My boyfriend and I started planning the trip and saving our pennies in February, and we just returned from 2.5 weeks in Beijing, Luoyang, and Xi’an.
Any questions?
How are those city names pronounced? Chinese transliterations always mess me up.
Did you try any snake or dog? (yes this is serious).
I spent a week in Beijing once. What were your general impressions of the place? Did you see any of the touristy things, like the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, or trek up to the Great Wall? I found the first two fascinating, and the Wall booooooooooring and a tremendous waste of time, myself.
Did you try Beijing Duck? Oh my goodness, there is nothing like actual Beijing Duck as prepared in Beijing.
I pronounced them Bay-zhing, Lo-yon, and Shi-ahn, but someone who speaks Chinese will probably be around to correct me.
gimme some impressions or things that stuck out? Just curious to see what you noticed as I’m probably too used to it to notice, but I might be able to explains some mysteries you might have seen/experienced. BTW, what country are your from?
English j is closer than “zh”, I think. Bay-jing. Luoyang is pronounced the way it’s spelled. Lwo-yahhng. Shi-an is about as close as you’re going to get in English. Pronounce “an” like in “android”.
Did you use a squat toilet? (Too personal perhaps? I am amused by people’s reactions to those :p)
When come back, bring bird flu.
I went to Beijing a month or so ago.
- Where in Beijing did you stay?
- What was your favourite restaurant in Beijing?
- Did you get “ripped off” a lot?
- What was your favourite market?
- Which section of the Great Wall did you visit?
- Your favourite souvenir?
- What is the freakiest food you tried?
- Where would you visit if returning to China?
- Did you learn any Chinese?
(For my part:
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Friendship Hotel – a fairly good, somewhat dated “garden hotel” far from the tourist districts and subway lines. Decent value, good breakfasts.
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Xiao Wang’s Home Chinese Restaurant is AWESOME.
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(At least) thrice I paid too much for stuff – a dishonest taxi driver, a seal and a cheap robe. Lots of overcharge attempts though. I’m sure I got ripped off more than I realize, though.
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I liked the Silk Market and the Clothing Market in Sanlitun – both with incredibly cheap rip-offs, which have held up well thus far.
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I went to a couple of sections whose names elude me at the moment.
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A “Swise Mades” Rolex watch.
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I tried the scorpions at the Night Market.
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Ni hao, xie xie, useless odds and ends.
Nope, no snake or dog, but my boyfriend tried both beetles and grasshoppers. His reaction: beetles are a bit sour and crunch, and grasshoppers taste like really crunchy chicken.
Beijing is enormous. Huge. Gigantic. There’s no describing how big it really is. It’s also dirty(polluted), some parts are smelly, and the traffic there is insane, both in terms of volume and in terms of how people drive. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of actual rules of driving; the one rule I truly saw being followed was “Do anything you want as long as you honk your horn.” There are also TONS of bicycles.
Also, everyone spits and most men seem to chain smoke wherever they happen to be.
Beijing is changing incredibly fast. Most of the old hutongs, or alleyways in which people have lived for generations, are being torn down. Bars, clubs, and restaurants appear and disappear. There’s construction of buildings and sidewalks everywhere. Olympics-mania has taken the city, and they’re doing everything they can to make the city seem first-class before 2008. That’s one of the reasons why we chose to go to China right now.
Touristy stuff? Yes, of course. We saw the Forbidden City, Tientan Park, the Buddhist Lama Temple, the Taoist White Cloud Temple, Tien’nanmen Square, and shopped at several indoor and outdoor markets. We hiked 10 KM (about 6 miles) from Jinshaling to Simatai on the Great Wall - hardly any tourists, and spectacular, though a difficult hike.
And yes, we tried Beijing Duck at one of the famous Beijing Duck restaurants. It was uber-yummy.
From the US.
Things that really stuck out for me: the cultural differences. People spitting and chain smoking, indoors and out. People staring - no concept of visual privacy (even down to toilets in some places). When we were in Luoyang, I think we were the only Western tourists in the city, and it felt like we were the talk of the town while we were there - though I did notice that people were much more likely to approach us and very friendly, as opposed to the big cities.
Babies not wearing diapers but split pants instead. What do people do at night? Let their babies pee anywhere? Or wake up every time the baby has to pee? Babies being taught to “go” in the street. I saw WAAAAY more baby genatalia than I was expecting to see. Is it a “Look, I have a boy!” type thing? Don’t they think the cold air might not be nice on bare baby butts?
Do all pregnant women wear the same uniform? I think every pregnant woman we saw was wearing black corduroy overalls with embroidered cartoon-like characters on the front.
Seeing small children in Xi’an selling flowers at night in heavily trafficked areas. I was told by someone who had lived there for a while teaching that those children don’t go to school because people have to pay to send their children to school. Instead, these kids get to buy more flowers to sell if they make enough money each night, and if they make more than that, they get to eat. It made me really sad.
The “hello” game: We walk down the street and pass a group of teenagers. When we’re half a block away, all of a sudden they all yell “Hello!”
How more accidents don’t happen with the way people drive, particularly in Xi’an - there were more busses and bicycles in Beijing but Xi’an seemed full of cars. We felt like we were risking death every time we wanted to cross a street.
Yes - there were very few places in public where we found western toilets (except KFC and McDonalds). If you gotta go, you gotta go. I wasn’t all that concerned about the squat toilets, though I am certainly more comfortable with Western toilets. I had to learn to bring my own toilet paper in, as there was never any in the bathrooms. Also, never any hot water and only once did I find soap. I was glad I brought hand sanitizer.
The worst toilet was in the Luoyang train station. It was just a long trough with stalls set on top, and running water going through - like an open sewer, because I could see (and smell) everything that had been done before I went in. I almost barfed.
Didn’t french kiss any dead chickens or play with chicken poop, but I did end up with a cold that won’t seem to go away. I think partly it’s my respiratory system recovering from 2.5 weeks of pollution, dust, and smoke.
- The Far East youth hostel (it’s in a hutong directly south of the Hepingmen subway station, pretty close to Dazhalan shopping area) the first time we were in Beijing. Oh, and one night in the Great Wall Sheraton thanks to a relative of mine who’s living and working there. Talk about contrasts. When we came back through before we flew home, we stayed in Saga youth hostel, but it wasn’t what we were expecting it to be (fellow travelers sang its praises everywhere we went) and were we to do it over again, we’d maybe stay in the HI in Worker’s Stadium instead.
- We didn’t eat in many restaurants, other than when we had Beijing Duck. Mostly we ate from grocery stores and street food. The pancake-egg-scallions-chili sauce thing was fantastic. Jian bing, I think it’s called. That was YUMMY. I also had a pomelo the size of my head. We did a lot of “point to the menu and be surprised by what we get” - in a muslim restaurant near the Far East hostel, my boyfriend got a little bitty plate of lamb and onions, and I got a wagon wheel -sized plate with chicken, veggies, star anise, whole garlic cloves, and tasty sauce, all over some sort of pastry. It was enough to feed 6 people.
- The first time we bought something (a daypack), we did, but after that we were pretty savvy, and we even got complimented on our bargaining skills a few times. I’m sure we got ripped off by menus, but we didn’t get ripped off by tourist attractions, as they were charging everyone the same price (as far as we could tell). We did have one bad taxi experience but we only took 3 taxis the whole time we were in Beijing. Mostly we walked and took the subway.
- I got some fabulous deals on the pearls at the Sanlitun market. I didn’t think clothes or shoes were a good deal at either market (we did lots of “shopping” before we actually bought anything). Some of the places started waaaaay too high, which makes me wonder how many Western tourists just pay the first price asked. I was interested in a wool coat at one point, which was in good condition other than the buttons were falling off, and started bargaining. The guy started at 1100 RMB! I couldn’t get him any lower than 600, and I could find a better coat for less in the states, so I just walked away. Non-clothing items seemed to be better deals. My favorite place to shop was the Panjiayuan market. We got some amazing deals on shadow puppets, jewelry, beads, and silk items there. I think it’s really only open on the weekends, and our last day in China we spent most of the day there shopping. I also liked it because we weren’t being grabbed or screamed at as we walked by (unlike most of the other markets and shopping areas). Whenever I was looking for something in most places, I would just give up or refuse to go into a place when someone grabbed at me or screamed at me. Do they not realize it makes people want to buy from them LESS when they do this?
- Jinshaling to Simatai. The only other tourists there were from our tour bus. We did have some self-appointed “tour guides” who wouldn’t stop following us to about the halfway point, and after that we looked up how to say “no” and “go away” in the phrase book, and we mostly got left alone after that.
- Probably all our pictures, though of the things we bought in China, probably a hand-embroidered textile I got at the Panjiayuan market. I also nearly broke my leg in Luoyang by stepping into a manhole whose cover wasn’t on properly, and I have a lovely bruise on my shin that will probably last til 2006.
- I mentioned already that my boyfriend ate beetles and grasshoppers. I didn’t eat anything all that freaky, though it was a freaky experience pointing at menus and hoping for the best. Everything ended up being edible, though. I did eat a new fruit - dragonfruit- that I’ve never seen in the states.
- We would like to go back to see Shanghai and go up the Yangtze river - hopefully before the 3 Gorges Dam is finished. I’d definitely go back to Xi’an. There are other parts of China that we heard about from fellow travelers that I’d like to see as well.
- Ni hao, xie xie, yao, boo yao, sher, boo sher, shway, jiega (hello, thank you, want, not want, yes, not yes/no, water, this)
My wife spent the first 30 years of her life in China (birth+) and when she goes back to visit she gets that too. It’s a normal reaction to the air pollution.
My wife makes that for breakfast too, it’s like an Chinese omlette. It’s the chili sauce that makes it.
I personaly find Beijing to be clean, since they have tightened the enviromental restrictions and kicked a lot of heavy polluting companies out of the city.
I hope you found some out of the way Chinese restaurants to try food from. Many of the big resaurants are real rip offs and don’t serve quality Chinese food.
Xi’an has to be the most polluted city I’ve ever been in. Was it polluted when you were there?
Beijing is clean compared to Xi’an and Luoyang, but it’s still a huge, dirty (with dirt and pollution) city. There’s so much construction going on that there is dust everywhere and huge (though quite orderly) piles of dirt and debris, especially where they’re knocking down hutongs.
The restaurants we ate in, other than the famous Beijing duck one (and I think one other near the lama temple), were all out-of-the way, either in a hutong near our hostel or a little hole in the wall type place serving whatever the local specialty was. I think the best dinner was the 3 yuan bowl of soup with noodles at a little noodle shop inside the old city walls in Luoyang. Both of us got a huge, filling meal for about 80 cents (total). I also enjoyed our hotpot meal we had in a restaurant in the Muslim quarter in Xi’an.
Xi’an’s air was definitely the worst, especially inside the city walls. One day we bicycled around the old city walls (the air was much better up there) and then walked around the city, and the pollution was so bad that it made my eyes water and sting and hurt the back of my throat to breathe.
“China lung” is a pretty common ailment to anyone visiting China. Depends on where you are, but a lot of air from dust, construction, automobiles and factories, or combination thereof.
increasing number of locals use diapers with their babies at night. Split pants by day and pampers by night. Some of my relatives, who are very local without much money, do that with their kid (s). Kids in China potty train generally much earlier at 1+ years old.
At least nowadays, pregnant women have clothes. Heck, even 6 years ago, my wife had trouble finding domestically made pregnancy clothes. There were a lot more on the market 2 years ago.
Other stuff you mention is just the way it is in China. Interesting and thanks for sharing.
Believe it or not, they can’t put paper in the toilets because people take it.