We were lucky.

We arrived Beijing late on the Friday holiday and traffic into town was mild, our courtyard hotel inside a hutong area was on a street that didn’t smell terrible, the corner Chinese restaurant was quite good, and for the following two days we had partly sunny/cloudy with a chance of meatballs. What pollution? It was like LA in the early 80s; thin layer of gunk but mostly OK. Like I said; we were lucky.

Our first day was a bit rough. All of China is on short holiday. This means that everyone who can is traveling. Those who came to Beijing from the countryside are going home to visit family and those who live in the countryside have come to see Chairman Mao’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. The line of people, whose form was loosely managed by ropes and soldiers in a serpentine pattern, must have stretched over one mile. The lucky ones will reach the front of the line before noon when it closes. If they don’t reach the front in time, they will race to enter the Fobidden City and jam into the largest palace in the world.

We made our way through the Forbidden City and its throngs of people with their pushing, elbowing and spitting.  I actually had to push back to keep one woman from knocking me over!  By the end, I understood why Lauren, who had been here in March, advised that we spend no more than three days in Beijing.

The Summer Palace was more pleasant. A large lake area, paddle boats, dragon ferry boats, people holidng hands and ambling along the bridges and trails up to the Palace. People stopping us to take pictures with our two girls (more on that later). There was space to move around and to appreciate the landscape and the history.

We were guided that first day by Jerry. Jerry is smart and very informative about Chinese history and the modern China. It was a very pleasant refresher course from the ancient civilizations course one might have taken in high school with discussions of culture, economics, politics, uprisings, migration and assimilation. We capped off the day with Peking Duck at Dadong, a modern china place with good food and mostly decent wine by the glass. (I am missing my wine collection right about now. There is no sake here and I just don’t like beer.)

Day two in Beijing was spent on our own with a morning walk along Behai lake, haggling in the market (pearl market) and photographing “snack street” and it’s scorpions, starfish, and even seahorses on kebab. (I thought of you Kim P – you would have been so sad to see these seahorses.)

Our third and final day was spent at the Great Wall. The Mutiayu section was visited by “Billy Boy” says our new guide, Tim. Apparently the Chinese liked Bill Clinton very much.Tim is funny and presents us with a slide show of how the westerners and Chinese are different – a tongue in cheek comparison of our ideologies and lifestyles: western old people walk their dogs, Chinese old people walk their grandchild (singular); western people go to a party and talk in small groups all equal, Chinese people stand in a circle with the boss in the middle.

To get to the wall we drive 45 minutes, stopping for lunch along the way, and then take a cable car up from the valley to the wall. We spend the next three or four hours walking the wall, listening to Tim’s comedy routine interlaced with actual history and social commentary. Lauren and Rose scrambled on ahead and went until the wall was more like mud and broken stones – the unrefurbished section.

We stopped at a cloisonné factory to kill time on the way to the airport. It turned out to be a nice little stop. The factory manager showed us the process for making cloisonné (pound and solder pieces together, hand lay the wire, drop paint and glaze into the designs, fire at 1000 degrees, fix any discoloration, fire again and again, polish twice, overlay the gold leafing (top secret so won’t show that step) and voila! your bowl, vase or bracelet is finished.

Another 45 minutes drive with Tim to the airport. On the whole, the Chinese people are happy he said. From what I can see here in Beijing, that seems about right.

Off to Xi’an…