While the garden sleeps I thought I’d start off the New Year with a post about the most foreign place I’ve ever visited: China. (Tanzania in Africa might have won that distinction but for the fact that I was on a guided tour and mostly in national parks, and therefore insulated from interactions with locals.) I’d never thought of visiting China until my husband was asked to give a presentation at a conference in Beijing in April 2005, and on a lark I decided to tag along. We got our visas, my mom stayed with the kids, and we embarked on a 4-day visit to China’s capital before the conference began.

China is a long way from Texas — 16 hours in the air. We flew from Austin to San Francisco, about 4 hours, and then from San Fran to Beijing, 12 hours straight. Although I nearly had a claustrophobic freak-out in my window seat in coach after 8 hours or so, I did enjoy the perk of the view. With my nose pressed to the window, we flew over the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Russia…

…and a desolate, mountainous Siberia. It was purely astonishing to me. I’d never seen anything like this, and what truly amazed me was that we flew over this landscape for hours and hours. For the first time I grasped how big our planet is. You’d think flying would make you feel the opposite, but seeing this majestic wilderness passing beneath us for hours — with no trace of human incursion — induced in me a sense of awe.

We arrived in Beijing around dinnertime, met up with my husband’s colleague Chris, who was co-presenting at the conference, and took a taxi to our hotel in the university district. After checking in, we walked down the bustling street, hesitantly window-shopping several restaurants until hunger won out and we took a table in a tiny, crowded place. Almost no one spoke English outside the hotel, we discovered, and our Mandarin was limited to hello and thank you. However, this restaurant and most others included photos of the dishes on their menus, making it a simple matter to point to order. Bottled Chinese beer was our drink of choice.

The next day we hopped on the subway at rush hour to go see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We quickly learned that when the doors open, it’s every man for himself. People just start shoving to get on. Once on you cram next to your fellow passengers as other riders squeeze on, and other riders, until you no longer need to hold a bar to keep your balance — you couldn’t fall over if you tried. Here we are with our subway faces on. We were grateful to discover that station signs are printed not just in Chinese characters but phonetically in the English alphabet, making it easy to find your stop.

A sea of gray stone pavers and an immensity of open space surrounded by government buildings, Tiananmen is the largest public square in the world. Armed guards stand watch around the perimeter, and throngs of Chinese tourists and guided tour groups with flags and matching ball caps trek across it. Although Western visitors immediately think of the student-led democratic uprising of 1989, there’s no sign to commemorate it, as China’s government censors any mention of the protest and its violent suppression.

At one end of the square stands the walled Forbidden City, the former palace of Chinese emperors. Until the last emperor was forced to abdicate in 1912, only royals and the aristocratic elite could enter. Today, adorned with a large portrait of Chairman Mao, it’s open to the public.

Chris and David tried to imitate Mao’s dignified, benevolent expression here. What I like about this photo is the rubbernecking Chinese tourists. We were stared at wherever we went in Beijing. I never got used to it. While Beijing is an enormous city, home to 20 million (!) people, Westerners are apparently a rare sight. Perhaps many of the Chinese tourists in Beijing are from cities that attract few Western visitors. Whatever the reason, wherever we went people turned around to look at us, smilingly motioned to be photographed with us, and even sidled up beside us to casually pose while someone else in their party took our photo.

My dark-haired husband, who is one-quarter Japanese, might have passed less noticeably (although not in that bright-blue jacket), but my blonde hair was a magnet for curious eyes.

Both are vast in scale, but while Tiananmen Square is architecturally drab, the Forbidden City is awash in sensual color and fantastical detail: yellow glazed tiles on the rooftops…

…corrugated roof lines and jewel-tone color schemes.

Dragons and other creatures skate down swooping eaves. Is that man riding a rooster?

Even ceilings include richly painted wooden beams and gold-leaf dragons.

The incredible tiled walls we saw here and throughout old Beijing fascinated me. I was certain the city would have a tile district, keeping this art alive, where I could purchase a small souvenir, but our guidebook was mum on the subject. I tried asking locals throughout our visit. Unfortunately the language barrier was as impenetrable as the Great Wall, and we never encountered any tile shops.

During our visit the city was sprucing up for the 2008 Olympics, and renovations were underway here as well. Scaffolding covered some of the palace buildings, and our minds boggled to think of how all these roof tiles, meticulously stacked in one plaza, would be reconstructed. What I would have given for one of those dragon-figure tiles!

Dragon’s claw tree, still leafless in early April

The next day we hired a car to take us out to the Great Wall at Simatai, a 3-hour drive from Beijing. After a hair-raising cab ride we’d experienced the day before, we were absurdly pleased to be in a comfortable sedan with seat belts.

Negotiating the streets of Beijing is an art. There are few stoplights, even on major streets, so to cross as a pedestrian you go with the flow, dodging buses, taxis, and bikes, working your way across in segments, all to a cacophony of blaring horns. The horn blowing is not done in anger or aggravation, as in the U.S. It’s done in advance, as a way of alerting someone that you’re coming. The taxis leave absolutely no room for driver or pedestrian error. They crowd right up behind or next to other cars and people. They change lanes — or create their own — at will. A taxi ride is a unique experience: careening around obstacles and people; tailgating to the half-inch; veering into the bike lane, honking as bikes casually move to the right or left; pulling into oncoming traffic if that’s the only way to get past someone going a smidge slower. The drivers are cool as cucumbers as they dart in and out; we passengers were continually sucking in our breath, eliciting puzzled glances in rear-view mirrors from the drivers.

The day we drove out to the Great Wall, we encountered a massive traffic jam on the multi-lane highway leaving the city. Without hesitation, our driver zipped into oncoming traffic to get around the mess [gasps in the back seat], and then ahead we saw the problem: a bus was making a U-turn in the middle of the highway. The highway was lined with trees, and the bus driver couldn’t negotiate the turn without stopping to back up. Cars in both directions had squeezed in to fill the gap, creating a logjam. The honking was enthusiastic.

Our driver immediately U-turned. Speeding back the way we’d come, we looked ahead and saw the unthinkable: another bus stuck in the middle of a U-turn! Zip — we flew off to the right on a narrow side road, following a line of evacuating cars. Clunk — suddenly we were off-road, bumping across a field, cruising past old men working with hoes. Pop — we thumped back onto a road through what looked like a U.S. housing area: gated, American-looking houses with standard American shops nearby. What in the world was that, we wondered, but no way to ask our driver, who spoke no English. Suddenly we were back on the highway, past the logjam. Yee-haw!

We chose to see the Great Wall at Simatai because the guide book said it was authentically old — dating from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In contrast, sections of the wall closer to Beijing are complete reconstructions and thronged with tourists. Our driver dropped us off at the bottom of a steep hill and indicated (we hoped) that he would wait, and we began our climb up to the wall.

A group of locals waited at the base of the hill, ignoring Chinese tourists but singling out Westerners. One of these, a woman about my age, attached herself to us as we started up. She made friendly conversation in passable English, and then let it be known that she had souvenirs she wanted us to buy after our hike. We said we’d think about it and continued up. She did too — the whole 2-hour hike, never once leaving us. She pointed things out to us, took our picture, tried to take my arm and assist me where the path was crumbly.

Unlike me, she never huffed or puffed all the long way up those stair-stepped hillsides. Obviously she did this every day. After about an hour, she told us we’d seen all there was to see and suggested we go back, eager to make a sale and pick up another tourist at the base.

Well, she’d never met my husband, who has never seen a hill he didn’t insist on climbing. The stairs were very steep, and there were a lot of them. Stupidly, I’d worn slip-on clogs, which kept threatening to slide off. Eventually I took them off and climbed in my sock feet.

It was very windy and cold on the wall, but the views were incredible.

To consider the wall’s age, its length, and its laborious construction induced awe. David and Chris were eager to climb up to all 12 watchtowers in this section of the wall, and somehow my legs got me up there.

Victory! On the way down our guide made her pitch. Pulling an assortment of memorabilia from her bag, she urged a purchase. Negotiations ensued. She told us how cold she’d been on the wall. She reminded us that she’d accompanied us the whole way, all the way to the unnecessarily visited 12th tower. We settled at last on a price for a photo book, and she bid us farewell, looking for another unsuspecting Westerner to guide up the wall.

We got some good laughs from the earnestly encouraging but oddly phrased English signage.

On our third day we visited the magnificent Temple of Heaven…

…and admired more gorgeous tile work on roofs…

…and walls along city streets.

We also visited Beijing’s natural history museum, which interestingly (and understandably, considering the city’s population) devoted an entire floor to human reproduction and birth control. Throngs of Chinese teenagers were also touring the museum, many dressed alike in red, white, and blue athletic-style jackets. The boys would wave at us and call out, “Ha-loh!”

Afterward, we rested on benches outside the museum and discussed what to do next. As we sat there, two teenage girls approached, one shyly, the other with a big smile. The brave one held out her camera and indicated she wanted their picture made with us. We were tourist attractions again! Chris and I made room, and the girls sat down between us while David took one photo with their camera and another with ours. The girl on the left looks like she’s about to flee; her friend, who’s grinning like we’re American movie stars, holds her hand in support. They said thank you in English and ran off giggling. Immediately another set of girls walked up with camera in hand, and then another.

I looked over at the crowd of kids, and they were ALL looking at us and holding their cameras. I thought, oh no, we’ll be trapped here for hours. So I popped up, grabbed our camera, and walked over to them, beckoning for David and Chris to follow. Could we take their picture, I motioned? The kids giggled and turned away at first, but when David and Chris went to stand with them they began jumping in on every side, eager to be in the photo. It was one of the most memorable moments of our trip.

That evening at dinner, as usual we pointed at dishes that looked familiar on the photo-packed menu: shish-ka-bobs, chicken and peanuts, a pork dish. The colorful dishes arrived, and we eagerly sampled them. The shish-ka-bobs, while tasty, contained surprising chunks of rubbery…cartilage? Meanwhile, the “chicken” with peanuts had large pieces of bone that was definitely not chicken; the meat had a slight chewy texture, almost like scallops, but it didn’t taste like seafood. Curious, we signed to the waitress to read through our guide book’s list of meats (with Chinese-to-English translations) and point to what we were eating. She read through the list and shook her head to indicate that our mystery meat wasn’t listed. Since the list was fairly extensive, including eel and other exotic meats, we were a little unnerved to imagine what might not be on it.

On my last day touring the city we visited the Summer Palace of Empress Cixi, a romantic pleasure-ground encircled by a large, manmade lake and extensive gardens.

The palace and gardens were constructed as a summer retreat for the Empress Dowager and her court with money siphoned from China’s navy, for which the country paid in British and French colonialism. Although faded and worn when we visited, I understand it’s currently being renovated.

A wall of Buddhas, sadly defaced during the Cultural Revolution or colonial occupation — I can’t remember which.

Spring arrived in Beijing during our week there. The city was brown, dry, and dusty when we arrived, but by the end of our visit trees began blooming and leafing, brightening parks and streetscapes.

I wasn’t as avid a photographer then as I am now, and I regret that I didn’t photograph a rock market we stumbled upon that last day. In a courtyard off the main boulevard vendors were displaying small, polished stones in bowls of water, or spread across blankets for viewing. Large shaped and polished rocks were perched on wooden display stands. We browsed curiously, unsure of the rocks’ purpose: home decor, spiritual significance, feng shui? No one made any sales pitch to us — this was a shopping event for locals, not tourists. Clearly the stones were decorative, but many were very large, and we wondered where a city dweller would put such a thing.

We decided to have lunch near the rock market and stopped at a small restaurant full of locals, nearly all men from the market. Everyone stopped eating and looked at us as we walked in. There was no English or pictures on the menu, so we pulled out our guide book’s list of food (in English and Chinese) and pointed to chicken and pork. The waitress pointed to the menu and said the names of two dishes, and we nodded. We also pointed to a nearby table’s plate of flatbread. Finally we ordered two 1-liter bottles of Chinese beer. The food arrived: chicken and peanuts with spicy peppers; bacon-like strips of pork with green peppers and green onions; flatbread smeared with what seemed like bean paste — all quite good. The locals watched us curiously for a while and then forgot about us. We studied them for proper technique on eating the pizza-like flatbread with chopsticks — not an easy feat. It was a lot of food and a good amount of beer for three people, and the total bill came to about 40 yuan — a mere $5 at that time.

Beijing was fascinating and contradictory to me, packed with people who stared at us and who sometimes called hello to us, but with whom we couldn’t really communicate due to the language barrier. A modern city with skyscrapers, mass transit, and even, surprisingly, English-language signs, it also seemed very foreign in social customs, and we had a distinct sense of only skimming the surface of the culture, with no real understanding of people’s daily lives.

I don’t know if I’ll ever return. It’s a long journey, physically and mentally. I remember, shortly after our arrival, realizing I was on the other side of the planet from my children, who were quite young at the time. It was an oddly helpless feeling.

Visiting China certainly broadened my view of the world. I’m glad I went on that adventure. I can’t help wondering one thing though: how many Chinese photo albums am I in?

All material © 2006-2014 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.