Beijing – Day 2

The plan is to head out early tomorrow (notice I said the “plan is”) so I figured I’d try and get this written tonight. Today was a little less hectic than yesterday and we didn’t roll out of the hotel until nearly 11. Part of the morning we spent trying to figure out our travel plans once we leave Beijing. We initially booked 5 nights here, but depending on how things work, we may leave as early as tomorrow. We thought we had it all solved until we found out the overnight train to Xian was booked solid, at least for the next two days.

With no resolution to our travel plans, we left for the Summer Palace, about a 30 minute drive from the hotel. Like the Forbidden City, the place was huge, encompassing the better part of a lake roughly the same size as Lake Samish. The buildings here are also going under a lot of restoration (I assume to coincide with the Olympics) and it is quite interesting to be able to contrast the ones that are finished with those that haven’t been worked on yet. The sheer magnitude of the project is fascinating and I think only possible because the labor is so cheap.

From the Summer Palace we headed back to the city center and learned our second taxi cab lesson. Even though the car we got in had a taxi light on the top and a meter, it was soon evident that it wasn’t a real cab as the meter racked up the rate at roughly three times the speed as on the ride out. Being taken again was a little frustrating until we realized that even with the extra layer of slush, the whole scam only cost us about $10. Somewhere in Beijing though there is a guy making a killing selling phony taxi lights and meters.

The rest of the afternoon we spent in a building full of knock-off stores. For some reason, even though the Nike and Adidas stuff is in plain view, if you want the specy specy stuff (like North Face) you have to ask for it and they pull it out from behind the counter. It’s all very cheap (whether it falls apart the first time you wash it is a different question) and if you haggle enough it seems like you can get things for about 30% of the starting price.

The bulk of the time we spent at this market was at the rug shop. For about 90 minutes Angela had the staff digging through piles of rugs, opening them up and spreading them out on the aisle to look at (with the passing traffic having to try and walk around). If either of us knew anything about rugs, what we saw was probably reasonably priced, but the only data point we have is what a similar rug costs in Thailand (as negotiated by people who know as little about this kind of thing that we do). We did manage to separate ourselves from the store without buying on the spot, so we’ll see if what we can learn overnight and maybe go back tomorrow.

Our last stop of the day was an opera performance. Our travel book listed this as a must see as opera is something they have performed here for many hundreds of years (it turns out here is less about fat ladies singing and more about ornate costumes and acrobatics). The performance was split into two separate stories. The first was Farewell My Concubine, which, if you follow this kind of thing, is supposedly one of the more popular ones. For 60 minutes I thought I was in the 5th level of hell. I put it on par with the FantaSea elephant show in Phuket, but Ang says it wasn’t that bad.

The second show wasn’t near as bad, and had the first hour not been so excruciating, the whole thing might have even been worth the $50 (after all, we did get free peanuts, dates and tea). As it was though, it probably falls into the “two hours of my life I’ll never get back” column.

The big event for tomorrow is traveling out to the Great Wall (the part where all the tours buses don’t go). Hopefully, we’ve being exposed to all the obvious cab scams now and will get there and back with a few RMB left for dinner.