World Tour 2 - Beijing, China

First, the pictures I promised from the ranch in Spray, Oregon:

Beautiful, right?

Now, on with our story. When I woke up at 4 AM to head to the airport last Monday morning, I had that dry, snotty pain in my throat and nasal passage that told me I was in for a good long cold. During our whole time in Beijing I was sustained on a regimen of Excedrin and Sudafed during the day and Benadryl and melatonin to go to sleep, which kept me functional enough to enjoy the days but not enough to go out with everyone at night. But it definitely made Beijing less fun than it could have been. Oh well – shitty health is an inevitable hazard of Whiff Tour (especially for me – my immune system is not the greatest).

The flight was long and uncomfortable and I spent most of it banging my head against my Rhodes and Marshall application personal statement, trying unsuccessfully to write a good draft. I probably should have spent it sleeping, but I was determined, and I always want to take advantage of the peaceful time for work and contemplation that long plane rides give me.

If you’ve never flown to Asia and are wondering how it feels, please refer to this picture I took of myself upon arrival.

We arrived in Beijing at around 4 PM and were picked up by Jen, the daughter of Jean Jones, our host. Jean is the principal of the International Montessori School of Beijing, an elementary school where we performed on our first day. She’s been hosting the Whiffs for several years now – in fact, her oldest daughter Kat is currently dating a Whiff from a few years back. Very graciously, Jean hosted all of us in her house, and though some of us had to sleep on couches, it was very comfortable and we all had a good time getting to know their family.

The first night was composed of eating dinner in the Jones household and trying to stay up as late as we could muster – I think I lasted until about 8:30 PM. But that was okay, because the next morning we were up early to go sing concerts. First we sang at the Montessori school, which was made up of adorable bilingual students who adored us (one kid was wearing a Whiff t-shirt he got during ‘08’s tour), and second we sang at Shi Gia, a public Chinese elementary school. This was a very cool experience – the kids and teachers all knew a little bit of English but not too much, but they were ecstatic to have us and very obviously wanted to impress. (For instance, upon arrival we received a long and boring tour of the pictures on the wall, depicting all the cool activities the students can participate in at the school). Our performance was broken up by two kids coming on stage with microphones and reading from scripts long speeches about how grateful they were to have us (first in Chinese, then in English). At the end, we sang Do Re Mi with the student choir and they gave us colorful little charms that bestow happiness, luck, money, etc. (reminiscent of Christmas ornaments, but not).

In between these two concerts we visited a chic shopping center with a less-than-chic mall within, which was our destination. This mall was stuffed with stores selling knockoffs of every brand ever. Our destination within this mall was Jessica’s Tailor Shop, recommended to us by Jean, where we could get ourselves hand-made tailored suits for about $150 and hand-made dress shirts for about $15. My suit, which I bought at Sym’s for over $250 my freshman year, is pretty janky and has never fit me well, so I decided to make an investment. I chose a fabric that wasn’t quite black, wasn’t quite navy, and wasn’t quite gray – a slateish color that was between all of these. I like it and am very excited to wear my new suit next year. I also got two dress shirts.

I felt like I had spent a good amount, but two Whiffs were a cut above the rest. Mike got two suits and five shirts, and Sam Hafer got one suit and twelve shirts. They spent about the same amount of money, over twice what I spent. Mr. Lavigne has now sworn to go on the Poor Tour Diet, because he’s spent all of his money at the tailor’s; Mr. Hafer was not available for comment.

After the tailor’s we had the first of several greasy tasty Chinese food meals. Chinese food isn’t much different in China than in the US, except there’s no conventional orange chicken or teriyaki chicken. We had a LOT of dumplings and quite a few noodle dishes, as well as a delicacy named Thousand-Year-Old Egg, which I think was an egg aged in vinegar or something like that. Later that same night we had a dinner at a very nice restaurant where we were served six ducks between the fourteen of us. The method was to take some duck skin and some meat and put them into a thin pancake with apple and cucumber slices and a thick, sweet sauce. I’ve had this dish at P.F. Chang’s before, but it was much better at this restaurant. During our dinner we saw a performance that included a magician who dropped her bird at one point, a man who balanced on improbable arrangements of cylinders, a small contortionist girl who blew our brains out of our skulls, a man whose mask changed instantly when he threw his cape in front of his face, and a beautiful violinist who played silly simple chords in rhythm in a tacky outfit.

Before dinner, though, we went on a Hutong Tour, which was a rickshaw tour of the old town in Beijing. This was fairly unimpressive – our tour guide obviously knew less than Wikipedia and had pretty terrible English, and the buildings were mostly run-down residences. However, we had some time walking through a cool market district by a lake, and climbed a tower with a seven-meter-tall bell on top. And of course, there was the perk that everything we saw was about 800 years old. The best part, though, was meeting up with Kevin Olusola, a good friend of Stephen, Jerry, and me from Yale who took this last year off to study Chinese in Beijing and so will graduate with all of us displaced ‘10ers in 2011. Kevin was enlisted by Jean to be our guide and helper (since none of us can speak much Chinese at all). It was a joy to see Kevin, especially because he’s obviously thriving in Beijing and was glowing with positive energy the whole time we saw him.

Unchronological as my narrative was, that was pretty much all of the first day (Wednesday) – two concerts, tailor, Hutong Tour, and dinner. I went home after dinner because I was sick, but some other Whiffs went out and had (I’m told) a rollicking good time. While I sleep my Benadryl sleep, let me spend some time telling you my impressions of Beijing.

Beijing would suck to live in. It has the two worst qualities of LA to the max: sprawl and smog. The smog is its worst quality: I did not see the sky during our entire stay in Beijing. Even an hour outside of the city on the Great Wall, the blue was still hazed over with white. In downtown Beijing, it looks like you’re in the Truman Show where the sky is a computer dome, and they turned the sky off. It’s just all white, and if something is over a couple hundred feet from you, it’s already partially obscured by smog. (Look at the last picture - that is an accurate representation of the Beijing sky at all times). As for sprawl, the streets are so wide that there’s no pedestrian life, which takes away one of the primary pleasures of being in a city: walking around. In the suburbs (the fifth ring, since the city is organized into ring-shaped districts), where the Jones house is, there are large swathes of demolished wasteland and long stretches of disorganized strip malls. Honestly, I left Beijing convinced that my friends who are obsessed with China after spending a summer in Beijing must be obsessed with the language and with being in a foreign land, not with Beijing itself.

However, I still had a great time in Beijing and saw incredible things. My favorite (perhaps predictably) was the Great Wall, which we drove to promptly on Thursday morning. I got all trussed up in tourist gear: shorts, sneakers, a t-shirt, blue Jansport backpack with water bottles, so much sunscreen my skin was shiny, $8 sunglasses I got in a Florida convenience store and a Mercy Corp hat I got in Portland. Though we had the option of taking a cable car up to the Wall (which was on a big hill), most of us opted for the whole experience of climbing the stairs. This was a big physical challenge, especially in the smoggy air. Someone observed that the Chinese are not yet as concerned about injury liability, and so aren’t scared of putting continuous long, steep staircases going up forever. By the time we got to the Wall we were deeply sweaty but that didn’t matter – we were on the Great Wall! And the experience of getting exhausted climbing up to the Wall and being tired climbing up and down its curves definitely enhanced the Wall’s majesty.

The crazy thing about the Great Wall is how windy it is, gripping to the ridge of the hills like a huge stone snake. You’ll climb laboriously to the top of some bump, pass through the shade of the guardhouse, and when you emerge triumphant from the other end you’ll see that you haven’t even begun to climb the Wall – it goes up, bump by bump, to enormous heights, and of course does this for about 600 miles. I’ve been thinking about experiences I’ve had that are impossible to replicate anywhere else, and walking on the Great Wall is one of them. No matter how many amazing pictures of the Great Wall you see, that can only give you the visual experience. The physical experience of stepping on the uneven stone and the stone steps that don’t quite fit your feet, of straining up a hill and awkwardly bumbling down, all on this solid man-made curvy Wall, is unlike any other walking experience you can have anywhere else in the world. And, despite all the amazing pictures we got, that was my favorite part about being on the Great Wall – the feeling on my feet.

Plus, I rode a toboggan down the hill, which was freaking sweet.

After the Wall we showered, donned tuxes, and set out for our concert that evening for a Yale Club event. During the bus ride, Stephen and I continued a long tradition of listening to classical music together on tours by starting with Shostakovich’s 10^th String Quartet. On the way to the gig we stopped at the Olympic complex and saw the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Very cool buildings, but I think people might have enjoyed the popsicles we got the most. The Yale Club event that evening was an outdoor shindig at a restaurant as a fundraiser for a charity that sends Chinese students to American universities. They gave us free food and an open bar, but I was starting to feel sick so I wasn’t able to take full advantage of either. The performance was awkward because of a terrible sound system, but the night was enjoyable nonetheless. Once again, while many of the Whiffs went out, I went home to bed.

Friday morning we set off for a tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, both of which were overwhelmingly large and impressive, especially the Forbidden City. I found myself wishing I had the historical knowledge and context to really know what I was seeing, but I did have a headphone audio tour guide to tell me cool details. A few things I learned: one loooooooooong staircase had a solid stone mural laid out along its whole length. Since the whole mural was from one enormous piece of stone that was quarried very far away, one might wonder how they managed to get it there. Turns out that, during the winter, they created a road of ice miles upon miles long, and slid the stone to the Forbidden City by that method. Crazy, huh? One thing that impressed me was the sheer amount of ceremony involved in the Emperor’s life – sure, he had a sweet place to live, but every room was dedicated to particular ceremonies that he had to engage in on a daily basis! But more than anything the joy of visiting the Forbidden City was just admiring the tiny artistic detail on every building as well as the enormous majestic nature of the whole spectacle. And to think – no one was allowed to see this!

The touristy nature of the whole thing took away from the sacredness of the space, though – there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, and at every room people were crowded around the railing, leaning in to take pictures. It reminded me of how at the Louvre, there was a crowd of cameras around the Mona Lisa but no one seemed to be looking at it with their eyes. I took tons of pictures, but I found it funny that hundreds of people a day take the same pictures of the same thing, so millions upon millions of amateur pictures of each of these big tourist sites must exist. Makes me think that pictures are ideally for the things that no one takes pictures of, like some strange image that struck you on the side of the road. For the great monuments, I think that ideally everyone should put their cameras away and download professional photographers’ pictures off the internet afterwards. But I’m a sheep and am definitely not going to resist the urge to compress all of the incredible monuments I’ll see into a snapshot (Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal and the pyramids are all coming up). The whole tourist scene at the Forbidden City made me just think of how much more beautiful it must have been when it was sacred, when only a select few were allowed to see it at all. I guess this is the price of democratization and capitalism (both of which are very present in China, even if not officially or politically).

After the Forbidden City, we had one last greasy dumpling lunch, went to the tailors to grab our suits (which Jean is graciously going to take with her to the US next month and mail to Greene, since that’s our first domestic stop after tour), and headed to the airport to fly to Bangkok, Thailand. Though we only spent one day in Thailand (we were in Pattaya, not Bangkok) I've got enough for a long blog post that I'm part of the way through writing and hope to finish tomorrow. So stay posted for more updates!

P.S. For those who think my blog is behind the times - yes, it is. But you can't rush genius :-).