BoomerGirl Diary

When the opportunity to travel to Beijing presented itself to my husband and me, the first thing we did was buy a Frommer’s guide to Beijing. This is our favorite brand of travel guide, and it has safely led us through many journeys. The guide to Beijing, however seemed to be written by someone who strongly resents the path that Beijing city planners have taken, and probably rightly so. His descriptions of the ins and outs of tourism in Beijing were the most discouraging that we had ever encountered in a Frommer’s guide.

My husband was locked into making the trip, but I was not. It took me a while to recover from this first attempts at researching plans for our visit, but ultimately, I decided to go, and I am glad that I did, but we did not do any sightseeing on our own and only took the most well traveled tourist path.

Even a safely conservative trip is full of surprises, and our first surprise was the route that our plane took. We went from Kansas City to Chicago to Beijing, flying over Canada, the Arctic, and Russia. Since it was late spring, the route was sunlit the entire way, so we were strongly encouraged to keep the covers on the plane windows shut. This helps those passengers that can actually sleep on a plane, and makes it easier for those trying to watch the in-flight movies. I did not win the arm wrestling match with my husband for the window seat to watch “The Bucket List” however, so I cracked my window open and peeked out as often as I could. I do not expect to ever travel to the North Pole, but I have now seen the blindingly white ice that stretches for miles and miles at the top of our world. I was a little surprised to see how many roads and signs of development there are in Siberia, two things that were absent in the Gobi Desert of Northern China. Despite the luxury of 5 inches of additional legroom that the additional dollars we spent provided, I was not able to get any real sleep during our flight over the globe, so I arrived at Beijing’s bright new airport more than a little groggy. This may color my memories of the place. Our plane seemed to touch down on a runway that had been built for the previous airport, as we spent over 20 minutes taxi-ing to our gate.

Beijing’s new airport covers 10 million square feet and cost $3.7 billion dollars to build. Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s Terminal Three is said to be the largest building in the world and contains a $258 million dollar German designed baggage handling system that can handle over 19,000 pieces of luggage an hour. It is projected that this facility will handle 1.4 million passengers a week during the Olympics. In layout, the airport is a pair of triangles whose points face each other and are connected by a long line. The designer says the shape is similar to a dragon, and I guess the multiple triangular protrusions from the roof could look like dragon scales. Inside, the airport is sunlit and airy and inspirationally, sweepingly large. Practically, though, it might need some slight adjustments. The restroom I visited upon deplaning had only two western style toilets and one eastern style toilet. My stall did not have enough water pressure to successfully flush the toilet. If this had been at the height of the expected traffic later this summer, things would have gone bad fast. Everywhere we look there is someone cleaning or polishing or sweeping. Lines form for the trip though customs without the customary maze of poles and nylon webbing. It takes us over an hour to work our way through the largest airport in the world.

Despite the warnings of our travel book, the taxi ride to our airport is problem free, as is our check in to our hotel. My husband is attending a business related conference, and we are staying in the conference hotel. We do not generally stay in five star hotels, so it is a bit grander than we are used to - the type of hotel that provides bathrobes and slippers and evening turndown service. The bathroom mirror has a heated center area that does not fog over during long showers. There are fresh flowers in next to the sink, and not just fresh flowers, but real orchids. Then comes the biggest surprise…. There are orchids floating in the toilet.

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My first impulse is to fish them out, but I quickly recover from that thought and let them find their own way out. There is a permanent sign in the room that cautions us to not drink the tap water. Every day we are provided with two complimentary bottles of drinking water, and several more that we can purchase.

We are pleasantly surprised to find that our hotel is part of the upcoming Olympic facilities. We can see the Olympic stadium and the water sports arena from our hotel. Neither of these venues is completely finished, however, and they are fenced off and guarded from wandering tourists. It looks like construction will have to keep up its frenzied pace in order for everything to make its August deadline.

Once again, despite the cautions of our travel book, we booked some day trips online before we left the U.S. After a bit of searching, we had decided to take several of the trips offered by Gray Line. We had encountered Gray Line in other cities in the U.S., and we thought they might be the safest bet. Our first tour takes us to the Great Wall of China.

As promised, we received a call to our room informing us of our pick-up time, and our tour guide arrived punctually the next morning. Much to our surprise, we are the only ones on the tour! We are taken to the Great Wall by car, traveling through very productive looking fruit orchards and tree farms. The first part of the Great Wall that was rebuilt and opened to tourists is the Badaling section, but we are visiting the Mutianyu section, which winds along the tops of the mountains north of Beijing. Walking along the top of this portion of the Great Wall involves a lot of stair climbing in itself, so we take the optional cable car instead of climbing the mountain and then exploring the Wall.

It is a beautiful day and we are early enough to miss the bulk of the tourist crowds. We took the required pictures and rode the cable car back down the mountain where we braved the gauntlet of aggressive sales folk at a series of t-shirt and souvenir booths that lined the path back to our car. Next we were taken to a cloisonné factory where we saw how copper bowls and vases are first covered in delicate patterns of bent copper wire and then each section defined by the wire is filled with powdered colored glass. The resulting item is fired in a kiln, which melts the glass into a smooth surface that is further polished until it looks like finely painted china. The raw edges of copper along the surface are coated with 24 carat gold in a secret process. These copper works of art are much more durable than china, so we take the risk and buy a vase to take home with us. Lunch is part of our tour and is served in a room attached to the factory. We feel that our tour has not been an expensive investment, so it does not bother us to have this shopping opportunity be a part of the itinerary.

On the way back to the city, our guide asks us if we enjoy massages. We think she is just making conversation about general practices and say no, we are from the Midwest of the United States, and massage is not a part of our daily customs. We will have this conversation several times in the following days, but we don’t know that yet.

Our next tour will take us to the Forbidden City…