Friday in the Forbidden City

For various reasons, too boring to get into now, I will jump to Friday, day 6 on the ‘shanks’ mare’ tour of Beijing.  We spent the day walking to and touring The Forbidden City.  We approached it from the north, through Jingshan Park because although it was not obvious, I had read that at its centre there’s a hill that gives an overview of much of the city, forbidden and otherwise.  It turned out to be true.  Then, continuing to use the compass on the iphone, Jay took us out the south gate of the park, then along the outside of the east wall of the Forbidden City and right to the Meridian Gate, in the middle of the south end, which is the main entrance.  At this point, we were in the middle of the Moon Festival crowd and spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out where to buy tickets and how to enter.  Once we did, it didn’t take too long to get into the enormous ‘foyer.’  Even before you pass through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, there’s a ceramics gallery on your right that I wanted to see.  Jay who had been sneezing even before we got to Beijing was suffering from a full blown cold by Friday, so he merely walked into that gallery and proclaimed, “When you’ve seen one pot, you’ve seen them all.”  I discovered that that is not true and spent quite a bit of time there.  I picked him up where he was resting on a bench as I exited, and we walked through into the vast area that holds the three halls of harmony.  Just walking up to and around them takes time.  It’s impossible to believe that they constituted a mere part of an emperor’s home.   Jay chose not to visit the Clock Exhibition Hall and the Nine Dragon Screen, but I found them both worth a look.  I had read in Alain Peyreyfitte’s book, The Immobile Empire, about the amazing clocks, as well as other examples of what England then considered to be the jewels of it’s Industrial Revolution, that Sir George Macartney had presented to the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 and how the latter had treated them as if they were no better than any of the other tribute that China accepted as its due from all the states trying to curry its favor.  I knew that they had been kept; however, and was curious to see what they looked like.  Many of the clocks were extravagant, but I was surprised to see how small the actual clock parts were.  After wandering through the Imperial Garden among the ancient cypresses, we exited via the north gate and headed, weary and hungry, back to the hood for an early dinner at the restaurant where we had eaten the garlic-laden eggplant.  This time, we enjoyed a cold beer, two soothing soups and some bacon and chive skewers, after which we rested in our room.  Then we went for a short walk in the area near the hostel.  I went down for an early night with my book, and Jay went out to a bar with some people he’d met in the hostel and gone out with earlier in the week.  

On Saturday, we had the Peking breakfast in the hostel, took a short walk in the hutong and flew back to Incheon.  But not before we had made up for our futile day of shopping on Wednesday by buying lots of goodies for mom, dad, May and the girls in the duty free area of the Beijing airport.  In fact Saturday was a bumper day for shopping, considering the fact that Jay and I both dislike it.  May and the girls were not going to return from their 2 days on an island off Incheon until Sunday, so after unpacking in the apartment, which mostly involved throwing dirty clothes in the basket to be washed on Sunday, we took the subway to EMart and bought the wave board that I wanted to get for Jin Hee and Min Hee for Chuseok, the Korean Autumn holiday, as well as some food to make a dinner for Sunday.  Then we set up all the gifts for May and the girls and went to bed, back in the clean breezes of Song do.  I hadn’t been bothered by the air in Beijing, but Jay had, and I certainly was aware of how fresh the air smelled when we got out of the airport in Incheon.

Beihai Lake and part of Beijing from the hill in Jingshan Park.

The Forbidden City from the other side of the same hill

Some of the porcelain reminded me of Maureen's work

A roofline on a building in the Forbidden City

A British made clock brought to China in the late eighteenth century

Jay's cold catches up with him on the shanks' mare tour of the Forbidden City

One of the nine dragons and a man posing proudly beside it

A lion with his paw on the globe, representing the emperor's power

A lioness playing with her baby, representing the emperor's potency, or so the story goes

The Great Wall

We booked two trips to the Great Wall with Beijing Downtown Backpackers, one for Monday and the other on Thursday.   The first hike, from Jinshanling to Simatai, was the longest and best, but they were both ‘great’ highlights of the week.  A guy came to get the 5 of us at the hostel at 8:40.  We followed him down our little street and then, like a consignment of drugs, we were passed on to another who led us to where the bus was parked; it was too big to go down our street. The drive to the start of the hike was about 2 hours long and took us through parts of Beijing and surrounding countryside that we would not have seen otherwise.  Just before reaching our destination, we picked up another guy who turned out to be our sweep, to use the VOC term.  There were not many people on this part of the wall, and we were free to go as we pleased for about 4 hours, one guide tried to stay in front and the other brought up the rear.  It was a wonderful day and Jay and I were dressed for it and in the mood for a hike.  We went up every tower and kept at the head of the pack, aside from 2 young men who had bought straw coolie hats from a hawker at the base.  We could spot them easily and, if we lingered taking pictures, we would see their pointed heads just in front of us and put on a burst of speed to pass them again.  The Jinshanling Great Wall is partly maintained but crumbling in places.  It snakes along the very top of a chain of hills.  At times you wonder why they even needed a wall to keep the Mongols out, but judging by the number of towers, it was well manned and facing it after a slog through woods and up and down hills would deter even a Tartar.  The idea of building it is another whole area for wonder.  It’s hard enough to hike, let alone lug stone and work on.  The descent after tower 22 is a beautiful, steep and well-built walk.  We rested at the bottom in the shade, drank cold drinks and I tried to unravel the mushroom dilemma, but with no success.  At the top of one of the first towers we had seen an old man who was drying long yellow mushrooms on the window sill, and now on the stones in front of us a man had many of them spread out, presumably drying, and a woman with a big bag of them was scrubbing her blackened hands with water on the flat stones in front of the parking lot.  They must be prized for some reason, but we never discovered why.  We were happy to sit back in the bus and be driven home to the Peking Yard, where we showered, rested flat out on the beds and then went for dinner, not garlic eggplant.

The second Great Wall excursion, to Mutianyu Great Wall, was on Thursday.  We were picked up again at 8:40am, but this time there were fewer of us in a van.  The drive was only 11/2 hours long but took us through different parts of the Beijing area, including some pretty upscale housing areas between the city centre and the airport.  We were mostly on a small road that was lined with trees, some exactly the same as the one the city planted in front of my house in Vernon, and passed through farmland.  Jay and I decided to relax on this one; we took the cable car to tower 14 and walked from there to tower 22.  The day began auspiciously as we went up in the same car that Bill Clinton had been in when he visited the wall in 1998.  But it was a very overcast day, so we didn’t get a panoramic view until near the end when the sun appeared in a haze as we walked back to catch the cable car down.  The wall at this point is not as varied as it was on the first trip.  It’s better maintained, and we began by being a bit scornful and practically running because we wanted to get at least a bit of exercise and escape the noisy hoards.  It was the Autumn Moon Festival while we were in China, and unlike the Jinshanling section, this one was crawling with Chinese, and, oddly enough, French tourists.  We soon broke away from the real crowd and were sobered by the fact that the section between towers 17 and 22 was steep.  It was more of a stair climb than a hike, but it was not a piece of cake.  After the last maintained tower, it becomes a crumbling path of rubble, which we, and others, followed for a while.  It made you appreciate the ravages of time because the restored part showed what a solid structure it had been and yet the centuries had worn it down to a barely visible line of stone at this part that had not been repaired.   Some boys, inspired by the wild country and fog were making weird loud noises just beyond us.  We had a deadline on this visit because there was a lunch included at a restaurant near the parking lot, so we turned around and headed down.  There was a gauntlet of hawkers that we had to run before we got to lunch.  This drove Jay crazy, but we made it, and then we sat down with others in our group and had a pretty good Chinese meal, with rice and about 8 different dishes.  Eggplant has been a theme on this trip for me because May often just fries oriental eggplant in olive oil and we eat it with rice and whatever else she has made.   It’s delicious.  Then there was the garlic eggplant on our first night in Beijing and the best dish at this lunch was a mixture of eggplant and potato, which fortunately, I was the only one who really appreciated, so I ate a lot of it.  The last part of the tour was a brief visit to the Olympic Birds’ Nest designed by Ai Weiwei. It and the setting it’s in are impressive.  Sadly, the bird is now in a cage somewhere else in Beijing. 

Jinshanling Great Wall

The old man on the tower.  You can just make out his mushrooms, drying on the red window sill.  He looks more like a Mongol than a Han Chinese, and that was the case with most of the hawkers on the Great Wall.  Strange, considering the original purpose of the wall.

Jay hits the wall

Jan and Jay on the Flower Tower on the Jinshanling Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

The cable car we shared with Bill

Mutianyu Great Wall

A tower on the Mutianyu Great Wall

Day one in Beijing

It’s Sunday, September 22.  A week ago today Jay and I were walking the streets of Beijing on the first day of what I’ve come to think of as our ‘shanks mare’ tour of Beijing.  My parents often used that expression to mean walking, and we certainly walked in Beijing.  We arrived at the Beijing airport in time to see a brilliant sunset from the windows of the cab that drove us to The Peking Yard Hostel in Wangzhima Hutong of the Dongcheng North section of central Beijing.  We unpacked Jay’s backpack, if that is the verb you use when you take a minimum of clothing and pile it on a bedside table and desk.  The room was very clean, the beds comfortable and the bathroom a good size, but there were no dresser drawers and only 2 hangers on 2 hooks.  Then we went back to the main living room and front desk area, bought 2 cold beers and a bag of crisps, took them up to the rooftop garden and relaxed for a while.  The hostel is well named because the front door is right on a narrow, busy street, but as soon as you enter, you are surrounded by plants and flowers.  The rooms are off a labyrinthine path, lined with bamboo and full of flowerpots, that extends quite far back into a yard.  Consequently it is very quiet in the rooms. After that we went on the first of many walks, along the narrow street in front of the hostel to a bigger street lined with small stores and restaurants and finally to a big avenue, bright with Moon Festival lanterns and full of people and restaurants.  Groups of older men were gathered around tables playing a board game with big wooden checkers, younger men were playing cards, many men surrounded each group, watching and commenting loudly.  There were also many people sitting on rickety chairs around odd tables eating long sunflower seeds and dropping the shells all over the sidewalk as they waited for tables to become available in the various restaurants.  It was a lively scene.  We slept well that night and on Sunday morning decided to have a good breakfast at the hostel and then try to get an overview of the central area of Beijing.  This is where Jay showed that he is the legitimate grandson of a WW2, RCAF navigator.  Using the small map of Beijing from the Lonely Planet guidebook and the compass on his iphone, he got us without a hitch from the hostel to Beihai Lake, through the park there, down the west wall of the Forbidden City to Zhongshan Park and through it until we came out, through the Gate of Heavenly Peace and directly into the vastness of Tian’anmen Square.  It was a thrill to see it like that because although we knew we were walking toward it, we hadn’t expected to see it at that exact moment.  We had walked for hours, along streets, through parks, around a lake and right to our destination. It reminded me of the time Jim and I entered France from Belgium and decided to spend the night in Reims.  We were walking on our first night, turned a corner and there was Reims Cathedral right before our eyes.  We hadn’t seen it at all from a distance as we approached the city.  Jay and I then walked around and through Tian’anmen Square.  Seeing the huge portrait of Mao that dominates it was impressive no matter what you think of him or the horrors that have occurred on that spot.  We saw the huge National Museum of China that extends almost the entire length of the east side of the square and decided to spend one of our days there.  A woman I bike with in Vernon who had taken a 3 week tour of China a few years ago told me that you will discover more about the country and see more of its real artifacts in that museum than you will on a tour.  By that time, we were ready to head back.  Jay found a more direct route paralleling the east wall of the Forbidden City, taking us through the upscale area of the city, past Whangfujing Cathedral where some teenage boys were doing very energetic dancing and back to our neighborhood.  We settled down, starving, at a local restaurant and ordered cold beer and food.  It was all good, but the best thing was the eggplant.  We each had one, a long oriental eggplant split in half, topped with oil, salt and tons of finely chopped garlic and then broiled.  It was delicious, but I thought as I ate it all that the garlic was not overly cooked and might be hard to digest.  It was.  We both had a restless night and vowed never to eat that again.       

The roof garden at the Peking Yard Hostel

Jay at Beihai Park looking out over the lake

A family enjoying a ride in an electric powered flower on Beihai Lake

A pair of very animated traditional singers in the park

A popular tour boat on the lake

Mao and a sentry as skinny as uncooked spaghetti at Tian'anmen Square

A sculpture on Tian'anmen 

Wangfujing Cathedral

Young dancers in front of Wangfujing Cathedral

Song do

It bucketed rain all morning, and I made May laugh by always saying that it was getting brighter on the horizon when it wasn’t, but now, at 12:35, the rain has stopped and I’m going to go for one last bike ride along the canal to Central Park.  I finally know the most direct route, and if I pedal quite quickly, I can be in the park in about 20 min.  The park itself isn’t big but it’s a rabbit warren of paths, most of which I’ve ridden on now.  I’ve even got my favorite coffee spot in the outdoor mall where I stop and read on the ride home.  Most of Song do was reclaimed from the sea, like the polders in Holland.  The spot where the soldiers first disembarked for the Incheon landing during the Korean War is marked in Central Park, well up on dry land now.  Song do is being developed as an International Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) and many of the venues for the Asian Games in 2014 will be here, but although it’s much more finished and populated now than it was the last time I visited, it’s still far from capacity.  Many buildings are impressive skyscrapers but not fully occupied, and the streets are wide with functioning traffic lights that take ages to change but not many cars, so until the vision of it’s designers is realized, people in Song do just look left and right and cross whenever.  Especially on weekdays, you get the creepy feeling that you’re biking through a ghost town that hasn’t even got any ghosts in it yet.  I wonder if in 5 or 10 years the whole place will be as busy as the central section where Jay’s school now is.

I’m back from biking.  When I finish this entry, I’m going to take the subway to a station that has a big underground market.  I need an umbrella for our trip to Beijing, and I just want to look around.   

Cosmos growing along the canal

Women weeding in Central Park, the www, Korean style

Masks of the world.  When you get close to have a look, classical music begins to play

The plaque beneath the totem

My bike in Central Park

This marks the spot of the Incheon landing in the Korean War

Click on the picture if you want to read the inscription

If you click on the picture, you might be able to read the inscription, but the writing was not deeply engraved, so it's becoming illegible.  This bodes ill for the area as this statue and plaque symbolize the 2 companies that worked together to design and build much of Song do

Kayakers on the canal practicing for a race

Eat, Bike, Hike

This visit in Korea could be entitled, Eat, Bike, Hike .   It’s 8:00pm on Monday, September 9, and I’ve just returned from 3 hours of biking and a total of 3 hours on the subway, plus an hour or so of aimless wandering.  Jay and May helped me plan the subway route that I had to take to bike on the path along the Han River in Seoul.  I had been going to take the girls’ bike because the minister I met on the weekend told me that was possible, but Jay found a site on his i-Phone that showed where and how cheaply bikes could be rented on the bike path.  Fortunately, I took his suggestion and rented a bike for $7.00 for 3 hours.

The subway was packed to the doors when I got on at 5:40 to go home and the trip takes about one hour and 40 minutes.  Being a woman of my age makes it easier because I am almost always offered a seat, and this time was no exception, but with a bike!!!!! I don’t know what I would have done because I was tired.  I rode as fast as I could for the first 45 min. and as I did so, I realized that a man about my age I think but it was hard to tell because he was wearing full Korean biking gear was ahead of me at first, then passed me on my gearless urban beater and then I passed him again and he stayed behind.  When I finally stopped to turn around, he stopped too and asked me the usual question about my age.  When I told him, he mumbled something in Korean that I didn’t understand and then said, ‘fast’, and biked on.  Buoyed by that reluctant compliment, if that’s what it was, I spent the rest of the time going slowly and taking some pictures.  The ride was very easy, as flat as the river. 

Jay, Min and I had a good ride on their much superior bike on Saturday.  We spent most of the day taking turns riding and walking on the path that follows the canal that borders Song do.   There’s good workout equipment all along that path, so we would stop at various points and do some exercises.   We had coffee and really sweet smoothies while sitting watching the people out to see and be seen at a new open air, upscale mall that’s just being finished in Song do.   On Sunday, Jay and I returned to his old neighborhood for a hike on the mountain there and lunch, so my legs are staying in shape, and the stomach is developing too. 

The last time I was here, Jay was on a Korean barbeque kick, so when we went out for dinner, that’s what we ate.  But this time he’s introducing me to some of his other favorites.  On Friday evening when he and May had finished work, we all went to a restaurant that specializes in ‘jok bal,’ a meal that is based on pork hocks, but it’s more like the whole leg because there’s lots of meat in slices to satisfy Jay and those who like that but there are also bits and bones, the parts that Pip was given and said that the creature was least proud of when alive, but which I love.  It reminded me of eating chicken feet with Tilly and Caroline.  Delicious.  On Saturday we went out with May’s brother and his fiancé for another pork based meal, ‘kamjattang’, this time the backbone in a wonderful broth with kimchee and potatoes.  Again, bits to satisfy all tastes, discriminating and less so.  It’s my favorite meal of the trip so far. 

May, Jay, Jin and Min at the 'jok bal' restautant

A butterfly gorging on a flower on the bike path in Song do

At the 'kamjattang' restaurant in Incheon

Min Hee has her chop sticks ready to go at the dinner

My favourite, 'kamjattang'.

My rented pink, urban beater on the banks of the Han and a passing biker in full Korean kit.

Another view of the Han and Seoul with my bike and two normally geared up Korean bikers

Some interestingly outfitted older Koreans playing some kind of croquet  

Lost and found

By Thursday, I had a vague map of Song do in my mind as well an actual map in my purse.  Jay and I went on one last, long, orientation walk from his present place to the old neighborhood so that I would be able to bike there when I borrowed the girls bike, which I’ve now done twice now.  I went for a ride yesterday to Central Park and the new mall.  Then I rode home, rested and met Jay and his fellow teachers around 10pm at a place near the school that specializes in terrific, crispy mung bean pancakes.  We ate them with spicy side dishes and soju.  Today I rode the bike to the old neighborhood so that I could hike up the hill there, as I did so often last year.  And I got lost coming down.  I locked the bike to a fence at the spot where I usually started last year and walked to the top with no problem.  I enjoyed the same view out over Song do, where we now live and had a chat with a retired Presbyterian minister.  He was a very welcoming person, I guess the profession fosters openness whether you’re born that way or not, but I was surprised by the way he sat down close to me on the bench and began to talk.  Koreans are usually quite aloof, but that’s probably because most of them don’t leave the peninsula.  His English was quite good and he had traveled the world, including 2 trips of about 3 weeks each to Canada.  He is very happily retired, enjoying not having to smile and deal with other families’ problems.  He makes breakfast for himself and his wife each morning and then she goes swimming because her knees are bad and he chooses a place in the area to hike in.  He has 3 children and 6 grandchildren.  I enjoyed our chat, said goodbye and started confidently back down.  I turned off the main path to visit the temple I often went to last year and then the confusion started.  I took some wrong turn and ended up in a Fellini movie, except set in Korea, not Italy.  The paths were all similar, dusty and covered in dry pine needles, strange looking people in long pants, gloves, headgear, dark glasses and sometimes even face masks wandered indistinguishably around me.  I passed the same row of white lilies and the same two old men playing chess (that sounds more like Bergman) about 3 times.  I felt almost dizzy and absolutely stupid.  And then as mysteriously as I had got lost, I was found.  I followed the path back to the bike. 
The ride home was easy; I celebrated knowing where I was by going to the mall, ordering an iced cappuccino and drinking it outside as I read my book.  I’m home now waiting for 9:00pm when Jay, May, the girls and I will meet for another special Korean meal.

Skyscrappers surrounding Central Park in Song do

Totem poles in Central Park 

More totems and skyscrappers

Last of totems and skyscrappers

Tamaracks supported by posts.  Many trees in the local parks are supported like this or by an even more complex patterns of poles.

The view of Song do from the top of the hike

The big-bellied Buddha is still happily seated in front of the temple 

Korea begins

I’m in the Kelowna airport waiting for the plane, which is on the board as being on time.  The support staff at the Vancouver airport has decided not to strike, and I haven’t been bumped by Air Canada.  Yahoo!!!!  Mo and John came to pick me up early; I was still in my underwear when Mo knocked on the door.  Thank the lord it was she and not John because I was naked in the living room, having left my traveling clothes hanging on a chair there last night.  After the drive, I treated them to breakfast at Tim’s in the airport, the last of the big spenders, and now I’m through the baggage check having promised the woman who examined my carry-on that I would jettison 1/3 of my new toothpaste tube before I went through the check in Vancouver.  What a detail, but I did it in the washroom here.  I don’t want to tempt fate, which has been on my side so far.  I’ve even had a minor miracle.  Last night I decided that I would finally read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which Jim read while he was sick and I kept because I also wanted to read it.  I put it in my carry-on, and this morning I heard on the news that Seamus Heaney had died yesterday, perhaps more of a coincidence than a miracle, but I took it as a good omen and so far it has been, for me at least if not for Seamus.  They’ve just announced that my plane has been delayed out of Calgary; we will be boarding about 5 min. late.  More anon.

It’s 7:20am Tuesday, Sept. 3 in Incheon, Korea.  I’m the first up, but I just heard the girls’ door open.  The flight went without a hitch.  Soon after takeoff from Vancouver airport, I was enjoying a glass of wine and some sweet and salty peanuts.  I was in the middle seat, but the 2 young men on either side of me were polite, moderately-sized Koreans; we shared a greeting and proceeded to read and not encroach on each other’s limited space.  Dinner was soon served; I chose the fish and rice, very nice, and white wine.  This was followed by almost 2 hours of reading and then, slowly, the reality of a 10 ½ hour flight began to set in.  Too dull-headed to continue reading and unable to sleep, I turned on the tv and searched for a movie in the ‘Classics’ section.  Nothing really appealed to me, but I chose ‘The Paper Chase’ from 1973, Timothy Bottoms as a Harvard Law student with long curly hair like Jim’s when my mom first met him and was unimpressed.  It was fine.  Then I watched ‘The Company You Keep’ about former members of the Weather Underground, with Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie and Nick Nolte, another blast from the past.  By that time I was feeling blasted myself and still unable to sleep, restless and breathless in the clammy air that moves over damp skin and on to the next person until it has circulated over hundreds of uncomfortable people and back to you.  After hours of this, the artificial night was ended by the turning on of lights and the rolling of food trays.  We were served another dinner, this time without wine.  I chose a beef stew, which was good in spite of the fact that I would never have thought of eating such a thing at such a time myself.  I happily drank the coffee, and about an hour later we arrived early in Incheon.  I was 5:15pm there, and we had already had dinner.  It was about an hour later that I finally pushed my cart into the arrival area and saw Jay.  What a joy.  He was equally happy because he and Gin Hee had been waiting about an hour, and as I hadn’t given him my flight number, he had had a nagging doubt that I was even on that plane.  We caught a taxi home to their new apartment, and the visit began with hugs and talk, some white wine and smoked salmon from BC that I had bought in the duty free, a fresh crunchy salad May had made, which was exactly what I felt like after all the stale air on the plane and rice with ‘giniling’ a meat dish from the Philippines that the girls love.  By the time we had eaten, talked and Jay and I had gone for a walk in a nearby park, we were all ready for bed.  I slept through to the morning.  So far, I’ve managed to get lost in the park, but Jay had given me his i-Phone so I was able to call him to come and get me, bodes ill for my future travels around on my own, but I went with Jay to his school yesterday and got the same ‘burner’ cell phone I had last year, so I will always be able to call for help if I’m lost.  Jay and I are going to lunch today with the gang from his school.  My time in Korea is moving along.

Korean Air in Vancouver

Some of the new skyscrapers in Song Do, the area of Incheon where Jay lives, as seen from the park near his apartment

Fish in the park, being fed junk food by kids on a Sunday outing with their parents

The girls go to school on Monday morning

The girls rest after school on Monday evening