This one has been a long time coming: I am going to China!
I think I say this every year, but this is the trip that I have planned the most, starting the earliest, and to the greatest detail, which is saying something.
For starters, I have been learning Chinese for one year now, so while my level is elementary at best I at least have learned some basic phrases and words, and thanks to my years of Japanese I have a head start on Chinese characters (even though, as I told my Chinese friends, I think Simplified Chinese could stand to be a bit more simplified).
Then there was the itinerary: China is an immense country with wildly different regions, and selecting only a handful of places to fit in a two-week itinerary was torture. This is the hardest itinerary I’ve ever had to put together by far, not because the places are difficult to link (the vast transport network means any two cities you want to visit are probably linked by high-speed rail) but because there are so many interesting choices. In the end, I settled for Beijing, Xian, Chengdu, and Shanghai. I was looking for the most noteworthy places but also a variety of regions and cuisines. I had to accept that I can only see so much in two weeks -this is already an ambitious itinerary- and leave destinations like Hong Kong, Zhangjiajie, Guilin, Chongqing, and who knows how many more to subsequent visits.
After calculating how many days to spend in each city, in which order, finding great hotels, and figuring out trains and flights, the next challenge was, unlike in other trips, technical: getting past the Great Firewall of China! Most of our apps do not work in China, so if you’re coming here you have to get an eSIM that will circumvent restrictions to still be able to use Google, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc., but you will still need to use Alipay and WeChat, since China is now mostly cashless and using those payment systems is a necessity. I hear that you can use Apple Maps, but I opted for Amap instead because I liked the bookmarking feature better. I already have some practice from having to use Naver Maps in Korea, as you can read in this blog!
Anyway, to cut to the chase, we landed in China with one hour’s delay after a long flight full of turbulences, which normally don’t bother me but it being an overnight flight I was trying to get some sleep and I kept getting jostled awake by the turbulence and the accompanying announcements. Upon arriving at the airport, I was truly shocked to find a literally empty line at immigration, so that I could walk straight up to a window, answer the usual basic questions, and be on my way within minutes. I was fully expecting to spend two hours at the airport so now my schedule was back on track!
Because I knew I would be tired and wouldn’t want to figure out where to find the Didi parking lot or the taxi stand or whatever, I’d previously booked an airport transfer service, and sure enough there was a man waiting with my name on a sign who was very polite but very much in a rush to get us going, so off we went into a fancy van. On the way from the airport into Beijing, I noticed all the cars on the road are electric, with the exception of a few green buses that still have exhaust pipes.
We are staying at the Eclat hotel, which is this extremely chic hotel inside a glass pyramid mall in the business district of Chaoyang. Every last nook and cranny is filled with whimsical modern art and sculptures, and they claim to have the world’s biggest collection of Dalí artwork outside of Spain, but they also have Buddhist sculptures, antique armoires, glasswork, a giant whale made of thousands of metallic parts… go figure!
After checking in and unpacking properly, I was left in a bit of an awkward spot as to what to do with the afternoon. I initially thought I might sneak out to see the Lama temple, but it was about 15:30 and apparently last entry is at just 16:30, so even if I made it in time to enter I wouldn’t really have time to enjoy it. There are no shortage of things to do in Beijing, of course, but I also needed my plan to be not too draining, considering we’re going to visit the Forbidden City tomorrow and will need all our energy for that.
So in the end I opted to take the metro (after setting up the transport ticket inside Alipay) to Qianmen, which is this really popular avenue running south from Zhengyangmen, south of Tiananmen Square.
This turned out to be the ideal first outing for my China trip, because it’s a very leisurely walk, easy to manage, but still beautiful and picturesque. Zhengyangmen gate itself is impressive, quite literally towering over everything else around it, and Qianmen street is a meticulously restored Old Beijing street with green-leaved trees on both sides of a set of tram tracks that are still occasionally used by a couple of antique tram wagons.
As a disclaimer, all the shops and food stalls in the vicinity are extremely touristy, not just in their offerings of the most typical mass-produced souvenirs but also in their way they run their business, with touts advertising at the door and loudspeakers playing jingles and whatnot. We only checked out a couple of shops (one of them Jing Fan, a store with beautiful fans of different styles) but the staff were super pushy and followed us around the store in that way that’s so exasperating, so we didn’t buy anything.
With the above warning out of the way, I still recommend a visit to Qianmen for the walk itself: the street is beautiful, there’s people out and about having fun, and it’s just a nice time all round, not to mention a low stakes introduction to Chinese architecture, commerce, and society!
After a nice walk, we thought we might as well dive right in and walked into Quanjude, or rather one of the many branches of this Peking duck chain that claims to have invented the dish. I was afraid that there would be a massive waiting list, but when we asked, the hosts gave us a ticket with our number and there were only seven people ahead of us -I don’t know if we even had to wait ten minutes!
The experience was daunting in other ways, though. Turns out there was a waitress who spoke some English, but instead we were assigned one who didn’t speak a word of it, so I very quickly discovered that the little Chinese I have learned is very little indeed. To the waitress’ credit or discredit, she did not make any accommodations for my obvious struggles and spoke a mile a minute, the only concession being that she repeated everything three times (“hao hao hao” or “okay okay okay”) while I tried to explain what we wanted to order until finally I flat out apologized for not speaking better Chinese (“don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry”, she fired back).
It didn’t help that the menu was like three hundred pages long, and that ten of them all seemed dedicated to the one thing we wanted (the roast duck), but instead the end we made it work and within minutes a man wheeled out a tray with our roast duck on it and carved it up into thin slices in front of us, so that we could then eat it on thin crepes with vegetables and sauce. It was quite good, tasted like no other roast duck I’d had before, and was in a way less strong in flavor than I expected. After they take away your duck, by the way, they make duck soup with it and bring it to you for when you finish. You’re also supposed to order more stuff than just duck, but long flights always mess with my stomach and I didn’t have a lot of appetite, so I was happy to focus on the duck. Plus the whole thing set us back 380 yuan for 3 people, or €44 total, so not bad!
As I am writing about it, this really was a perfect introduction to Beijing in its larger-than-life, contradictory charisma. A beautiful walk down a leafy street, touristiness, metro stops with endless corridors in between, roast duck, language barrier, and lastly, the night lights on the way back to the hotel and up to my 17th floor.
And we’ve only just begun! I have a full agenda planned for tomorrow!
This Is A Lake 