Kyle and I hopped the bus in front of our apartment at 11am Wednesday for the hour bus ride to the airport. Our travel agent was waiting at the airport with our tickets, passports, and Chinese visas. We flew out of Korea at 2pm, Wednesday afternoon. We had a 1 hour layover in Qingdao, but when the plane landed 40 minutes late I noticed as we were picking up our bags that we only had about 15 minutes to catch our connection. When my bag came out before Kyle's, I went off ahead to find our guide who was going to speed us through the process. I noticed when I found the guide (who spoke zero English) that there were 27 people on our tour, quite a few more than the 14 the travel agent told me over the phone. The first in a list of things that "changed" after I talked to him. No major differences I guess, but next time I book it'll be through another agent...even though he was quite nice.
Twenty minutes later, as I was taking note that our connection was supposed to have already taken off, Kyle still hadn't come out from the baggage claim area...strange cause we checked our bags at the same time. Turned out that there was a baggage problem so he and quite a few others had to wait for their bags to come on the next plane. It didn't end up being a problem cause the plane that we had come on was actually our connecting plane as well, so they held it. We landed in Beijing over an hour late, so our guide "Richard"(who spoke English quite well) took us straight to the Chinese circus. My first impression driving around Beijing was that it's quite similar to Seoul; a mix of old dilapadated buildings and new high rise and office towers.
The Chinese circus was amazing! I could write paragraphs about the details, but I wouldn't come close to capturing it. It was one of those things you have to see for yourself. It was a kind of acrobatics show set on a theatre stage. When I sat down at my seat surrounded by Asian people I was kind of bewildered because I was listening to the conversations in front and behind me and what I thought would be Chinese was actually Korean. Then when an "ah-ee-suh-kuh-reem" seller came by, the man in front of me conversed with her in Korean and paid with Korean money...made me wonder if I had actually left Korea. Of course, later it occured to me that since it was a 5 day holiday in Korea that there would likely be a lot of Korean tourists in Beijing.
After the show we had our first taste of authentic Chinese food. The food was amazing, but surprisingly quite similar to the Chinese food I have eaten in Canada (It made me wonder if you get "foreigner-friendly" Chinese food when you go on tours). While eating, there were some Chinese dancers dancing as entertainment on a stage. One of the girls threw a necklace at me from the stage. I put it on, only to be dragged up onto the stage later to dance with them. That was a little strange. We were going around in a circle and at times clapping our hands with the person next to us. It wasn't too hard to follow, but I felt kind of embarassed because, even though I wasn't the only patron dragged up, I was the only person from our tour on the stage. With our "all inclusive" package we only got one free drink, so when we asked for more beer we were told we'd have to pay for it. We asked how much because the bottles were double-size and it was after all a nice restaurant. When we were told it was 5 Yuan per bottle (less than $1 Canadian)...it was like, "Well...that's a little steep, but we'll start with 10." After dinner we headed to our 3 star hotel (not the 4 star mentioned in the ad). We had grabbed some beers from a newspaper kiosk on the street, so Kyle, myself, and a few others from the tour went back to our room for a few beers. We played a couple drinking games, but called it quits at 1am because we were supposed to meet in the lobby at 8am.
The next day I dragged my tired ass out of my rock-hard bed shortly after our 6:45 wake-up call. We managed to get down to the buffet breakfast in time to eat and still meet on time, which proved unneccessary as we ended up waiting about 20 minutes for others. Then we hopped on the bus for our trip to the Ming Tombs, the place where most of the Emperors/Empresses of the Ming Dynasty were buried. We only went inside one of the tombs, which was fine by me cause that's about as many as I would have wanted to see. It was interesting though. They had a lot of artifacts on display that had been buried with them. After the tombs we went to our first of a few Government run tourist shops; a jade factory where we were educated on the finer points of Jade including how to tell real stuff from the fake. Knowing that the prices would be 5 times what you'd pay on the street, I didn't spend much time in there. Kyle and I went outside and had a look around. There was a woman with a Mongolian camel selling chances to sit on it. I figured that sitting on a camel had to pretty high on my list of life goals so we went over to try it. I think the camel almost had a heart attack when the 6'5" big man (me) sat down cause it made some kind of grunting noise and teetered a bit?. Somewhat embarassing, but I wasn't too worried about him snapping at me cause I noticed he was tethered by his nose...ouch. Anyhow, I wasn't finding the hump all that comfortable on the family jewels, so I was glad to jump off after Kyle had snapped a couple pictures to mark the occasion....
