In December Christina and I rode the train from Shanghai to Beijing for a week long holiday. We visited some of the turistic attractions of the city, hiked a section of the great wall and realized Beijing is not the place where we want to live.
The trip itself was interesting because we travel by train instead of flying. The cheaper train between Beijing and Shanghai takes one night hop and most of the people travel in sleepers. When we arrived on the train station 2 hours before departure the waiting hall was already full and once the doors opened, the Chinese people start running from the waiting hall to the train. There is a good reason for this. Chinese sleeper trains are very similar to transiberian trains but have a configuration in rows with 3 levels of benches. Your ticket only book the row in which you sleep but not the level so on boarding time, you need to run if you want to claim the lower benches. As we didn’t know this we let all the Chinese people board the train before us so we only had the top benches left.
This was actually my second time in Beijing but the first time for Christina. You can read what I wrote about on my first trip in 2008 about the city, the palaces and temples, and the opera and acrobatic shows. This time we visited the touristic sights around Tienanmen square, the forbidden city and the mausoleum of Chairman Mao. Those monuments are really impressive. I was very keen on visiting Mao because after seen Lenin in Moscow in June, I thought it was the correct year to show my respects to Mao as well. Chairman Mao is displayed in a laying position with strong illumination on his face. He looks a little bit less healthy than Lenin. Maybe because he died older? maybe the lights?
David meditating at Tienanmen Square
Beijing, that awful place to live
The pollution in this city is horrible. Unlike in Shanghai, you can feel there is a dense layer of smog at street level. The cold and the pollution takes away a lot of your energy. There is a big problem on the food safety side: I’ve visited twice Beijing and I’ve been food poisoned in both. Just for comparaison, It only happened once in Shanghai during the six months I’ve been living there.
A history apart are the traffic problems of this city. The city is massive and lacks a lot of infraestructure. Vehicles can barely move because the traffic is too dense, there are not a lot of highways but many multiple lane crossroads and massive roundabouts.
Chinese people playing Chinese chess in a park
Moving around in the city center as a tourist is a nightmare. Subway lines are insuficcient and the stops are really far apart. Taking buses is out of question for tourists because you need to master Chinese to understand them. So the only opntion to move around the city are the taxis. The problem is that the taxi drivers in Beijing are very spoiled. They normally ignore you when you hail them and if they stop, two things can happen. They may not like your destination and act like if they dont understand you and kick you our of the taxi or they may like it and try to rip you off asking for a ridicolous amount of money for the ride. We got tired of this and at the end we were hijacking taxis when they stopped on the traffic lights, ignore the complaints of the taxi driver and act as stupid foreigners. We were really thankful when the drivers took us without ripping us off.
I don’t think the problems affect only foreigners because I saw local people also losing their nerves. The root of the problem is probably that the taxi fare is too cheap. A taxi ride in Beijing is easily half of the price of Shanghai and as the Chinese government subsidize taxis in Beijing, they probably lost all their motivation to do their job. We could not find any phone number to call and send a complaint as in Shanghai.
Acrobatic Spectable
What Christina said:
Equipped with thermic underwear and warm hats we decided to face Beijing in December. We travelled there in an overnight sleeper train. The train station in Shanghai a lot more resembles an airport than a train station. There is a security check before entering (like everywhere in China there are 10 people standing around and nobody actually looks at your scanned luggage), there are several “duty frees” and there is a gate where you wait for the train, ours greeting us with an estimated 300 Chinese who all wanted to take our train too. Once our gate opened everybody immediately jumped up and, climbing over seats and gates, rushed to the train. Since we had designated seat tickets (for the hard sleeper category) we didn’t really understand this and waited till most people had left before heading to the train. We soon noticed why this was a big mistake.
Your ticket tells you which row your bed is in but in each row in the hard sleeper category there are 3 beds on top of each other, the top bed being the least popular one. Evidently, this was the one we ended up in. The problem with the top bed is that it is too close to the ceiling to sit on and that the opening from the ventilation system is right next to your bed so you have a constant draft of fresh air being blown at you. This is ok when your train is in Shanghai where the outside temperature is 15°C but once the train got close to Beijing and the landscape started getting snowy it was rather cold.
My first impression of Beijing was that it was a lot cleaner and less polluted than I had expected (although I would soon change my first impression). And it was cold. Very cold. The cold can be somewhat annoying when you spend an hour waiting for a taxi to be so kind as to stop for you but it can also be very amusing when you see the way the Chinese “equip” their children to stay warm. Wearing approximately 10 layers of clothes these children look like stuffed dolls with a little head looking out at the top. Very cute. The children probably remember Beijing as a very hot place where mum and dad had to carry them everywhere because they couldn’t move. As for the taxi problem we soon developed a technique of “hijacking” a taxi when it was forced to stop at a red light. Sometimes we were thrown out of the taxi again but often the taxi drivers brought us where we wanted to go to because they didn’t know how else to get rid of these stupid foreigners.
While in Beijing we visited the forbidden palace, the preserved corpse of Chairman Mao, ate Beijing duck and went to an acrobatic show. The actual goal and highlight of the trip however was to see the Chinese wall.
David jumping at Tienanmen Square
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