No Great Wall. Not Even A Pretty Good Wall.

Thursday, October 13th

This must have been our most annoying/infuriating Beijing transit experience of the week. Before we left Seattle, we had booked two tours through this highly recommended company called the China Culture Center. The first was on Tuesday through the hutong, Tiananmen, and the Forbidden City. The second was supposed to be to the Great Wall on Thursday, with a stop at the Ming Tombs. (The bolded "supposed to be" is thinly veiled foreshadowing.)  Since the one on Tuesday was really good, we were really excited to see the Great Wall with them.

We were supposed to meet at 8:45am in front of the China Culture Center office. We had an address, a phone number, and plans for the subway. I should mention that the subway system in Beijing is great – clean, lots of English, cars that come every few minutes. But Beijing is an ginormous city, so it just takes a while to do anything. We got off at the subway stop we thought we were supposed to at 8:30. We thought we could just jump in a cab and get the rest of the way by 8:45 or 9:00 at the latest, which is when the bus actually left. This was one of those times when we just couldn’t catch a cab. We went into two nearby hotels asking them to help us get one (they just basically pointed to the street). One conceirge was really nice and helped us call the number we had for the tour group, but no one answered. They were also nice enough to write down the address in Chinese.

We decided to give it one more try with the cabs -- still no success. When none of the regular cabs would come over, we decided to do something we had avoided so far: take one of the motorized pedicabs. When I saw “pedicabs” in this context, I mean a tin box attached to a WWII era motorcycle – and I’m not even kidding. KLC and I were not even sure it would hold our weight. We showed the driver the Chinese address and she motioned for us to get in. We went for say, less than a block, when the motorcycle sputtered and died. She motioned for us to get out and then we were back on the street trying the whole routine all over again. A few minutes later, she pulled up in front of us and told us to get in. Being even later for our now likely departing tour, we went for it. She took us quite a harrowing distance – especially in the context of what we had seen the night before. She dropped us off on the street we thought we were supposed to be on, but she couldn’t take us the whole way because the motorcycle started sputtering again. What we thought would take only a few minutes, ended up being probably a half an hour of walking and wandering looking for the right address. We finally found it – at 9:45am. The tour and our day at the Great Wall were gone. The people at the CCC were extremely nice and gracious, but there was nothing they could do. In hindsight, we could have planned a little more, but I think it was just one of those things that happens in a megacity like Beijing.

We were both pretty disappointed about not getting on the tour. However, we had some free time in Beijing and we decided to take advantage of having a less taxing day. We went back to the CCC and asked them for some recommendations of what to do. They directed us to another hutong, but one that has been renovated to include lots of shops and cafes. It was a little westernized, but at this stage of the game, we were good with it. We found some things for the kids, postcards to send back home, and were generally relaxed since there were no cars zooming past us at a million miles per hour.

After lunch, we took a taxi (successfully!) to the Temple of Heaven. This is a rather big park just south of Tiananmen Square – basically in the middle of the city. There are obviously temples and other structures, but the main thing for me was that there were trees and just lots of green space. It finally dawned on me that I just hadn’t seen much of that in Beijing and it just added to the stress of being in such an urban environment.

That night, we had the conference dinner at a restaurant that served the famous Peking duck. I pretty much stuck to my regular eating repertoire of eating vegetables and fish on this trip, but food is a big part of travel so it's worth venturing out a little bit. I wasn’t that blown away by the duck, but then again, it’s not really my thing. It was still a very nice dinner and a good way to end the conference and basically our stay in Beijing.