Day 11 -- Beijing, China

I woke up in the middle of the night and squirmed around on the not-so-soft sleeper for a while. I even had the air mattress, but the bed was still horrible. I was awake for about three hours and spent much of the time staring out the window from my upper bunk. It looked like we were traveling mostly through farming country as I saw what looked like grain mills and grain loading machines by some of the railroad tracks off to the side. Most of the land also had a good layer of snow cover too. I finally got settled in to bed again to try to fall asleep. I put my extra pillow over my head to block the sound of the rattling walls and the general noise of the train. Not that I wouldn’t travel by train again, but this was possibly one of the most miserable nights of sleep I’ve had in quite some time. A couple hours later at about 6:00am, we were awoken by a train attendant knocking on the door. She collected the headphones, a plate, and the garbage—guess they want to make sure no one has time to steal things before we arrive at the next station. We turned on the GPSr to see how far out of Beijing we were. Turns out we were passing through Tianjin, the city that my Chinese laoshi (teacher) is from. We ate breakfast consisting of whatever snack foods we through in a bag before leaving (beef jerky, fruit leather, cereal bars). We pulled in to the train station at 7:15am; the trains are very punctual in China and will slow down outside of town to assure on time arrival and will leave your ass on the platform if you aren’t on the train at the scheduled departure time. Our guide for the day met us on the platform. He was a Chinese guy in his late 20s to early 30s named Kai and he had a very strong British accent. We met our driver and went to the hotel to check in. Our rooms weren’t ready, so we checked our luggage and headed out for a busy day. Our first stop was the Summer Palace at about 8:30am. Daniel was finally able to experience some of the things he had seen in my pictures. It was just as cold as when I was here last year, but not nearly as windy. It was nice having a guide with us to explain the history of the area. We spent nearly two hours and covered a lot of ground. I was happy that I actually got to see the marble ship there this time too (last year I rolled my ankle the week before while running in Tokyo and the walking was a bit too much for me). We left the Summer Palace and, per our request, Kai took us to the Old Summer Palace. He thought that this would be boring to us as it is mostly ruins, foreigners rarely visit it, and it serves as “a place for senior citizens to come do Tai Chi.” The ruins, however, made it very interesting and gave it sort of a more real flavor. Not that other places aren’t real, but the feeling is very different when something has been restored, maintained, or freshly painted. We took a lot of great pictures, made it to the center of a walking maze, and even found a virtual geocache. I didn’t see any other foreigners (at least not readily identifiable by looking at them), so we were sort of a novelty I looked on as Daniel knelt down to take a picture and a boy, probably about 7 or 8 years old, ran up to him, said hi, giggled, and ran away. This happened several times and I finally asked his father if I could take a picture. They obliged, then followed suit by taking several pictures of us with their two children. Another young boy, about 9 or 10, had his own camera and also stopped to take a photo of us. On the way out, a teenage girl approached me and asked in very good English if I would be in a picture with her friend, a guy who was probably 15 or 16. We finally got back to our van and looked for a place to eat. Kai was trying to take us to a noodle restaurant, but the two or three that we stopped at were full. We let him know that any place would do, so he found another traditional Chinese restaurant and ordered food for us as there were few pictures and no English on the menu. Everything was great except for the pickled spinach and the roach that Mom saw crawling on the windowsill when we sat down. Gross, but she said it was nothing compared to the rats she saw crawling on the pipes overhead at a restaurant in Suzhou. After a very filling meal, we spent about an hour and a half at the Forbidden City. Again, it was nice to have a guide to explain the history this time. Also, last time I only managed to see maybe half of the Forbidden City on my last visit. I’ll attribute that to the cold and wind last year—we could barely stand to be outside and would duck into a shop or building at just about every opportunity. There are lots of renovations going on right now, likely in preparation for the Olympics, making it difficult to get a lot of good pictures (Athens was the same way when I was there in 2003, so many of my pictures have scaffolding in them). We left the Forbidden City at 3:30pm and walked through Tiananmen Square. We took pictures here and there and made it to the other side in about half an hour. From there, we walked to our hotel (Capital Hotel), only a block away, but it was a BIG block and took us about 10 minutes. We were cold and exhausted, so we all lay down to nap for a while. Everyone slept except me. As tired as I was, I was struggling to fall asleep. When I finally did, one of the hotel staff knocked on the door and insisted upon coming in to “turn down our room” for the evening, despite the fact that I told him we were sleeping. He came in and closed our curtains the rest of the way and turned on a lamp. He left, I turned off the lamp, then tried to sleep again. It just wasn’t happening, so we showered then headed out for dinner at about 7:45pm. Dad was really craving steak, so we paid a visit to Outback Steakhouse on Wangfujing. Dinner was really good but expensive. There was even a Napa Valley (California) wine on the menu for 888RMB (US$111). Needless to say, we didn’t buy it. After a more than filling meal, we went back on the freezing cold street. I bought some new gloves (the thin fleece ones I have been using for the last year have been singed and made even thinner from my camera flash and just aren’t cutting it anymore). Grabbed a cab and went back to the hotel by 10:00pm and I promptly passed out.