2018, Central Asia

The CCTV Tower in Chaoyang

We wake up early this morning to go visit the great wall. As it’s not close to the city, you need to get there either with a tour or with a private driver. We opt for the latter. It turns out to be a lucky move, as it takes nearly two hours to go to the point we chose. It’s a part of the wall called Mutianyu and it’s not one of the most visited. In theory, at least.

Once in Mutianyu, a cable car takes the lazy ones like us directly on the hills on top of which the wall stands. After quite a long queue, a stunning view, and a finally breathable air welcomes us. The landscape of the mountains surrounding Beining is breathtaking, just as the steps we have to climb to get to the top!

On the wall there is a little bit more of foreign tourists compared to what we saw yesterday, mainly Italian, French and Americans. Anyway, more than 80% of tourists visiting at this time of the year are, as usual, Chinese.

The steepest part begins after a pretty easy walk of around an hour. Before that, an unsuspectable old man succeeds in selling us the most expensive bottle of water of the whole China, with a clever, and pretty demotivating “very long, very long”. As soon as we reach barely half the way of the steep stairway, an officer starts yelling at the tourists, throwing his hat to the floor, apparently telling them to turn back. We reluctantly follow the orders and, an hour later, we’re back to the starting point. We have barely the time to get into the car and a violent rainstorm falls on us, to our major relief as we’re already heading back to Beijing.

Here we have to ditch Plan A, the Summer Palace, because of the bad weather so we ask the driver to lead us to the silk market, which is a kind of center mall with all kinds of different products, from fake branded handbags to electronics and even jewelry (also fake, of course). We are not looking for anything in particular, but the fact that the market is a dry place is good enough to keep us there for at least four hours (of course, it stopped raining in the meanwhile). We find a lot of interesting things, except silk! There are some taylor shops who also sell fabrics, which is one of the things Prisca is interested in, but the fabrics are not original enough. The most funny thing is that in most shops you can bargain to buy what you want for the best price. Prices indicated on the products are quite high, which is almost an invitation to bargain. A product that is indicated as worth 2000 yuan, for example, can be sold, after hard (or very quick) negotiation, for 200 yuan or even less! It’s quite surprising, and you quickly get in the game of bargaining! In the end, we left with some funny gadgets for the home and spent a little below 50 euro.

Not far from the Silk Market there is the fanciest part of the Chaoyang neighborhood, sporting 5-star hotels, european boutiques and some of the most awe-inspiring skyscrapers of the city, among which stands the CCTV tower belonging to the main Chinese TV company. Challenging the laws of physics the building emerges from the fog as in an post-apocalyptical sci-fi movie. “We’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”! Time to leave!

Our breakfast being prepared - on the street

Miffy welcomes us!

Selfie with Mr Mao

Night in the neighborhood

Lost in Translation

After a 10-hour flight, and not so many hours of sleep, we finally land in Beijing. Everything looks pretty smooth, from collecting the luggage to passing the border control, until we face our first challenge: finding a cab to get to our hotel. We choose to ask for a fare estimate at the information center: too bad that, once we jump in the car, the driver wants roughly the double. He starts anyway, but without being sure of the exact localisation of the hotel. After calling a bunch of colleagues he now seems reassured but, we cannot say the same. Once arrived at destination, a bit of final bargaining leaves us with no cash at all, and we even have to concede a final 10eur to be able to close the dicussions and to leave him with a smile on his face.

It’s 5am in the morning in Beijing and sun is already up an shining: after a brief dialogue with the tenant we are ready to hit the streets. Our neighborhood offers much in terms of cheap local food solutions - albeit maybe not in terms of hygiene. That said, paying without cash looks the hardest of the hurdles and 3km later a cash machine of a local bank saves our chances of having a decent breakfast.

It’s just 9am in the morning and we opt for visiting one of the major sightseeings of the capital: Tien’Anmen and the Forbidden City. Despite the hordes of tourists moving in the early morning to discover the once epicenter of Imperial China, the queue is once again quite smooth and, most of all, the fact that we are foreign tourists (aliens) gave us the right to skip the safety check, which makes us feel special (haha). Once we pass the main entrance, we make another queue to buy tickets, to find out they are sold out… Outch! We are then forced to keep on walking somewhere else and we stumble on another neighborhood, on Jinyu Hutong street. Probably one of the most European/Western areas in Beijing, with a huge concentration of shopping malls and an army of fancy people. We walk around a little bit, take our first real Chinese bubble tea (which is delicious) and get back to our hotel’s neighborhood.

There begins our adventure to find a Chinese SIM card. First of all, having a SIM card gives you a real advantage in the day-to-day tourist life: having internet access allows you to use maps, look for places, make cheap local calls and, most of all, look for translations! In most countries, getting a cheap SIM card is just a matter of finding the closest phone shop in your neighborhood. In most countries, but not in China. Getting a SIM card here requires registering your passport to your network operator, a procedure that local shops are not entitled to do. After visiting at least half a dozen of telecom businesses, we find one willing to help us, not before negotiating of course. The guy tries to sell us a card registered under his name for about 40€ but we’re not reassured: after half an hour of juggling between translator and calculator (to show the price we’re willing to pay) and 20 more minutes to find a bank to provide us with cash (because no credit card accepted, sorry!) we finally come to an agreement. The guy’s wife appears from the back of the shop and escorts us, by taking a local bus, to the local headquarters of China Unicom, in the outskirts of the neighborhood. Here, after a long hour of waiting, with the lady falling asleep in the meanwhile, we are finally able to get our SIM cards, not before giving copies of our passports of course, having our faces scanned for comparison and, of course, additional translations.

Long story short, at 4 PM, 3 hours after beginning our quest for connectivity, we have 2 legal Chinese SIM cards - and a second-hand cheap Honor phone, our precious tech companion for the rest of our journey.

It’s now time to go back to the hotel, to take a well deserved shower and nap, before hitting the street again for a tour in the Beijing night!

TL;DR: Lessons learned:

• Locals from Beijing are really helpful - after negotiations, that is!
• A translator installed on your phone is required even for the basic interactions (such as “how much is it?” or “a bottle of water, please”)
• Getting a legal SIM card is harder than you think
• Your credit card is basically useless here. Unless you get a working WeChat Pay or AliPay account (and we still have to figure out how) cash is your only way to pay
• Eating is cheap: a full breakfast is about 2€/person, and a dinner goes about 5/6€
• Beijing is freakin’ humid!

That said, we’re having a good time! See you in our next post!

Today‘s the beginning of a new trip, a new journey through continents, people, and cultures.

Today’s the beginning of more exciting moments of plane-hopping, photography, wandering, eating, early wake-ups.

And, most of all, today’s the beginning of discovery, of countries and regions you might actually wonder whether they really exist today or they’re just memories of a faded past. We’ll go through a segment of the Silk Road, leaving Paris for Beijing, then reaching Xinjiang, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Today’s once again the beginning of something new. So, let’s begin.