Summer Palace and all kinds of shopping

On Friday morning we tested our expertise at Beijing public transport by taking the subway and a bus to get to the Summer Palace, which is a bit of a ways outside of central Beijing. Once again, we barely had to try to find a tour guide to hire. The guide in question today was a nice little guy named (this is his English name, mind you) Jonvey, who was nice but didn't have nearly as good English as our beloved Dawson. Every time Jonvey was thinking of a difficultish word in English, he would squinch his eyes shut really tight like he was concentrating really hard before he could produce the word. Overall, I found the Summer Palace to be kind of whatever (having been to the Forbidden City 2 days earlier, where there are a lot more entertaining stories about eunuchs and whatnot), but we wandered around and watched a little performance where bored-looking guys banged randomly on bells and some ladies with really long sleeves danced around a little bit and then two guys acted out a Peking opera scene about people fighting in the dark. All of the performers looked completely unenthused, which I suppose is what happens when you put on the same performance for a bunch of annoying tourists taking pictures multiple times every day.

Oh my sleeves are so long, that is about the only interesting thing about this performance

Other famous attractions at the Summer Palace include the Long Hall (which they are not lying about, it is really really long) and what Jonvey cutely called the "marbleboat." Alloneword. The marbleboat was commissioned by the Empress Cixi (aka Dragon Lady), and according to my Beijing guidebook it was some kind of tribute to the navy. Jonvey, however, told us that the marbleboat was symbolic of the government, because the water is like the people, and even though a marbleboat can't actually float on the water, the water can't sink or overturn it either.


The Long Hall...it is actually wayyyy longer than it looks in this picture


Look, a marbleboat!

Unrelated note: I just managed to run over my own toes with the wheels of the chair that I am currently sitting in. Having tried this, I do not recommend it to anyone else. I do these things so you don't have to.

Was there anything else interesting at the Summer Palace? I don't think so. We made our way out, kind of hungry and grumpy, and fixed things with a delicious lunch of jianbing, a fabulous street food that is a sort of egg-crepe combo with a crunchy fried thing in the middle and some onions and sauce...it is hard to describe, but suffice to say that they are delicious. Some random man by the jianbing stand talked to me a bunch and told me that it was the most famous jianbing in the city and all sorts of outlandish things, which I doubted, but it was exactly what we needed.

Tummies full, we braced ourselves for another long haul on public transportation to get to the Silk Street Market. The Silk Market is one of the biggest and most touristy markets in the city, so it requires fierce bargaining to keep from being fleeced by the vendors who are quite experienced with foreigners and know various languages. It's key to not look like you want anything too much, but we needed to be able to remark upon which things we liked so we could stop at that stall. Unfortunately, Silk Street vendors are liable to know what you are saying in any number of the languages we all knew, so our resident unusual-language man Gered provided us with what we figured would be a fairly safe code word: volo, which is Latin for "I want." We used it whenever anyone saw something they wanted to stop and buy, and I am pretty sure that nobody else understood, although one particularly desperate salesman told us that sure, his store carried volo, if we wanted some.

I am usually a fairly amiable and not terribly fierce bargainer, mostly using humor (and my natural charms) to get a price that is decent for both parties. However, I made an enemy at the Silk Market after our moms volo-ed some pretty silk jackets. The price I got her down to still seemed a bit overpriced to me, but it was obviously low enough to make her pretty angry. We had thought about buying something else from her shop, but I just wanted to get out of there before she set me on fire with her eyes or something. Dad got a pretty good price on his own for some fabulous custom-made dress shirts for his long-armed self. Good job, Bobo! Ask him about his "risk color" if you get a chance.


So many pretty fabrics! Volo!

After the Silk Market, we went off to the Pearl Market, which is also a tourist kind of place, but not nearly as crazy as the Silk Market. Having made friends with a vendor last time, we took the Ryans to meet him and bought some things with a much nicer kind of bargaining, eschewing some of the customary insanely-high first price offers and good-naturedly quibbling over small differences.

Laden with treasures, we hustled back to our hotel and packed them into suitcases, then left immediately for the train station. We came thisclose to a travel disaster when my parents' camera slipped out and got left in the cab, but thank heaven, our observant and honest Beijing cab driver found it and ran to return it to us, leaving before any of us could even offer him a monetary reward. My faith in humanity was further reinforced by some awesome gals at a restaurant inside the station who got us the promptest meal we received in China so we could have dinner and still catch our train.

Having only taken hard sleepers during my time in China, I was totally unprepared for what our train ride in soft sleeper class was like. In hard sleeper, there are 6 people in a compartment with no door and no extra space, where you sleep with your valuables under your head at night and go to the bathroom in a squatty potty that empties straight over the tracks where you have to hold a bar while going to the bathroom to keep from falling over from the vibration of the train. I honestly don't mind any of that stuff too much (except when the other people in your compartment sit and rhythmically hock up loogies and spit them into a bag while you are trying to sleep), but man oh man was soft sleeper an improvement. Each compartment has only 4 beds, plus a locking door, and the 4th bed in our compartment wasn't occupied, so it was just me and my parents. We each had a TV at the end of our beds (with personal headphones!), plus cute complementary slippers and decently-sized, comfortable beds. My dad says the train was his favorite of all our accommodations on the trip, and I have to agree that it was pretty awesome. We played cards for a little bit, but mostly we just lay in our beds and crashed.


Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool on the Beijing-Xi'an train

In the morning: we attempt to do everything interesting in Xi'an in the course of a day. Not that unreasonable a goal, really.