My day started with a bike ride down to the subway. I wasn't nervous about the actual ride... I was more nervous about crossing the road and parking my bike. I crossed the road okay. You kind of just bike between cars, they don't stop for you and you don't stop for them. It's really a judgement call when to proceed across the street. Parking my bike was another story. There were hundreds of parked bikes covering the sidewalks outside of the subway station. Plenty of the bikes had fallen (or been pushed) over and were laying in mud. All of the bikes have locks on them for the most part, but in Beijing, you do not lock your bike to anything stationary. Instead, you just loop the lock around your tire spoke and the frame of the bike so the wheel won't turn. So technically someone could still take your bike... and sell the parts I assume.
So we decide to park our bikes in a paid bike parking lot. I go to the entrance of the lot and make a motion for one of the tickets. The old Chinese woman proceeded to scream at me in Chinese, point angrily at my bike, and wave me away. This went on for about ten minutes while me and my group tried to explain that we wanted to park in the lot. Finally, Troy showed up and he spoke to the lady. Apparently, the only thing she was upset about was that the bikes we had bought all had bike seats that could be easily stolen. All she wanted was for us to understand that if our bike seats got stolen, she was not responsible. Yeaaahhh talk about language barrier. All I wanted to do was park my bike. If my seat gets stolen, I just buy a new one... I wish I could've told her that.
All 30 of my classmates and I crowded onto the subway and headed toward Tiananmen Square. When we arrived, we walked past the Egg, Beijing's Opera house. It literally is a building shaped like a egg, and it is sitting in a huge pond. It was pretty cool. Then, we entered Tiananmen Square!! How incredible! Tiananmen Square is really just a huge concrete slab in the middle of Beijing. It was crazy to picture the square packed full of Chinese people, screaming and shouting and protesting. It's scary to imagine the chaos that must've ensued when the military forcefully broke up the student protests in 1989.
However, there are no references at all to the violence that occurred in the square in 1989. In fact, today the square is quite the tourist destination. It was strange to be happily posing for pictures in a place with such a dark and controversial history. I also went inside the Mao Memorial at the square, which is were Mao Zedong's body is on display. There was a HUGE line to get into the memorial and file past Mao's glass casket. I was excited to see it at first, but once I was there, I was a little creeped out by the absurd number of Chinese people wanting to see Mao's body. I actually got sad for the Chinese people. Do the younger generations know how the Chinese suffered under Mao? People were selling all kinds of Mao paraphernalia in the square, like Mao wrist watches and hundreds of wrapped flowers to lay by Mao's casket (I'm almost positive the staff at the memorial resell these flowers everyday). It is apparent that the Chinese people revere Mao and regard him as some kind of a hero. A man even tried to sell me one of Mao's "Little Red Books". If I had wanted to buy it, would I have been allowed to bring it back to the US? It tells you how to be a good communist. There were also plenty of soldiers stationed across the square, wearing their red arm bands... it is quite a different world over here.
There was one fun part about Tiananmen Square. I was walking with Troy, and an old Chinese man started yelling Chinese at me. I sounded like he was angry at me for some reason, but Troy told me that he wanted to take a picture with me. How fun! So I called over some of my friends and we posed with this man and his family. That was only the first of many pictures that we took with Chinese families. They are fascinated by Americans, and it's kind of fun! Mother's would bring their children to take pictures with us, and they always acted so gracious when we agreed to take a picture with them. One small girl even poked Adrienne's face numerous times and giggled. So cute!
After Tiananmen Square, we were free to explore Beijing on our own for the rest of the day. I was eager to break away from the big group. We attracted too much attention. So I found some of my friends that wanted to go to the Chinese National Museum, and we headed that way. This was actually the first time that I ventured through Beijing without anybody that spoke Chinese. All we had were our maps and each other :) It was fun trying to find our way, but sometimes difficult trying to get our point across to people.
It turns out that the National Museum is closed for renovations until 2010! So, if you are planning on going to Beijing for the Olympics, don't put the National Museum into your plans. I was so disappointed. So then we decided to go to the Underground City, which is literally a city that was built underground. Our graduate assistant for the study abroad program told us that it is not a place that a lot of tourists go, so naturally I was very interested to go see it. Well it turns out that the Underground City is permanently closed, and the original Silk Market is permanently shut down, all because of the Olympics! Those dang Olympics keep taking away all of my fun. Apparently the Olympic Committee doesn't want tourists wandering into the Underground City, and of course the notorious selling knock-off goods at the Silk Market is illegal, so that had to be shut down before the Olympics. Add that to the list of disadvantages of the Olympics, along with perpetual cloud cover because China is manually making it rain to clear the air of pollutants.
Advantages of the Olympics being in Beijing: more signs in English and Olympic merchandise everywhere!! I bought a blue backpack today with the mascot Beibei swimming on it! If you want any Olympic merchandise, please do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to pick up anything you may like- pins, t-shirts, hats, backpacks, watches, cups, mugs, magnets, keychains, phone charms, decks of cards, coins, stuffed Fuwa mascots... the list seems limitless.
So after finding all of these closed places, we changed our plans and went to see the Temple of Heaven, which was wonderful! The Temple of Heaven is one of China's famous icons (next to the great Wall of course)! It was built in 1420 by the Ming Dynasty. We toured through the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the Echo Wall that encloses the Imperial Vault of Heaven, and the Circular Mound. The Echo Wall is a huge enclosed circle (a perimeter of 193 meters), and when you whisper into the wall, you can hear it all the way across the circle as if the person were standing right next to you! When we got inside the circle, of course we had to try it out! So, our group split into two and posted at opposite ends of the circle. My group yelled "Yellow!" into the wall, and then we got a return "Jackets!" It was so exciting!!! So we kept yelling "Yellow" with a return of "Jackets!". We got it on video too! The Tech community should be so proud. We're going to post the video online, so I'll add the link as soon as it is posted. Also, the very center of the top of the circular mound is supposed to be where your voice is the loudest.
After visiting these three areas, we took a walk along some trails inside the Temple of Heaven Park. The Quote of the Day is from David Schwartz reading a park map: "Walk past the Divine Kitchen and the Temple for Killing Animals, and take a left."
After we had walked ourselves into absolute fatigue, we rested at the Long Corridor where there were people playing flutes and cymbals and dancing with ribbons. Then we took the subway back to get our bikes, which were safe! Yay! We rode our bikes back to campus in the rain, and then went to the grocery store to stock up on water and snacks for our adventure to the Great Wall of China tomorrow. We are taking a bus ride to a rural part of the Great Wall, two hours outside of Beijing. It will not be as crowded, and I am hoping that we will see some blue skies :)
No comments:
Post a Comment