She Said:

Heading to Beijing…

JP went to work in the morning and took most of our bigger bags packed for Beijing . We were tasked with getting the kids ready, food packed, and getting ourselves on the Metro and to the train station for a 1:00 train.

We had a busy morning with packing and making sandwiches, and Carolina and I decided to run down to the store to get some train snacks prior to leaving. That was our first mistake. We commented on how well we were doing on time as we headed down and then panicked on the way back up to the apartment. It was already after 11. Here is how the next two hours went:

- 11:15 try to take shuttle bus to Metro to avoid long transfer
- 11:16 shuttle changes route; hop in cab instead at 11:24
- Get to station at 11:34, get out of cab, and realize our bags are missing (i.e. left on curb at hotel)
- Chad jumps back in cab at 11:40, gets bags (thank goodness), and is back at station by 12:05
- Three adults, three kids, and two strollers run through the Metro station, only to be held up by a lady who won't open the door to let strollers through
- Finally, on the Metro, all is well, and it looks like we might make it…
- Until the train stops two stops prior to our stop and goes out of service at 12:43
- The next Metro train arrives, and we get to the station with seven minutes to catch our bullet train to Beijing . We act "Chinese," and push our way through to the elevator.
- We can't get out of the Metro. Our Metro cards won't work in the machines. We are stuck. Chad picks up the stroller with Sebastian in it, throws Sebastian at me, and crawls under the turnstile at 12:58.
- We run as fast as we can, having no idea in this large station where our gate is located. We realize we're on the south side and need to be on the north side AND one floor up. We run some more with both strollers, multiple bags, and make it to the x-ray machine closest to our gate at 1:07.
- The train is already gone.  
- I look down and see that Sebastian is now sound asleep through all of this.  
- The next train is in three hours.

So we were stuck in what felt like a non air-conditioned station for three hours. Sebastian slept for one hour and woke up quite cranky. The next debacle was changing his diaper. I only tell this story to remember it myself because it just added to the insanity that was this day . I have no problem changing a wet diaper in the middle of the station with him standing up. However, this one was more complicated. The bathrooms were awful, and the only place I could find to change him was in a very small spot I cleared on the sink. He was so cranky; he was totally fighting me and squirming around while I was trying to change him. Subsequently, there was shit everywhere. He was crying. I was dripping sweat, yelling at him to chill out… And multiple Chinese women were taking photos. Awesome.

Finally, at 4:07 pm, we boarded the train for Beijing. We arrived at 10 p.m. and were all exhausted. Exiting out of the station was also comical. We must have taken a wrong turn and ended up walking through the equivalent of an employee lounge (which was really shady and consisted of a few workers sleeping on benches and smoking). We hopped in a cab to the hotel, and when we arrived, I was finally rewarded for this hellish day. 

The Conrad hotel might be one of the nicest hotels we've ever stayed in . JP's boss helped get us a great deal, and it couldn't have come at a better time. The room was clean, spacious, and there were slippers waiting for all three of us! Sebastian started feeling mildly feverish when we got off the train, so I had already given him Tylenol at the station. We quickly settled, and he was sleeping in our bed before we even got his crib set up. When the crib was ready, we moved him and crashed in bed. 

We started hearing him talking in his sleep with what sounded like gibberish. In trying to quiet him down, I noticed that he was burning up. He spiked a high fever at 3:30 a.m. and was shaking (something we've never seen him do). We quickly gave him Motrin and put cold compresses on his head and neck. This scared us both, and I started having visions of going to a Beijing hospital. Thankfully, the fever started coming down and was down to low grade around 5:30.  

The alarm was set to go off at 6 for a 7 a.m. tour at the Great Wall . There was no way. He still had a low-grade fever, and we could not take him two hours away in a thousand degree heat with an air quality index of 217 to climb the Great Wall. It was a bummer because we didn't get to tour with our friends, but it was the best decision for Sebastian. With a little more Tylenol, by 9 a.m. his fever broke. He ate a big breakfast, and we took a little walk around the hotel. We all went back to sleep from 12:30-3:30 and were feeling a lot better, collectively.  

With his fever down most of the day, we decided to take an outing and check out Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, we missed the flag lowering, but we arrived just in time to see the army emptying the square fairly quickly. I imagine this is custom once the flags are lowered, but once I was reminded of what happened there in the not so distant past, it was even more eerie to watch the square being emptied by Army. We walked on all sides of it and checked out the north gate.

Being an exceptionally poor air quality day, I wanted to get Sebastian back indoors . His cough was beginning to take shape. Finding cabs in Beijing is no easy feat. We enlisted a local hotel to help us flag some down, and 20+ minutes later we got one. I'm pretty sure our cabby was stoned and did not have any working A/C. His car felt like the little engine that could, and I was having some doubts we would make it. I enlisted my handy Mickey Mouse surgical mask to try and limit the air pollution Seb inhaled, but unsurprisingly, he wouldn't keep it on. We settled on room service with slippers that night and headed to bed early.

We decided to book a private tour to the Great Wall the next day, which would require us to leave by 7:30 a.m. We held our breath that Seb would feel ok as we booked our second non-refundable trip to the Wall. We were rewarded for our sick day with a private tour guide and car that turned out to be wonderful. I was anticipating our visit to the Great Wall with much excitement, maybe more than any other site in Beijing, and it did not disappoint . This was surely worthy of being one of the seven wonders, and I was in awe.

Getting up to the wall was a trek in and of itself. We took a bus to a gondola, and after some short steps, we were there. With Seb securely on my back in a backpack, we began our climb. It was about 800 degrees but a small breeze and the shade of the lookout towers provided some relief. Our guide gave us some great history and explanation of the wall, and we trekked a few towers. I really enjoy learning about history while in it's presence. The enormity of the wall was astounding.

After about an hour or so, Seb was looking and acting heat exhausted so we decided to head down. We treated him to an overpriced Popsicle and headed back to the hotel. We rested briefly and went right back out to see the Temple of Heaven. This is recognizable to anyone who has ever been to the China pavilion in Epcot. This was another beautiful temple housed in the center of massive park grounds . We wandered the temple grounds and through some of the park. We stumbled upon some street music before we headed out. Sebastian was so excited and kept saying "more" every time a song ended.  I don't think they understood him, but they thought it was funny. 

Again, trying to catch a cab back to the hotel was impossible. We walked quite far and stood in the middle of a very large intersection until we finally got one to stop. He agreed to take us, and it proceeded to take over an hour to go less than 10 miles with the insane traffic. We were late to meet up with our friends in the lobby for dinner, and by the time we finally got back, they were gone. We walked to where we thought the restaurant was and were able to find them right before they got seated. 

Dinner was delicious with king crab, another amazing Peking duck, bamboo shoots, and a few other things I think Chad will publish in detail. The only thing left to see was the Forbidden City . Though I really wanted to check it out, we only had a few hours before needing to catch the train back to Shanghai. I opted out so Seb could sleep in, and Chad went early to get photos and see it. The train home was easy and we enjoyed the company of all our friends.    

He Said:

Making our one o'clock train to Beijing just wasn’t going to happen. Despite our efforts, we were thwarted by a late start, a change in shuttle schedule, me leaving two bags at The Kerry and having to go back and get them, our inability to find the stroller entrance to the Metro, our Metro train going out of service once we finally boarded, and then a maze of exits and elevators and defunct Metro cards when we tried to enter the train station. Despite all that, we were only about ten minutes late, but it wasn’t going to happen.

When we finally got to Beijing about three hours later then expected, we could immediately tell we were in a different world . It had a completely different feel about it, even in the train station. One of the first things I saw was a police commander yelling at rows of his subordinates in a back corridor by the elevators. Hmm. Couple that with no access to basically any form of communicative websites, and we knew we were in Beijing. This was the northern city of government power and the communist party, not the southern city of Shanghai and its ultra-Capitalism and western businesses.

Even in Beijing, though, there certainly are some western comforts and a thriving business scene. One such example was our home for three days – The Conrad Beijing. This is probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, with a massive, luxury suite and impeccable service. I’m not exaggerating when I say you couldn’t take ten steps without someone offering to do something for you, help you, or just go out of their way to say hello. Thankfully the general manager in JP’s office got us an insane deal on the rooms because the next 24 hours were difficult to say the least .

Around 3 a.m., Sebastian woke up shivering and muttering incomprehensible words. He definitely had a fever, though it wasn’t off the charts high. He’s had worse. But he was shaking and acting delirious. We gave him Motrin, held a cool compress on his head, and basically took turns half sleeping for the next three or four hours. We were both very worried.

Around 5 a.m., I think, he finally settled into an unlabored sleep. We were supposed to be downstairs in less than an hour for breakfast, followed by our tour of the Great Wall we had booked a few days before. We had a choice: wake Sebastian up and take the tour, or let him sleep and figure it out later. It really wasn’t a choice. There’s no way we could have interrupted his sleep. We gave up seeing the Great Wall, unsure of what would happen over the coming hours and days, but at least Sebastian's fever was down, and he was sleeping.

That day, we were really grateful for the amazing hotel room . We spent a lot of time there. All of it, in fact, aside from a late trip downstairs for the buffet breakfast. We basically lounged around, took care of some administrative stuff, let Sebastian play with the camera, considered how we could scramble and still see all the sites in our shortened time (basically see the highlights of Beijing in 36 hours), and we rested. The opulent breakfast included two monks who stayed a very, very long time, as well as our nice waitress who instantly took a liking to Sebastian. In the evening after the crew got back from their Great Wall tour, Sebastian was feeling a lot better. Alli and I were jonesing to see something, anything, so we made sure Sebastian could handle it, and we hopped in two separate cabs to Tiananmen Square with the Hurtados.

As we entered the square, there was a mass forced exodus out of the square. Eerily familiar. Cops and soldiers were corralling people toward the periphery. There was no loitering whatsoever, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crowded space of that size be cleared of people so quick . The military and police presence was beyond what I expected. (I later found out we were there on the anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army, a holiday which always brings out extra uniforms and precautions. Still, the tension was noticeable by all of us, perhaps driven by our expectations and our memories.)

We walked along the western side of the square near the Great Hall of the People. In the middle, we could see the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Mao Zedong’s mausoleum. We walked north toward Tiananmen Gate, the massive portrait of Chairman Mao getting bigger and bigger with each step. There were colorful fountains and music, people waving Chinese flags, and massive, ornate lamps (familiar-looking from photos in 1989), each one packed full of security cameras. Eventually, we were standing right on the north-south axis of, not just Tiananmen Square, but the entire city of Beijing.

We walked a little further to the east near the Beijing Hotel to hail a cab . I later discovered the famous "tank man" photographs were all taken from the balconies of this hotel. The cab we eventually hailed was at the intersection where the man stood in front of the tank. To this day, 25 years later, his name and whereabouts are unknown or unconfirmed to the world. In China, many/most don’t know about him at all. His images are banned. The June 4 massacre isn’t discussed. In fact, it’s basically been erased from public memory. Earlier this summer, a team of French journalists took photos of the "tank man" into Tiananmen Square and asked locals if they recognized it. Most did not, or they didn’t want to admit it if they did. Even in today’s modern, far-less-restrictive China, the team of journalists wound up in the back of a squad car within 10 minutes.

The next day on the way to the Great Wall, I was talking with our English-speaking guide who went to a Beijing university in what was probably the early 90s. I mentioned something about the police presence in the square the night before, and knowing what happened there in the past, how I guess I expected it . She looked at me with an odd expression, which I later realized could have been from general lack of knowledge about what happened in 1989.

I talked with her about a wide variety of topics, and having our own, private, English-speaking guide who literally walked with us the entire time made missing our tour the day before less of a downer. We talked about the immaculate roads in China, the farmland and countryside we were driving through, and we talked about how there’s a movement in the U.S. for more bicycles in our cities (something traditional in China), while in China, car ownership is growing exponentially (something traditional to the United States). It was one of those conversations you truly cherish when traveling. It was a conversation where we both learned about each other's respective cultures in a genuinely curious kind of way, completely devoid of any judgement or animosity about our cultural differences.

The Great Wall was amazing . It is massive, and to think it extends for more than 5,000 miles is mind blowing. We took the gondola up to the top, the views to our right eventually revealing the crenellated battlements on the top of the wall. At the top, we walked to the right a bit through tower number 14, and then we walked back to the left to tower number 15. My thoughts on the Great Wall are:

1) It would be amazing to hike a far distance or to see it by helicopter. 2) When you go see such a small section of it, even one with a reputation for sweeping views like Mutianyu where we toured, your perspective doesn’t change too much. 3) When your kid starts looking exhausted, almost frighteningly so, it’s time to head back down. 4) The long ride out from Beijing and relatively short amount of time we actually spent at the Great Wall were 100% worth it. 5) There’s nothing like the feeling of looking at one of the Wonders of the World with your own eyes.

After a quick rest back at The Conrad in Beijing, we headed out to the Temple of Heaven, which is actually a large park and complex containing many temples, altars, and halls . Even more than the Great Wall, perhaps, it was the one site in Beijing I was most looking forward to seeing because of its stunning Ming architecture.

Many of the structures were built around the year 1420, with some reconstruction and rebuilding along the way. They were essentially divine sites where the emperor would visit to pray for rain during times of drought, to pray for great harvests, and to make ritualistic sacrifices on behalf of his people.

The Temple of Heaven’s centerpiece is the Hall of Prayer of Good Harvests, quite possibly one of my favorite buildings in the world. Its three tiers of blue tiling symbolize the heavens. Inside, columns are arranged by symbolic numbers that represent the seasons (four) and the months (12). The building is made of wood, contains no cement or nails, and if I were driving an alien spacecraft to Earth from some outer solar system, this building might be my first stop. We took hundreds of photos as we walked around not twice, but three times . Alli even shared a ping da beer with me. We strolled through the rest of the park, and eventually found some live, traditional music. Sebastian was of course the focal point amongst the locals, not the tunes.

Cabbies in Beijing suck, but eventually we found someone willing to take us back out to the business district where The Conrad is, as well as the famous Peking duck restaurant called Dadong. We were late, but when we finally arrived, the whole crew was still waiting. We proceeded to dine on Peking duck in the city of Peking. It was amazing, even better than Xindalu back in Shanghai. This time we only ordered two ducks, and supplemented the meal with a king crab dish, various sides, and many Tsing Taos. I learned that when you toast in China around a Lazy Susan, it’s acceptable to tap the bottom of your glass on the Lazy Susan. This is how a large table all toasts at the same time. (For food porn from the meal, please see the attached images.)

The next day, I was up bright and early . Alli and Sebastian were still sleeping. Alli eventually stirred, and told me just to go alone, which I’m glad I did. We all had to be in the lobby by 10:45 to catch a van to the train station, and intent on not missing another train, that left me just over two hours to see the Forbidden City. Calculating travel times in the cab (traffic in this city is worse than anywhere I’ve ever been), that left me with just over an hour. Seeing something as formidable as the Forbidden City in an hour is one thing, with a two-year-old and a stroller over rough cobblestones is another. Also consider: another shitty Beijing cab driver dropped me off at the north gate while listening to some Sunday morning drama on the radio; the only entrance is the south gate; I had to pay a gouged 40 RMB to just get to the south gate in another cab so I could be on time (almost $7 for a five minute ride, which is very expensive in China considering it should have been about $2.50). I’m really glad I went alone because I essentially ran through the largest palace in the world .

It was truly massive. For what Versailles is to France, the Forbidden City is even more so to China. Gate after gate, expansive courtyard after expansive courtyard, it's an intimidating complex of pavilions and gateways that eventually lead to the living quarters of the Chinese emperors. It is the most important real estate in China, and after thinking about it, I could see why. Even if their knowledge of the cosmos in 1420 was far less than ours today, pulling back from the central, imperial living quarters is much like the animations that pull back from Earth and show the expanding universe. This makes sense, because the Forbidden City was literally the center of the Chinese universe. Each gate is entry to another level of the palace, of the universe.

To view it as an imperial visitor must have been awing. To view it in an hour shortly after the gates open and it's already packed with people is impressive in a different sort of way . Either way, the most confounding thing we experienced that day was on the train back to Shanghai: 

JP, Darrah, Frank, and I proceeded to drink all the beer on the train and piss off the entire dining car staff in the process.

Sebastian Said:

Before the bullet train – “Big big big train.”
On the bullet train – “Go very fast.”
On the train a bit later when a man spit in the sink – “Man spit it out on the train.”
At the Great Wall gondola – “Go up up up.”
In the Temple of Heaven Park – “Hear more music.”
At breakfast in The Conrad – “Lady put napkin in lap. Nihao nice lady!”