Beijing--Part III

The next day we slept in. It was nice. It was still gross and rainy outside, and I was still feeling pretty crappy, so we decided to make it a low-key kind of day, with no temples or walls or tourist-y things. We wanted to make sure we got our bus tickets ahead of time, so we headed across town to the bus station.

It was really funny to be in the bus station. Everywhere you look in China, you see the Olympics logo, and especially in Beijing, there is a lot of talk about preparing for the Olympics. So many foreigners will be here, and they'll probably want to travel within China. Not all foreigners will want to fly to their destinations. Perhaps they'll want to take buses. I only mention this because there wasn't a single word of English in the bus station. There isn't at the bus station in Weihai, but we were in freaking Beijing. The capital. We couldn't believe it. And we already get stared out on a daily basis (though not so much in Beijing, honestly), but the fact that we were in the bus station at all was completely unbelievable to most of the folks who were waiting, or mopping the floor, or selling us tickets. We were complete freaks.

On the taxi drive to the bus station, we had passed a gigantic pizza restaurant called "Pizza Factory". After buying our bus tickets, we decided to head back in that direction. We had written the street down on our map and had a good idea of where it was--a straight shot, really. When we hopped in the taxi to try to find it again, we had a cabbie who was unwilling to try to understand us (speaking Chinese)even the littlest bit. It's really funny--somedays we'll have entire conversations in the taxi, where the driver is eager to speak and really goes out of his way to figure out what we're saying. This particular day, though, he tried to tell us that this street we wanted had no restaurants. None at all. So we just showed him the name card for our hotel, knowing that if he just took us back in that direction we would inevitably drive past it. We did. We told him to stop, and he said (in Chinese): "this isn't your hotel." Like, we know, jerk. It's the restaurant you said didn't exist on this street. We've gotten better about being assertive with our Chinese, though, and I think we really starting perfecting it in Beijing.

The pizza restaurant was like any other pizza joint. We sat upstairs and had a nice view, the service was slow, they served every individual item on a tray. I wouldn't have minded if the waitress had just handed me some tobasco and cheese from the next table; but no, she had to run over and get the tray and make a grand presentation out of it. Fine dining.

The best part about this place, though, was the salad bar. According to the menu, one could only visit the salad bar once; knowing this, one had to make the most discriminating of choices when assembling the salad. At the table next to us, two tiny Chinese ladies debated what they should order. They decided they'd share a salad and a small pizza. Fair enough. It was the duty of one of the ladies to make the salad and the other to just wait. I have never seen such an architecturally sound masterpiece. The salad builder had a plan of attack! She lined the entire inner perimeter of the bowl with carrot sticks, thus creating even more bowl!

Then she proceeded to create layer after layer of fruits, a whole lot of thousand island dressing, vegetables, nuts, pineapple rings that she dangled off of the carrot sticks, you name it. And in the span of time it took her to create her salad, four other salad lovers came and went (they employed similar tactics), her pizza came to her table and we had finished half of our meal. And this was on top of really slow service. We weren't the only people who were entertained, either. Most of our side of the restaurant was watching her, wondering when she would ever stop. I think she and her friend were both a little embarassed and impressed. There's no way they came close to finishing (even half of) the salad.

Post lunch, Rory went back to the hotel, and I walked around our area a little bit to check out some reasonably priced silk and handmade stuff. It was nice. I broke a wooden fish in a handicraft store, but she didn't make me pay for it, and I was sort of shocked. I broke a toothpick holder once at a restaurant, and they made me pay for that. I'm a klutz. And I was a klutz with a giant purse and a bag of silk, so even better.

I wasn't feeling the best, so we called it a relatively early evening. Ate McDonalds again and went to 31 to see the rest of the band. Luckily for us, the drunk university kids weren't there again that night. They were probably still hungover from the day before. Even though the full band was performing that night, something about it was less impressive to me. I liked it better when the two guys performed by themselves the first 3 nights we saw them. It was very soothing. But once the lead guitarist/lead vocalist/person for whom the band was named showed up, it suddenly was less soothing. Less intimate. Still very good, but the fact that I was all snotty didn't really help, either.

Next day was leaving day. We had some time to kill before our bus left, and we didn't have any plans other than to eat some more duck at a much cheaper restaurant down the road from our hotel. We walked in, the place was clean enough (though there was no bathroom), and we ordered some duck. It tasted just as good as at the restaurant where it cost 3.5 times as much for it. Let that be a lesson for those who go to Beijing and want Peking duck. It's good no matter where you eat it. I mean, it tastes pretty much the same--it's roasted duck. Even here in Weihai, at the roasted duck restaurant, it tastes the same. Delicious.

We didn't want to do anything too big or that we might not have enough time to fully enjoy, so we opted for Beihai park. We learned in Qingdao that if a park is important enough to put on a tourist map, it's probably worth checking out. It was cheap, and it was close to Houhai park, so it was already in a neighborhood with which we were familiar. The park turned out to be a real highlight of the trip. It was gorgeous, there weren't tons of people there, we didn't feel like we were getting stared at left and right; it was so sprawling, too, and we ended up spending several hours there. We even got to ride on a ferry that looked like a dragon. Pretty cool.

The park was full of different pavilions and pagodas and dagobas. Real highlights, though (and Rory has video footage of this somewhere) were the clusters of (mostly) old people gathered in the pavilions, playing instruments and singing songs at the top of their lungs. Chinese jam sessions aren't too uncommon in parks (we've learned), but it's always a pleasant surprise to just sort of stumble upon them. Especially if the first song you hear is a familiar one, like "Silent Night." There's something really sweet and cute about hearing Chinese folks singing "Silent Night" in four part harmony.

We left Beihai and headed back to the hotel (to pick up our backpacks) and off to the bus station. I had no more memory left on my camera, I was cranky, and I was in no way prepared for another overnight bus ride back to Weihai. As we were sitting in the bus station, I remembered the day before, when we had distinctly asked the ticket lady for two tickets together. Sure, in America, separate us on a trip for a little while, and it's no big deal. We speak English, we can handle it, we can reasonably ask someone to move if we need to. And most of the time, people will be understanding. But in China, for 13 hours, surrounded by a bunch of people who stare, it's a lot harder. Upon closer inspection of the tickets, we realized that they didn't look anything like they were together. 28 and 13 or something. Before we actually got on the bus, I told Rory to be prepared for me to throw a fit.

And I did. I threw a big fit the second we got on the bus, telling the attendant (in Chinese) "yesterday she said we had two tickets together. We need to sleep together. We are the only Americans on the bus, the only English speakers on the bus." The lady just smiled and nodded, like it was going to be no problem to put us together. She shuffled us further to the middle of the bus and pointed to a top bunk bed. I assumed this meant we would have this bunk, top and bottom. So we started putting our stuff down and getting settled in. Then the woman tried to tell me that I was in the back of the bus. I didn't move. I just said over and over "I don't want. We don't speak Chinese. We're the two people on the bus who speak English..." blah blah blah. She still didn't quite understand. That's when I pulled the bratty, little kid temper tantrum move. I sort of threw my hands in the air and let out this big, pissed off sigh. At this point, folks were looking, not really understanding what was going on, but the fact that other passengers had been disrupted at all made the lady spring into action, promptly freeing up two top bunks in the back by the bathroom. Fine. Thank you very much.

This bus was significantly less comfortable than the one from Weihai to Beijing. I thought back to our Weihai departure--our nice send off from the friendly guard--and then the Beijing departure. Night and day, I tell you. It was raining and I'd just made a complete jackass of myself. But at least I was next to Rory and not some dude who smelled like garlic, cigarettes and motor oil. Oh wait, he was sleeping underneath us. He was an old guy who was in charge of the luggage underneath the bus. You could tell he didn't like foreigners. Rory got that impression from him even before we got on the bus and I threw my bitch fit. But once he was underneath us, he was such a jerk, giving us that "there's too much white on this bus" glare. He even got up and reached over my head/my bed to turn off the fan that I had blowing on my face. Never mind the fact that I was sweating and he was down there in just his wife beater and dress pants, surrounded by extra blankets (enough for the whole bus). Julie angry! But I didn't say anything--didn't want to add more to my reputation.

For a few hours after departing Beijing (wonderful Beijing!), I cried and cried. It wasn't because I was sad to leave the city, it was just the first time I've been homesick at all. I was acutely aware of it on this bus, trapped in some little metal bunk bed, surrounded by people who thought I was crazy cause (I'm foreign and) I wanted to be next to my husband. Luckily for us, the trip was only 10 hours this time--evidently more people want to go to Beijing than to Weihai, so there wasn't as much traffic--and when we pulled up to the Zhangcun drop off point near CCTV, the driver and everyone else on the bus were shocked that we were getting off the bus. "There's no way they live out here" they were all thinking (because most people can't believe we live in Zhangcun, which really is out in the middle of nowhere). But as we got our luggage from underneath the bus, we saw a friendly man in a parking lot (at 4:30 am) ready to give us a ride to Daguanghua (without us even having to tell him; he just knew).

It restored my faith in China a litte bit, to have someone there, in a sense waiting for us. I was back in my Zhangcun comfort zone, even if that meant pulling into Daguanghua and walking up 225 steps to a tiny little dorm room.