I Hate It When...

The NY Times beats me to the punch! I always have big goals for my updates here, but I slack off way too much! I meant to write about our visit to Beijing and Xi'an back in October but it never happened. I meant to write that the nice people we met on the Great Wall gave us super tips about fun places to visit in Beijing, such as Pure Lotus, a fantastic Buddhist, vegetarian restaurant, with fabulous atmosphere, beautiful presentation,

great tableware and really funny names of dishes on their giant menu. I felt totally behind the times when I opened up the nytimes.com travel section to see the 36 Hours in Beijing article where they wrote just about the same thing.

At least they didn't also mention the Red Capital Club, another place we were directed, a bar/restaurant where Mao and his buddies used to hang out, furnished with old Communist relics, where all the drinks had names relating to the bar's theme. From the Club, the Maitre'D put us in a cycle rickshaw, where the driver took us through streets of the old hutong to the Red Capital Residence - the related hotel, where you can go into the courtyard, slip down a rabbit hole and end up in an former bomb shelter, where you can have a drink and watch old Communist propaganda films in the background. If you're heading to Bejing, we highly recommend an evening at one (or both) of these places.

Oktoberfest and China Part II

Before I continue to update on our China trip, I thought I'd just share a fun story about Oktoberfest. Chris participated in not one, but two competitions! One was eating and drinking, and one was a tag-team Erdinger drinking competition, more of a marathon than a sprint. Chris and 3 of our friends were victorious and won us free drinks for the rest of the night and an Erdinger "Oktoberfest" set, complete with 2 glasses, 4 beers and coupons for free things around Singapore. Here are photos of the victorious group before and after their win!






Now...Onto China...

After a restful day/night at the Simatai Guesthouse, we moved on to hike the portion of the Wall between Simatai and Jinshanling, about 5 km. We had been told by several people that it is difficult and steep at the beginning of the hike and then it calms down, but I didn't get that at all! I felt like I was climbing up stairs and downstairs, and upstairs and downstairs, and...you get the idea. For about 5 hours. It was fun though, and the views were beautiful. I did feel a bit dumb though - we brought Chris' daypack and left our other bags in the car. However, we didn't really measure out how much that would hold, versus what we wanted to bring with us. It ended up that I had to carry a shopping bag (brought from home, but it happened to be a Duty Free bag) on our whole hike - I got some weird looks for that!

This is the scary bridge he had to cross to start our day:



and some of the ups and downs...



We had alot of people following us, trying to get us to buy 'beer, soda, water, postcard, t-shirt?' - all said in rapid succession. But, being used to hawkers from our time in Turkey, we were able to shake them off pretty easily. We had been told that we'd find our next host through his wife, who'd have my name taped up to her stall of 'beer, water, etc...' and we were very unsure about whether or not this was actually going to work out. But sure enough, we walked into the nicest, most 'together' tower we'd seen that day, and there is a woman, smiling like crazy, with my name on her table.






She served us tea, on our 'terrace' where we hung out for the afternoon, looking at the wall in all directions.

Eventually, her husband arrived, at just about sunset, and walked us into town to his home/shop/restaurant for a fabulous dinner!

Some shots from dinner:





After the humongous dinner (including, among many other things, a plate of dumplings for each person!) we took the 20 minute walk by flashlight back up to the watchtower, shared a bottle of wine on our new friends' watchtower and took our walk home along the wall to our home, where Mr. Sun had set up our beds for us and we went to sleep to get up at 6am for sunrise.

After seeing the beautiful sunrise, we walked down to meet our driver to take us into Beijing. We got stuck in a ton of traffic on the way home, but had some time to relax before starting on our whirlwind tour of Bejing and Xi'an...to come...

China...Part I

I had planned to write about our amazing China trip as soon as we returned but, as I actually had to work a bunch, and I had 1,211 pictures to sort through, it kept getting pushed back, but I'm here now...

Our trip had an auspicious start as soon as we left Singapore. We were so responsible and booked our flights months ago, while we were still in Turkey. On the way to the airport, we were chatting with our taxi driver who also had plans to go to Beijing that same week. It turned out that his entire trip, with a full tour, cost about as much as one of our airline tickets. We also did not have a nonstop flight to Beijing. This turned out to be to our advantage...After the short leg of the flight, we had a layover in Kuala Lumpur. From there, we had about 6 hours to Beijing. I was disappointed to find (since I am so large and need alot of space) that I was stuck in a middle seat on the plane. While we are sitting in our tiny, cramped seats, someone comes back and softly asks to see our boarding passes. He tells us that they'd like to give us an upgrade to Business class "but separate seats. Separate. You won't be able to sit together." By the first "sep-" I had (sophisticatedly) shouted "OK" started crawling over Chris, likely elbowing him in the face to get a move on and continuing "yeah, yeah, we see each other all the time." Let me make sure to give them a plug...We were flying Malaysian Airlines, my new favorite airline...And the flight attendants were so nice that they actually asked someone else to move so we could end up sitting together. While one person was putting our bags in the overhead compartment, someone else was handing us glasses (glass glasses. Not the plastic stuff that cracks if you accidentally bite down onto it) of champagne so we could have a pre-take off flight. Chris was so exhausted from all of his hard work at school, so he fell asleep immediately after takeoff. I, on the other hand, love feeling important and pretending to have a luxurious life, so I stayed awake for most of the flight, taking advantage of more drinks "keep 'em coming" might have been my exact quote to the amused flight attendant, the best chicken and beef satay I have had to date, and the personal video screen filled with movies and television shows. Oh, and when they served us food, they set our tray tables with LINEN. We should not have to eat off of mere plastic tray tables, surely not! Basically, it was the best flight I've had since the "NY to Orlando upgrade of 1993" and has led me to the undeniable conclusion that: Coach is for suckers.

Anyway, back to the actual visit to China. The trip was partially to visit China and partially to visit with Chris' parents who were in Beijing as part of a longer trip around the country. We had planned to be with them on their tour from Sunday to the following Saturday (we were arriving early on a Saturday morning,) but visit the Great Wall of China on our own beforehand. Being the over-researcher that I am, I contacted about 5 different companies that do hikes of the Great Wall with a one night camp out on the Wall, nearly signing up with one, before I inadvertently realized that we actually weren't meeting Chris' parents until Monday so I decided to start organizing a 2 night trip on our own. In subsequent research, I came across a guesthouse at the Simatai section of the wall, along with contact information for a man in the US who created the website for the Chinese owners (who didn't speak much English.) I decided to contact this guy, who ended up being an invaluable resource when planning the trip. I'm not going to put his name on here, but we'll call him J, because I don't want him to have to be harassed by anyone else! Basically, he called the owners in China for us, to organize our stay and also organized a driver to bring us from the airport out to the Wall, hold our luggage while we hike, and take us to our hotel in Beijing 2 days later. For our second night's stay, I had contacted the (also invaluable) tour company representative that Chris' parents were using for their tour, and asked if she wouldn't mind contacting a man who I had read about online as someone who rents out a watchtower on the Wall and provides dinner and breakfast to his guests (and who also does not speak English.) As we were going to be hiking along the wall, I wasn't sure how we would hook up with him or figure out which watchtower belonged to him. I was told by the tour agent "his wife runs a stall on the wall, and she'll have your name taped to it."

There were so many loose ends here, I wasn't really sure if it was going to work out, but never one to like failure, I had my fingers crossed and...It couldn't have turned out better! The driver, who I was warned (there's a theme here) didn't speak English, actually brought his college-aged, English speaking niece along for the 3 hour trip, just to make sure we could figure out all the details about where he should drop us off, when and where he should pick us up, and if there was anything else we needed. She gave us her phone number, so we could contact her for any reason, which we did when we decided we wanted an earlier pick-up time on our final day (after 'roughing it' for a few days, a girl needs a couple of hours at the Silk Market...More on that later)

We arrived at Simatai at about 9am on Saturday morning and, in the pouring rain, started our walk. After following the "walk along the river and take a left at the first watchtower" type of directions we got from J and thwarting some would-be Wall-escorters/postcard-hawkers, we arrived at the Simatai Guest House to meet our friendly hosts for the night - "You're the Americans!" he said as we walked up to the place. After finally getting some sleep on the beds (wooden planks with 1" thick foam stapled to it) in the Guesthouse, we awoke in the afternoon and had some amazing sweet and sour chicken, fried rice and homemade (and delicious!) noodles and a couple of beers. After our first meal in China, and after the rain cleared and we realized we could see the Wall extending as far as we could see, from our patio, our host offered to take us on a walk (he did speak a little English) up to the Wall for sunset. It was awesome.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Guesthouse and our sunset hike. We are heading out to Oktoberfest today, so I can't write more but I will update the rest of the trip in the next day or so...