Saturday, August 4, 2007

Brief weekend in Beijing

Beijing (7/27 – 7/29/07)

Since the flights to Asia are so long, work gives us an extra day to fly there and get acclimated to the time change, etc. We left Chicago on Thursday to fly to Beijing for the weekend. Unfortunately we got stuck on a flight that consisted of a school group of probably 50 Chinese kids who maybe had never flown before but definitely had no respect for the other passengers or even flight attendants. These high school age kids were climbing over seats, leaving things in the aisle-way, leaning over our seats to talk to eachother rows away. Very obnoxious and didn’t allow many people to sleep on the plane. Luckily sleep was not in my agenda. I had bought the 7th Harry Potter book with the intention of reading it on the plane and I got through ~600/700 pages on our 13 hour flight. I probably took about a 30-minute nap during the whole time we were in the air. I finished the book by Friday night. It was pretty ridiculous, but you know once I start reading a good book, I won’t put it down until I’m finished. Anyways, so Team Japan (as we like to call ourselves) consists of 9 auditors, 6 girls and 3 guys. The group that went to Beijing was 5 girls and 1 guy – the newbies (Holly and Eric) of course were excited to go on every weekend excursion so they were part of our Beijing group. We arrived in Beijing and caught a taxi van to get to our hotel (Marriott Apts). By the time we arrived at the hotel and freshened up, we all just wanted some dinner and then to get some rest for our trip to the Great Wall early Saturday morning. We had the concierge arrange for a van to pick us up at 8am and drive us 2 hours to get to the Great Wall – Simatai section. So let’s start with Friday:

Friday – 7/27/07
We arrived at our hotel (the executive apts) and checked in – all the girls stayed in one apartment that consisted of 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a living room, dining area, kitchen and even a laundry room. It was pretty sweet! I called the smallest bedroom so I could have a room to myself J. Not to be anti-social, but I know from experience that one of the girls snores pretty badly and didn’t want to get stuck in a room with her. This also allowed me to have my own bathroom…and anyone who knows me, knows that I hate sharing bathrooms ;-). Eric got his own room cause we had enough in the budget and didn’t want to stick him with 5 girls for the entire weekend – for his sanity’s sake. After we all freshened up, we asked the hotel concierge where we should eat. Basically what’s a good restaurant nearby where they speak English. We didn’t really have it in us to try to communicate to someone who didn’t speak English. He suggested the South Beauty and wrote down the information in Chinese for us to give our cab driver. Since there were so many of us, we had to take 2 separate cabs. Since I had money and Kathleen had money, we took the 2 separate cabs and Sonia and Eric came with me while the other 2 girls went with Kathleen. We arrived at the huge department store and our cab driver told us that the restaurant was “in there” (basically just pointing and said something in Chinese). We also found a group of teenage girls who spoke English and they confirmed that the restaurant was inside the 5 story department store somewhere.
This department store was ridiculously huge and so we go up escalator after escalator walk around each floor and even ask several employees of the department store where this restaurant was. No one seemed to be able to help us but 1 woman pointed to a general direction on the 2nd floor and said it was over there. We walked in that direction and Sonia walked over to it and said it was only a Manicure/Pedicure place, so we continued on. We even went down to the information desk and they didn’t seem to be much help because of communication issues. After about 45 minutes of this, we almost gave up and were about head to the nearest restaurant when Sonia asked one more employee. This woman pointed out in the same direction as the other and said it was “over there”. Sonia was determined to find this place so she actually told the woman to walk us there (sort of grabbing her arm, which I thought was pretty rude). But the woman complied and walked us to the same Mani/Pedi place but when you walk a little further, you see that the restaurant WAS there!! It was against the wall, connected to the department store but not actually IN the store. DUH! How stupid did we feel?? So we go inside and the other 3 girls were there and had already started eating…craziness! But we were able to order and I actually got this great shrimp and pineapple dish! Yummm. Finally after dinner we headed back to the Marriott for some rest before our next adventure. One thing is for sure – no matter where we go, there’s an adventure waiting for us overseas!

Saturday 7/28/07


So we get up early Saturday morning and pack up some gear for our journey. Me being the “Mom”, packed the most – food supplies, wet wipes, a towel, some reading material for the drive up there, and of course my I Pod. Kathleen and I picked up some bottles of water for everyone from a nearby grocery store too. We were all pretty awake on the drive up there so we whipped out our China and Japan tour books and did some reading as well as this Joke Book that my friend Aman had bought me before we left. Thanks for the books Aman! We opted to go to this area of the Great Wall called Simatai as it was less touristy than the Badaling area.
We also went out on our own without a tour guide. We get to the ticket office and couldn’t even figure out how to get up to the top from where we were, so we bought tickets to ride a cable car up to almost the top. It dropped us off and we still had a good 30 min. hike to reach the Wall itself. It was a pretty steep incline but we didn’t come here for nothing! Also as our luck seems to be, the weather was really cloudy and foggy so we couldn’t see much. However, it could’ve been much worse! As hot as it was, it would have been ridiculously hot if it was sunny outside! As you’ll see in the pictures, we were all drenched with sweat by the time we got to the top.

Kathleen and Holly were rockstars and were the first to reach the top. Eric and Shannon were next and Sonia had to keep stopping, so I waited with her and we took our time climbing to the top. We finally had made it and the rest of the group was catching their breath and waited for us before exploring the area. Sonia wasn’t too interested in going anywhere so she just stayed at the base level while the rest of us continued to go up stairs and see what else was around. Holly actually turned around at one point to get Sonia cause she thought Sonia might enjoy seeing what we did. She was a good motivater, but Sonia definitely hated her at the time J. The rest of the group wanted to try to hike up to a much higher level of the wall, but didn’t get too far when the area was roped off and the guard said that it was illegal to go there.

- the "illegal" part of the Wall

I think we could’ve paid him off, but that part of the wall definitely didn’t look like it had been even the slightest bit renovated or safe for that matter. So back we went. We checked out the other side and got some pictures, but you couldn’t go much further, so we then proceeded to head back down.

Again, we couldn’t figure out any other way to get back to the ground from where the cable car would pick us up so we enjoyed the relaxing trip down via cable car. We reached the bottom, welcomed by a row of street vendors trying to sell us various Great Wall paraphernalia and by our van driver who waited there for us. We all passed out on the drive home. We reached our hotel around 3 or 4pm and most of us were just exhausted from both the Great Wall and from jet lag, so we took naps, planning to wake up for dinner around 8pm. Since we were so tired, we didn’t want to venture out for food and just ordered delivery…not only was it delivery, but it was Italian food at that. I know I know, slightly disappointing, but I wasn’t feeling too adventurous with Chinese food after so many articles and news reports on the quality of Chinese food. Also I didn’t want to take the chance of getting sick before even getting to Japan. Turns out both Kathleen and I ended up sleeping until the next morning! Holly, being the ball of energy she is, didn’t want to take a nap so she ventured out to the New Market while we all slept and did some MAJOR shopping. She came back around 8pm expecting us all to be ready for dinner but of course, we weren’t. She got a ton of really great stuff from there, but I still preferred my sleep to shopping. Sonia and Shannon felt bad that Holly wanted to go out to get a drink and was going to venture out by herself again, so they went with her. Apparently they had another little adventure trying to find some restaurant/bar that was in Sonia’s Beijing book and ended up going to the nearby Outback for appetizers and drinks after searching for this other place for 30 min.

Sunday – 7/29/07



Our flight to Tokyo was scheduled to leave around 2pm, so we had the morning to do some exploring. I woke up the next morning at 5am feeling extra refreshed! We all got ready and headed to the Tiananmen Square area to check it out and then to the nearby Forbidden City before coming back to the hotel to get our luggage and then getting to the airport. The amount of tourists at Tiananmen Square was crazy, but pretty funny too. Since Eric is 6’7”, he looks like he could be a famous American basketball player. Every few minutes some family or group would come up to him asking to take their picture with him. The girls and I all got a kick out of it until for some reason, someone wanted to take their picture with me. Kinda random, but sure why not. Then someone else asked Kathleen the same. All very confusing but it was really cute. Eric even had to turn down a few pictures since he kept falling behind the rest of the group. We walked through the Square and into the Forbidden City. As we were short on time, we couldn’t do a guided tour or even go thru all of the buildings, but we walked around, took some pictures and bought a few souvenirs.





By 11, we caught a couple cabs, headed to the hotel and had to split 2 people to a cab because we had so much luggage each. Kathleen and I went in one, Sonia and Shannon and then Holly and Eric. Mind you, Holly and Eric are both new (just started about a week before leaving for Japan) and have COMPLETELY opposite personalities. I could probably discuss this for days, but all I’ll say is that it can be both entertaining and frustrating at times. Kathleen and I couldn’t find the rest of the group but weren’t worried since we were all taking the same flight to Tokyo. We took our time and grabbed some lunch at this cute restaurant called “Lucky something”. They had everything from American burgers, to some sort of “Irish” food to Chinese food and even pizza. We opted for burgers and they were actually pretty good. We checked out a few shops along the way and had also been given access to the Business Lounge, so we hung out there for a while before the flight. This flight was much better than the previous one. It was cool cause we could actually watch on our TV’s as the plane took off. We also had a much better selection of movies and I FINALLY was able to watch Spiderman 3! Pretty good, but too focused on the “love” part…I’m not a big fan of Kirsten Dunst, so that didn’t impress me too much. All in all a good flight. We get to Tokyo and take the Airport Limousine (a huge shuttle bus) to our Hotel Okura and check-in around 11pm Sunday night.
- Forbidden City (Imperial Garden)
We were extremely busy this past week at work as there is much work to be done in 5 weeks. I also had to balance that with trying to plan things for our Mt. Fuji trip the following weekend as there were 5 of us going (same group as the Great Wall minus Kathleen). That’s a WHOLE OTHER story…which is about to follow.
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