed observed a Chinese tourist relieving himself in a leisurely, shameless fashion, off the Wall.
We left the Wall and proceeded to our luxury hotel, which turned out to be not as deluxe as we were lead to believe. That is, it was Western, and it had Western toilets, and it was clean, but the service was still Chinese service. That is to say, even though breakfast was supposed to come with our rooms, it wasn't served until 7, and we were taking the airport shuttle at 6 am. Furthermore, we found out that we had to pay for the shuttle, and that room service wasn't actually twenty-four hour service. Although our rooms technically had internet access as advertised, you needed to have brought your own computer along in order to take advantage of this feature. Our complimentary cocktails, as we were told at 9 pm, were only good for happy hour, which lasted from 5-7 pm.
So, in a defeated sort of way, some of us went to bed, while others of us bought twenty-dollar massages (another plus to China - cheap massages) and straggled into the hotel restaurant downstairs (still with spotted forehead). We ordered from the menu, and I noticed that the waiter wasn't actually writing anything down. Even when they write it down, half the time you don't get everything you ordered. I predicted that each of us would either have to reorder something or send something back, which is precisely what happened. We had three different waiters (as is often the case here), and still got terrible service. I can't figure out the system, but it absolutely does not work. And there was no excuse, since there were only two other tables with customers in the entire place. I won't go into the particulars of the bad service, since it would take far more time to write about than it's worth and would probably only confuse you.
Tomorrow I will write about Japan.
I was rather worried about the intestinal distress, since we had two hour plus long train rides to Narita, the usual hassles with immigration to go through, as well as a ten hour plane flight, followed by a two hour one. It's not every morning that you wake up wondering if you should pack an extra pair of underwear and pants for the day. It was pretty bad. Thus, I left Japan in an extremely weakened state (much as I entered it). However, if you do ever find yourself urgently in need of plumbing, it might as well be in the country with the most advanced toilet technology in the entire world (if not also in several galaxies, and possibly the whole universe). Japanese toilets really are that good. If you measure the level of civilization of a country by the sophistication of its toilets, Japan is a world leader. I could go on and on about this, and I will later, but perhaps I should pick up in China, where I left off last time.
If you recall, we were leaving for Beijing on Saturday morning. Had spent the previous night on Halleck's couch (again), but still seemed to be breaking out in new bites (although not on the face, which was an improvement). Spots still large and unsightly. We rose at 5 am, in order to be ready for the 6 am bus which was supposed to be waiting to take us to the Great Wall, and then to our deluxe accomodations in Beijing. No such luck. We had been assured that we would have a much larger bus this time. However, when the bus arrived, it was the same one that had initially picked us up at the airport two weeks earlier. The one that was far too small - it contained seating room only, with no space for luggage (do Chinese people not travel with luggage??), so we had had to travel the two hours with all of it sitting on our laps. This time, after two weeks of shopping, we had accumulated more luggage, and also two additional people (who were going with us as friends and guides). The driver folded over one of the seats to show that there was (slight) room for luggage, but this left only 7 seats, instead of the 9 we needed. We were told repeatedly that there was no other bus.
After much gesturing and several telephone calls, it turned out that there was, indeed, another bus (which for some reason no one had wanted to bother with giving us), so we left at 7 am. Apparently, this is typical of the Chinese, and of Chinese "service". My instructor had lived for a year in China several years ago, and when someone asked her husband what Chinese he had learned in the course of their stay, he had learned the following: "don't have", "it's broken", and "wait". That pretty much sums it up.
Anyway, we finally left, I turned up my mp3 player, and drifted off to Dido. When I woke up, we were driving through mountains covered with trees. These are not the rounded, full-bodied mountains of Pennsylvania, for example, but closer to the jagged, sharp mountains of Costa Rica. If I were any kind of good geologist, I would be able to tell you why this is. In any case, they were beautiful. We began also to catch glimpses of an impossibly steep, winding wall which kept disappearing into the mountains, covered with people moving along it. If you go to China for nothing else, this is worth seeing. It's not so much that the Great Wall is great because it's massive, but because it is mind-bogglingly long, and impossibly steep, and winding.
When we got to the section of the wall which we had come to see, it began to rain. Hard. People crowded against our bus, trying to sell umbrellas. The wonderful thing about China is that if it started to downpour at Six Flags, for example, a single umbrella would go for well over $10, probably more like $20. Actually, you probably would have to buy an ineffective, cheap plastic poncho for something like $8. These umbrellas were oversized, fairly well-made, and selling for 10 quai, which is about a dollar and twenty cents. And that was BEFORE bargaining.
Shops lined the road to the Wall, with cashmere scarves and pashminas selling for about the same price as the umbrellas. I got two very touristy sweatshirts (for Faith and Laura) saying "I Climbed the Great Wall" for about $5 each. Another of us got hers for slightly over $3. Money is almost meaningless here. You find yourself bargaining in an impassioned manner to get the price of something down from 60 to 40 quai, but then you realize that you're talking about the difference between, respectively, about $7.50 and $5 -- for something that would be worth three or four times as much in the US.
The Wall looked just as it does in photographs and postcards, and we were at the most famous section, in Badaling. It was breathtakingly steep - virtually inaccessible to the elderly, and the safety rail was evidently a recent addition. There were signs saying things like: "no spitting on cultural relic" which still didn't quite ruin the mood. I wondered briefly if anyone is ever tempted to pee off the Wall, and later met someone in Japan who had indeed observed a Chinese tourist relieving himself in a leisurely, shameless fashion, off the Wall.
We left the Wall and proceeded to our luxury hotel, which turned out to be not as deluxe as we were lead to believe. That is, it was Western, and it had Western toilets, and it was clean, but the service was still Chinese service. That is to say, even though breakfast was supposed to come with our rooms, it wasn't served until 7, and we were taking the airport shuttle at 6 am. Furthermore, we found out that we had to pay for the shuttle, and that room service wasn't actually twenty-four hour service. Although our rooms technically had internet access as advertised, you needed to have brought your own computer along in order to take advantage of this feature. Our complimentary cocktails, as we were told at 9 pm, were only good for happy hour, which lasted from 5-7 pm.
So, in a defeated sort of way, some of us went to bed, while others of us bought twenty-dollar massages (another plus to China - cheap massages) and straggled into the hotel restaurant downstairs (still with spotted forehead). We ordered from the menu, and I noticed that the waiter wasn't actually writing anything down. Even when they write it down, half the time you don't get everything you ordered. I predicted that each of us would either have to reorder something or send something back, which is precisely what happened. We had three different waiters (as is often the case here), and still got terrible service. I can't figure out the system, but it absolutely does not work. And there was no excuse, since there were only two other tables with customers in the entire place. I won't go into the particulars of the bad service, since it would take far more time to write about than it's worth and would probably only confuse you.
Tomorrow I will write about Japan.
posted by jessica rabbit at 7:42 AM
2 Comments:
I just returned from China last week, and simply have to give my experience at the Great Wall. . .
Ba Daling was a great place. There's a point where most sane people turn around and walk back to their bus. My friends and I looked at the Mao watch we had, realized we had three more hours, and pressed on. That is when it got steep! We went to the end of that section, and there were some points where the incline was between 60-70 degrees. It was absolutely amazing. I thought I was going to die a few times, but still amazing.
There were three crazy dudes who would run down the steep sections just screaming - in a way i admired them because they were just having a blast. There was a girl who was making her boyfriend give her a piggy back ride down some sections - bitch woulda rolled down the steps if it were me.
Finally - yes I peed off the wall. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go!
Hee hee. Sounds fantastic! I secretly wanted to pee off the wall, too, but restrained myself. Plus, as a chick, it would've been a bit complicated. I kind of wanted a Mao watch, too... or one of those bags, but I wasn't sure if I could wear him in good conscience.
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