China - Beijing - 3/9/2005

Today was our last day in Beijing. Our suitcases were picked up early so they would be sent directly to Shanghai and save us the hassle of having to carry them ourselves on the trains and then up the mountain.
After a late breakfast Brad and I went out hunting for an Internet cafe that we heard was close to our hotel. We probably walked for about 30 to 45 minutes going into different stores and using my Chinese phrase book to see if anybody knew where we could find the Internet cafe, unfortunately only one person seemed to know where there was one, but his directions were broken enough that we didn't quite find the place until giving up and heading back to the hotel through a very small side street, and alas there I saw a computer against the window of a store, and I checked the store figuring since they had a computer they may know what an Internet cafe was, and it turned out to be the place. Considering the lack of signage I'm really surprised people even knew the place even existed, but we were able to communicate well enough where we each got a computer for an hour. This was a good break from being unplugged for almost four days.
We all got back together around noon to go on a Hutong tour. The tour consisted of being taken around an old neighborhood in a rickshaw bike and showing us one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in Beijing, some of the interesting things we learnt was how family status could be added as architectural features to houses so as to communicate social standing in a visible way. Our tour guide also took us into a person's home to see what the houses looked like on the inside. Some other items of interest were that once a house got acquired by a family it meant that they would be able to stay there for several generations at a very low additional cost. Many of the houses we got to see were in the area where most of the senior Chinese military officers lived, which probably meant that they were a perk of supporting the communist government in the beginning of its rise (although this was not mentioned in the tour).
After the tour we were driven to a restaurant that was like a huge warehouse and they even had many live creatures like crabs, fish an others that could be acquired as part of the meal. Our fare was pretty much very similar to what we had been eating so far, although it did have more of a slant towards seafood dishes.
Maybe one of my favorite and memorable "Heard and Overheard" phrases was uttered in this restaurant.
Ed Hemphill: "Hmm, this tastes good"
Rest of the Table: "What is it like?"
Ed: "Tastes like Chinese Long John Silvers"
The item in question, did actually taste good, and yes, I'd say it also tasted like Chinese Long John Silvers. Ironically for most of us I think this marked the point where we were starting to tire of adventuresome eating, and the familiarity of most of the dishes allowed us to already know what we liked and steer clear of the more unfamiliar dishes.
After lunch we proceeded to visit the Imperial Summer Palace. It is necessary to mention that the sunset views of the lake and the palace were beautiful I got to snap a lot of pictures trying to capture some of these views. During this visit we had one of the only group separations of the whole trip, since we came out a different place of the Summer Palace than where we went in a couple of people from the group decided to get ahead of the rest of us, and came out the same place we entered the palace, thus getting effectively separated from us and worrying us for a short while until Daniel and Kenneth in a double pronged search effort managed to find them and we were once again all happily reunited.
By the time dinner rolled around it seemed the whole group was ready for some good old style American fare, so that dinner consisted of some good old fashioned Pizza Hut. It looked like Pizza Hut in China was mostly eat-in vs. more delivery pizza in the US, but the funny part was when we asked for pizzas that would have half of one type and the other half a different set of ingredients, we almost gave the poor waiter a heart attack by demanding that much, so in the end we figured out we all liked pepperoni and made his life easier by only ordering a full pepperoni pizza. As the book said, Flexibility is not a Chinese trait.
After dinner we were driven to the train station where we said goodbye to General Lee. It must be mentioned that General Lee set a very high bar for all the tour guides after him, since he was very honest and straightforward, and had been doing this for a long time thus making him highly knowledgeable about Beijing. Additionally he got to live through the cultural revolution and that gave him a unique perspective of China and its people. I think we were very lucky in having him as one of our guides for this trip.
The train ride to Tai-han proved to be more fun than I expected with the biggest excitement coming when we had a group of strangers trying to come into our staterooms. Actually we later found out these were THEIR staterooms, and Daniel was trying to tradewith them so we could all be together. Once again Daniel proved himself worthy by convincing them to take our staterooms and thus a very interesting confusion was averted. The ride itself was fun because the people in the different staterooms that were open for partying were giving the place their own fun environment. So you could have a "Latin quarter" and a "Moonlight Bar" section and we got to visit between them. The drawback of this style of train ride was that the sleeping was kept to a minimum. But the way I looked at it was that we didn't get to travel on a train in China every day, so might as well make the most of the experience!