We were up at 6am
this morning to make sure that we could take advantage of an
unexpected treat, While we were undergoing our undercarriage
replacement last night, one of the train guards had come through and
distributed voucher for breakfast and lunch in the dining car. That
said breakfast consisted of a boiled egg, a few pieces of bread and
some butter and jam was neither here nor there – it was free, fresh
food. After we had eaten, we went back to the compartment to start
packing and then back to dining car for our free lunch – rice,
veges, and a delicious dish of sausage, carrot and some sort of root
vegetable in a tasty sauce. After a few weeks of Mongolia's
meat-and-noodle-dominated dishes, Kate was in heaven.
By now the train was
travelling through some quite dramatic scenery and after lunch, the
Western passengers all crowded around the two open windows beside the
corridor wielding their cameras and taking hurried snaps between
tunnels. As we pulled into Beijing just before midday, the air coming
in through those same windows signalled our arrival in warmth.
Although it was still fairly early, the temperature was now in the
high 20s, on its way to the low 30s.
After getting off
the train, the first order of business was to pick up the tickets for
our various jaunts on the Chinese railways, which I had bought
online. This was easier said than done. We cycled through a number of
ticket offices/counters before we found the right one and when we
did, we discovered that I hadn't printed out enough of the
confirmation details. The woman also wanted more money from me, which
I wasn't expecting – I thought they were fully paid for.
Eventually, she started to say 'Commission, pay me' and we realised
that there was a separate (and thankfully nominal) payment that had
to be made because we were getting the tickets from a station
different to the one that we would be leaving from. Because we
couldn't get all of the tickets in one go, we gave up and went in
search of the metro, so that we could get to our hostel. This proved
to be much simpler – and indeed, the journey was quite a pleasant
experience: the carriages are air conditioned and the whole system is
relatively user-friendly.
Emerging from the
metro, we pulled out Kate's iPhone and set about trying to use Google
Maps to find our way to the hostel. But try as I might, I couldn't
figure out how our apparent location on the map related to what I was
seeing around me. A friendly local stopped and asked if we needed
help and after figuring out where we wanted to go, he pointed us up
and across the road. We thanked him and headed off, but I still
couldn't reconcile the map with our surroundings. And then it hit me
– the strange and rather large shaded circle around our location on
the screen was indicating the error that had been introduced into the
GPS location by the Chinese government. It was showing the general
area in which we could be found, rather than pinpointing our exact
location. Armed with this knowledge, I fell back on my old-school
map-reading skills and had us at the hostel in no time at all.
As we were checking
in, the Australian couple from the train arrived. They, too had been
relying on Google Maps, and had managed to get comprehensively lost,
which made me feel a little better. The hostel is located in one of
Beijing's famous hutongs – narrow, quiet streets or alleys formed
by lines of traditional courtyard residences. The hutongs lend
Beijing a wonderfully near-rural feel. Tree-lined and relatively
peaceful, they run perpendicular to the main shopping streets, so
it's possible to go from the hustle and bustle and glitz and glamour
of a super-modern mega-city to something akin to a little village
street in the space of just a few metres.
After checking in,
we walked outside and into a small restaurant two doors down, where
we had one of the nicest Chinese meals I've ever had. My mum was born
in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, so Chinese food has been a
staple for me for as long as I can remember. Growing up, rather than
settling for whatever was on our doorstep, we would always seek out a
better class of restaurant, with more authentically Chinese food. But
nothing I've eaten in the past really compared with this meal - the
food, which arrive almost as soon as we had finished ordering, was
simple, but the flavours were clean, fresh and complex. There was a
very helpful menu with pictures and English names for all of the
dishes, but we didn't look quite closely enough at one of the
pictures, so one of the dishes we ended up with was pork with some
pretty powerful chillies, but even that was really nice. We also got
some chicken, veges and sausage fried rice.
After lunch, I
headed back to the railway station – on foot this time – to pick
up the tickets, passing a few odd sights on the way there and back,
including a guy sitting on a step outside a shop with a big
freshwater turtle on a leash and a big group of middle-aged Chinese
sitting around in a little park outside a hotel while their
fancy-looking dogs of all shapes and sizes gambolled around them.
Thankfully, this
time the ticket transaction took place with a lot less bother and
hassle, although it did take some time, causing much consternation
among the locals in the queue behind me (I wanted to turn around and
tell them to get in a different queue, but, language barrier...).
In the evening we
went out in search of a nearby night market. The directions we were
given at the hostel front desk were wrong, but we found it
eventually, but then we almost wished we hadn't – it turned out to
be a wholly sanitised simulacrum of a night market, with a single row
of stalls, all selling the same thing, set up beside a busy road. The
food looked anaemic, the stall holders slightly desperate, this was
not what we were after at all, and we turned, disappointed, and
headed back to our hutong, where we had a pretty good dinner in a
duck restaurant across from the hotel.
During our wandering
we're already noticing that the girls are having a bit of trouble
adjusting to the Chinese traffic – Zoe in particular. Having seen
the way that the UB drivers behave, they're now pretty good with the
cars and trucks, but Beijing traffic is half cars and half bikes and
scooters/mopeds. These latter vehicles act as if they're a hybrid of
car and pedestrian, happily ignoring the laws that apply to both –
they sail through red lights, drive on the pavements and generally
just go wherever they want, whenever they want. To make matters
worse, the scooters are mostly electric, so they're virtually silent.
This can create some pretty surreal scenes, with great hordes of them
zooming by without a sound, but can also pose a real danger to the
uninitiated and the non-vigilant, as it's all too easy to step in
front of a rapidly approaching scooter if you're not super careful.
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