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Other entries in Beijing

Hurrah for arriving in Beijing..or not!

Well thank goodness for leaving the craziness of Shanghai! I did love many bits of it, but staying in tourist central wore you down. Back to Radisson, the hotel wasn’t near the centre of town, but with so many historical sights in Beijing not many hotels are. So most things involved a taxi ride, which wasn’t a taxing affair, but you needed to have picked up a business card from the hotel, with the address on one side, in Chinese, and the ‘please take me to….Forbidden City’ on the back! Apparently the government have started to give free English lessons to taxi drivers and shop keepers ready for the Olympics, as there is gonna be a whole culture shock and language barrier for a lot of people.

The Forbidden City was top of the agenda this week, as I could spend a day there before my first work day at 6pm. And do you need to spend a day there! It’s massive! I always knew Tiananmen Square was the largest outdoor public square, but having never seen any pictures, really wasn’t sure what to expect of the city itself. Its about a mile in length and nearly as wide, with Tiananmen Square extending even further south. There are squares and throne rooms, boulevards with stairs leading to temples, a garden full of trees and statues and a long tiled wall with the most amazing 9 tiled dragons. We started at the north gate as getting near enough to be dropped off by a taxi is tricky, and found ourselves going in the opposite direction to all the tour groups, which was nice! But everything is symmetrical so if there are too many ppl you can walk the other way round the building!!...oh and there ARE a lot of people! If you’re really fortunate, you might also be asked to take pictures, with you in them!!...as many Chinese seem obsessed with seeing westerners, esp. those with red hair as Ali found out!

I know I take a lot of pictures, but one 2GB memory card and over 4 hours later it was definitely time to head back to the hotel. The quickest transport out of any of the tourist spots is definitely the Beijing metro, as when u hit Tiananmen Square, no cars are allowed to stop. Funnily enough one of the busiest roads in the city seems to run in between the Square and the famed south gate of the city, which has Mao’s gigantic portrait looking down at everyone!

After a long second day of fit-up, we made the most of finishing at 6pm, by going to the Red Theatre to see a Kung Fu show!! It had a loose plot of a boy being sent to a monastery to become a monk and kung fu master, which could then be represented by differing forms. His training involved lots of group synchronised kung fu moves, but as he got older and was distracted by the pretty fairy of his dreams, which brought in a ballet section and some acrobatics with the hanging sheets of material they wrap themselves up in (like the bbc adverts!). His regret and self punishment involved breaking wooden blocks with their hands and metal sheets with their heads!! Finally the advancement to grand master took an all out battle with the rest of the monks to leave him victorious!! Good and entertaining and only 90mins long! Finished off the evening with Peking Duck, which was nice…they hang them and roast them, leaving them quite juicy….not quite as good as our crispy shredded duck unfortunately!

It’s strange how many rules and regulations we came up against in the Beijing theatre, which we didn’t have in Shanghai. I knew where the power box was for the wardrobe electricity, but I couldn’t push the ‘on’ switch without a licence from Beijing municipality!! The laundry was put into the tiny ladies toilet, which was the only one in the building! But never mind whether we had everything working, as the cleaner also used the side sink for her mops I had to re-plumb things so she could better empty her bucket! They shouted at Ali for putting a tiny bit of gaffa tape on the floor, to stick down the carpet edge, as they said it would ruin the paintwork. They said they would bill us for it! Well it looked like it hadn’t had a fresh coat for 20 years, and to top it off they had stuck the carpet down underneath with double sided tape, we couldn’t wait to see their faces when they took that up at the end!!

Conscious about leaving anything plugged in for too long, all the electricity goes off at night so we couldn’t burn the building down. But they were so concerned about our hot box (kinda like a fridge/freezer but with hot air for drying clothes rather than cold), at one point they wanted to station a guard by it all day in case it set fire to something! I know the outside is made of metal, so it is quiet warm to touch, but if it doesn’t burn the material we put in it to dry, its not going to randomly set the surrounding area on fire! Eventually they settled with 2 fire extinguishers!! If things weren’t already hard enough work, we nearly missed the matinee as they hadn’t bothered to tell anyone that they’d changed to time to earlier in the day!!

I was pretty exhausted after a nightmare dress rehearsal, with dressers who could do their job but spoke no English and a translator who was so stupid she couldn’t understand what she was saying even though she was only supposed to be translating it! It was made worse by the cough I’d picked up in Shanghai turning out to be tonsillitis and chesty cough, for which I was given a concoction of tablets and some interesting cough syrup. Then just as I was recovering from that, I woke up one day with a really bad crick in my neck, which made work really difficult and painful. Typically the doctors don’t work over the weekend, so many hot baths, tiger balm and heated neck packs later, I eventually went to see the physio who pummelled at it for half an hour!! It took ‘til the next day to recover from that!..but it did ease up, although hindered by the rubbish pillows and ridiculously soft beds at the hotel!

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