Eating like kings

  As luck would have it, our hostel did not disappoint us again. As we walked into the common area that the day before gifted us with a wealth of Chinese food, we found four of our companions from the night before about to embark on another journey. Yesterday's invigorating drink would be today's delicious meal, and we embarked on our second unexpected journey in two days. It was these journeys alone, through streets that again seemed empty for a city of this magnitude in country so populated, that helped to connect us through conversation and shared goals and experiences. 

  Despite getting lost again, this time for a fraction of the time, we reached our destination when at last we pushed wide-eyed through a series of the nicest hotels and shops, by which I mean Rolls Royce and Ferrari dealers, we had perhaps ever looked upon. It was in one of these buildings we found our restaurant, which was as equally as classy as the establishments we had passed.

  With our hunger growing, we sat at a circular table, perhaps more worthy of King Arthur than our group of tourists, confused as much by the menu, which was a veritable bible of Chinese cuisine, as we were about the dynamics of being in such situations. So after ten minutes, during which we each had a chalice of beer or wine set in front of us, we decided to order three ducks. To which our waitress replied, "The most is one and a half." 

Duck prepared right in front of us

  It wouldn't be the first time she would help us out. For her part, she was as patient as a goddess, offering us only smiles and tips on what exactly it meant to eat at this place. For its part, the duck was delicious, whether it was the skin garnished with sugar or the meat itself inside a hollowed out bun, what we came to know as "A Chinese Hamburger." Suffice to say, the experience was good enough to warrant the money we each spent on it, which turned out to be thirty dollars each.

What we really paid for

  When in Beijing.

New Year's Day

  As it were, we only had two full days, and frigid nights, in Beijing. The first, New Year's Eve, has already been described in great detail where we achieved the biggest goal we had on our itinerary: The Great Wall. So the next day was icing on the cake, where we made the best of what was left, as far as the city had to offer. That is, what we knew the city had to offer. It can confidently be said that four days, and that's being generous, is not enough to become familiar with the sights or sounds of a place, much less explore them to their core, but such is the crux of traveling.

  So after traversing the city the previous night to the cracking of fireworks and the promise of Belgian beer, we had intended to make our way to the Forbidden City.

  Unfortunately, this was perhaps our only disappointment of the day. Knowing we would wake up and peel back the thick white covers only to have to reluctantly take the next step, which involved bare feet and a frozen floor, it was not a difficult choice to deem sleeping for another couple of hours invaluable. As a result, our two-person party made it to Tiananmen Square in plenty of time to see hordes of people, mostly native, celebrating, presumably making a once a year trip to the revered location to look upon a gigantic picture of one of their most beloved leaders. As others did, so did we.

Mao's picture

  Once we had taken pictures and this experience in we made our way past Mao, easier said than done in both life and death, through one of two gigantic hallways, at each end capped by menacing metal doors that could resist even the most powerful of unwanted visitors. As what looked like an aesthetic plea to cover their threatening mass, each door had rows of ornaments upon them, shaped like a bell that was attached by it's rim, and we made sure to rub them as we passed, hopefully capturing some sort of Chinese good luck for ourselves.

  When we reached the other side, there was only a vast stone courtyard between us and The Forbidden City, complete with basketball hoops, a soccer field, and more vendors than I'd care to be approached by. Not to our complete surprise, given that it was a day when no business is expected to keep normal hours, we found the crowds we had for so long been following instead moving in the opposite direction, coming at us in a constant stream, eyes looking ahead, accepting the fact that bodily contact was a given. The Forbidden City was, for us, forbidden.

The Forbidden City

**More pictures at Tiananmen Square

The Celebration

  On a journey that turned out to have more highlights than we could have ever expected, the biggest one might have been what happened when we transcended into the New Year. We knew, even before crossing the border, two things about the New Year's celebration throughout China. One was that the holiday, at least while we were scheduled to be there, was reserved for family. The second was we would see lots of fireworks. Day or night, didn't matter.

  So when there were fireworks blasting during our late evening hostel dinner, we weren't surprised. When they continued somewhat consistently throughout the nine and ten o'clock hour, cracking in the sky like a roar of thunder spliced into a hundred little pieces and then thrown in every direction, we weren't surprised. No, it wasn't until after dinner, when we decided to go out for some drinks with five others, a journey which took over an hour of getting lost before we could find an open, but foreigner friendly, bar, that we were surprised. This was when we noticed across the street, at the same time as we were passing our destination, that they were selling fireworks for the masses. In fact, there were more fireworks than people.

What surprised us was the multitude of citizens, normal people, firing off a multitude of fireworks for a multitude of time. To be fair, this shows only a small part of it.

  Just from the background noise, you can begin to hear the amount of fireworks that were being shot off. 

Fly by Knight

  As for the unexpected, it consisted of where we stayed and who we were with, which, though we never would've realized it, were one in the same.

  Another thing we were blind to up until the point we stepped foot inside was our accommodations. It was our first time using a hostel, which was quite a bit different from a hotel, despite the simple change in spelling. The negatives were immediately apparent, as the first thing we wanted to do was shower after our extended day of travel (12 hours of traveling to cover three hours of flight). As hostels would have it, it wasn't our room in which we got to do this, but in a group sleeping area, where upon entering it felt like trespassing into the lion's den, trying not to disturb the sleeping, and possibly ornery, inhabitants, complete with concerns over which of the four light switches to flip (I chose incorrectly twice) as well as which shower hose to use (there was one in the toilet area and one next to the sink).

  Beyond that, our tile-floored room was exceedingly cold, with only a meager hot water heater to keep it warm, which we could not control. In older days, you get the feeling the less intelligent might have prayed to it for its mysterious production of warmth (only after a handful of burns).

  The positives, however long it took them to appear, far outweighed these small negatives. As we wandered back in after our day at the Great Wall, slightly confused and heavily weary, we walked in upon a feast of none other than the authentic Chinese food we had been looking to eat throughout the day. From tofu to duck to fish to eggplant, our hosts who ran the hostel had ordered food for the guests who were present at the time,  which up until that point did not include us. It was at this point we realized what the "community" room was for (besides the warmth we didn't get in our rooms). Though the guests went off on their own like arms completing separate tasks and legs making separate journeys, they eventually came back to this center through the gravitational pull of comfort.

Ana, Karey, Christophe and Yirka

  So it was with these people that we got to eat dinner, and simultaneously got to know. And so we met Christophe and Yirka, a couple from Belgium on a year-long paid vacation, and Karey, an English teacher in China, and his girlfriend Ana who had come to visit, both of whom came from Florida.

"Hello, you want postcard? Magnet?"

  As for the expected, we knew the place we had to go while in China was the Great Wall.

  So on our first morning in the land of so-called communism, we woke early, knowing we had to inject ourselves with energy in the form of our Hostel's breakfast (more on that later), as it would soon be stripped from us by the blistering cold like mother nature by the Chinese, quick and in its entirety. We navigated the city with the ease of experienced travelers, with the only minor snafu coming in the scowling form of a female bus worker who didn't understand Chinese (as I spoke it). It was nothing which could diminish our determination to see the Wall, though.

  Our point of entry, which goes by the name Badaling, is one of the most well-taken care of parts of the wall. While it have would felt more authentic to look upon crumbling bricks that now resemble only frames of their former selves, fragile enough to scatter when pressed upon by the strongest winds as if choosing to give way to the inevitability of time, being able to walk upon the wall as soldiers did for hundreds of years was pleasing in another sense. Despite the fact that same sense was continuously bombarded by the mountain winds, determined to turn our blood to ice, our awe outlived the brevity of the mere hour we could spend hiking before having to travel back down before we ourselves crumbled in our frames of gloves, hats and scarves.

  As this section of the wall wound up, over and between mountains that better resembled gigantic piles of boulders than jutting spires of rock, the hike proved to be challenging. In our hour, which seemed closer to two given the frigid conditions, we managed to scale our fair share of the wall, brushing off a pair of persistent adversaries in the cold and souvenir sellers. It would have been the latter, with their excellent abilities to force conversations using their three-word vocabularies (hello-magnet-postcard), who'd have forced us off the wall in warmer weather.

*As always, more photos can be viewed on Photobucket

Maoney

Chinese New Year

  With our first four-day vacation in the entire span of our time in Korea (outside of our measly five vacation days), we chose to go to China, making what we thought would be a cliche trip to one of the world's most populated countries. Upon leaving, of course we knew not what to expect, having heard etchings in both positive and negative light as to what would be contained inside those tight borders.

  We left unsure of our timing, hearing the travel would be horrendous, as hordes of people made a mass exodus from Korea in the name of the Chinese New Year, the Asian equivalent of January 1, but of course, as with everything in comparison to American tradition, more extravagant, time consuming and, for lack of a better word, holy.

  But much to our surprise, the travel which we expected to be a cyclone turned out to be a breeze, while our time, which we thought would expire much more rapidly as we scampered from one household monument to the next, turned out to be anything but cliche. Despite the narrow two days we had to absorb the essence of China (and the Chinese), both the expected and the unexpected took place, making one post not nearly enough to sufficiently describe the happenings of our trip.