Toerke

Two 2nd class one-way tickets to Beijing and a 1995 Insight Guide Beijing – I didn’t find anything more recent in the Mongolian bookstores. That’s our preparation for the Chinese adventure. Not a lot really. At the station we find out that the clock has been set back an hour last night. Fortunately not the other way around. We share our 2×2 bed train hotel with Gaz and Kacy, a young British couple on a world trip. After a chess tournament and a beer marathon the train rolls into a hangar where the train is lifted and the wheels are changed. The national anthem blasts through the speakers and line-up of suits salutes the iron dragon. Welcome to China!

Just before Beijing we get a taste of the Great Wall at Badaling. Busloads roll on and off. It’s National Day and golden week, a week off. We’ll realize that pretty soon. It’s busy everywhere, even busier. We stroll across Tienanmen Square and disappear into a yellow crowd of kids waving the Chinese flags and their parents busying about with digital memories. At the Donghuamen Market Beijing specialties are lined up on sticks – fish, frog logs and pork, but also crickets and scorpions and edibles(?) of uncertain origin.

In small restaurants as well as in the crowds at the Beijing zoo we are an attraction. It is obviously quite interesting staring at the white foreigners. Kids giggle and try lesson one “Hello. How are you?’ Everyone’s eager to practice their English. Head massages, foot massages, haircut and a ride in a scootertaxi. We get a taste of it all.

Roger Moore leads the way through the squares, gardens, temples and other sights at the Forbidden City. Wanfujing Street’s screaming signs boast shopping centers, one even bigger than the next. Spend your Yuans! Capitalism is warmly welcomed and nourished here. A blanket of greybrown smog covers the city.

We’ve seen the Great Wall. Or rather, we’ve felt it. In the soles of our feet and our buttocks and everywhere in between. We been dropped off at Jinshaling at twelve and picked up at Simatai at four. Plenty of time to experience this stone phenomenon up close. The work of a megalomaniac, what an idea the build a construction like this! But it is pretty and impressive. The slide at the last steep stretch adds a little extra fun to it all.

Well there it is. We’ve seen all we wanted to see. Tomorrow we’ll dig into a Peking duck and then we’ll probably head for Xian where an army of baked soldiers awaits us.