China Day Four - A Few Complimentary Tours I Would Have Missed On My Own

So, today was Friday, May 17^th.

The kids are still jet lagged.  They all fell asleep Thursday evening at 5pm and could NOT be woken up.  They slept until midnight, when they woke me up to tell me they could NOT go back to sleep.   Thankfully, I have brought the best work of fiction ever written along on this trip and so I read out loud to them and we generally goofed off until about 3am when we all went back to sleep until 6am. 

The book is called The Once and Future King (about King Arthur of Great Britain) and if you know me well, then I have been telling you to read it.  Last night, we read this bit about sports:  “…Merlyn grumbled about athletics, saying that nowadays people seemed to think that you were an educated man if you could knock another man off a horse with a bit of stick and that the craze for games was the ruin of scholarship. …’The trouble with the Norman Aristocracy,’ exclaimed Merlyn hotly,  ‘is that they are games-mad.  That’s what it is, games-mad.’  …But Sir Ector, who was an old tilting blue said that the battle of Crecy had been won upon the playing fields of Camelot.  This made Merlyn so furious that he gave Sir Ector rheumatism for two nights running before he relented.”

This quote is relevant because Bill (my husband) asked me to go running with him Friday morning.  Bill is games-mad.  I think he has signed up for more than 20 triathlons this year and he is currently working on getting his mile time down to under 6 minutes, 30 seconds in the 5k.  He’s extended the scope of his mania to include me and so I finally told him I would do four triathlons per year (but no more) and I have been faithfully attempting to share his joy.  Bill is thrilled about this.  Had I grown a third breast, I don’t think he could be happier with me, as his wife, than he is over these triathlons.

I told him I could do three miles comfortably, four with little pain and six was my absolute limit. Of course, we went six.  It was actually really nice.  With the crowds and the uneven pavement, he really couldn’t get too far ahead of me.  I only had to ask him to wait once (this is a record for us) and we saw a LOT of the city.  We went from the Poly Plaza, which is our hotel, to the outside wall of the Forbidden city, then through Coal Hill park and back to the hotel.  At one point, we hit an open air market that was so crowded we had to walk the whole way through it.  I can’t post the pictures yet, because they are on Bill’s phone, but I will try to get to them later.  You can more or less find our route on Google –earth, although I can’t find it myself, because Google is the new Forbidden City over here. 

After a shower and the hotel breakfast we met our guide for a complimentary tour of the hutongs.  I feel terrible about this.  She wanted to do this for us because she missed us at the airport and she said it was her custom.   The adoption agency also wrote and told us to accept her offer of the tour, so of course, we did, but I hate that she felt compelled to do so much.  Ironically, missing her at the airport turned out to be the best thing for us because we had an incredible day.  She took us to the drum tower, the bell tower, a tea house with a formal Chinese tea ceremony, a rickshaw tour through the hutongs, and a visit inside one of the hutong houses.  This was really cool.

These are the drums at the top of the drum tower. They used them to mark time.  They are LOUD.

These are the stairs going up the drum/bell towers.  They felt great after that morning run.

This is a view from the rickshaw, of another rickshaw.

Another view of the Hutongs from the rickshaw.

The Hutongs are a very old (700 years old) part of the city.  She told us they make up about 10% of the real-estate in Beijing.  The houses are small, unattached buildings with separate rooms for a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen.  Since they are so old, there is no plumbing so there are public toilets all over the hutongs.  Each block has at least one.  The streets are tight, almost alleyways, and you don’t see windows because there is a sort of central courtyard for each housing unit that the rooms look into. 

Our guide had to leave about noon, so we ate at a McDonalds, took a walk to Coal Hill with the kids this time and went up the hill to see the Forbidden City.  After that, everyone was exhausted, so we took the subway home (our friends taught us how to use them) and everyone was asleep by 5pm, again.  This time, Bill and I woke the kids up from 6 to 8 pm so hopefully, they will sleep until morning and we’ll be closer to China time. 

This is a map of the subway station we were in.  Note the irony of marking "You Are Here" in English, while leaving the names of the subways in Chinese.

On Saturday, we see the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.  I never did get signed up for the 7k race on the Great Wall.  I supposed it would never have worked with the tour for Saturday already scheduled.  I am sad about this, but I recognize that it's a little absurd to complain.