This trip was different from most of my other trips in several ways. For one, it involved China... For another, I spent more than a week in a country I was not living in. And, perhaps most distinctively, I didn't do this trip alone.
I did pieces of it by myself, but in addition to seeing my friends in Shanghai, for the second half (or so) of this trip I was joined by Koichi, who came in from Japan in time to join me for my second full day in Beijing. I'm not really used to traveling with other people, but when I'd gone to visit him in Japan the year before it had demonstrated that we could travel around in Asia a bit without killing each other... So we figured this could work. Besides, with his 3 semesters of Chinese language study and native Japanese language skills he was fairly literate, which made ordering food in restaurants and riding buses a little more predictable. His company enabled some marathon Uno games during our downtimes, which would not have been nearly so exciting had I been on my own...
Anyway, on this next day we decided to do a tour of some of the things outside of Beijing. While my guidebook said you could get to them on your own, we decided it was worth spending ~$25 to not have to deal with the shlep. There are tours offered everywhere; we went with the one offered in our hotel. Interestingly most of the tours are for Chinese people. There are Western tourists in China, and increasingly there will be more, but most of the tourist infrastructure seems designed to handle intra-China tourists, not just in Beijing but all over. I thought this was kind of nice, since while things may have been "touristy," because it was Chinese touristy it still had an air of authenticity that other touristy places don't often have. On the other hand, it could also mean that your tour will be in Chinese... Although in this case our tour guide provided an English translation to the 5 non-Chinese people on board the bus.
The first, albeit unadvertised, stop on the tour was at some official jade factory where some pushy English-speaking guides rushed us through a few presentation rooms so we would have lots of time to buy things in the gift shop. But soon we arrived at the Great Wall, at Badaling. Badaling is apparently one of the more touristy spots to see the Wall, I think because it's one of the more convenient spots to get to from Beijing. While I find being harassed by souvenir vendors really annoying, the Wall was still the Wall and I was even somewhat impressed by the vendors who had lugged their goods up so high onto it. Where we were there really was a lot of climbing involved. We hiked up about 20 minutes and could have kept going if we weren't worried about being able to come down in time to meet our bus. The views from where we were supposedly were spectacular, but we wouldn't know because we were shrouded in a thick fog. But like the weather the day before at the Forbidden City, it enhanced the experience. It felt nice and ethereal to climb into the quiet, white stillness.
When we returned to the bus the guide told us about an old saying that went something like, "Once you've visited the Great Wall you can call yourself a man." As far as I can tell, though, the experience doesn't seem to have the gender transformative properties the saying would seem to suggest...
Next stop was lunch, where they took us to a multi-level Chinese restaurant that seemed to have many banquet rooms. Lunch was included in the tour price, so they sat us all at 3 large tables and dropped a bunch of different dishes on the lazysusan before us: a soup, a fish dish, rice, some sort of meat and cabbage dish, a sweet and sour dish or two, some red bean paste-filled egg rolls (my favorite), and probably some other stuff I was forgetting. It was all family-style with sharing, which was nice, except that the Chinese don't really believe in serving utensils. People kept helping themselves with their own chopsticks.
Speaking of health and hygiene, the next stop was at some sort of Chinese herbal medicine outfit. I'm not quite sure how better to describe it. They brought us into a classroom of sorts, where two "nurses" gave a quick overview in English and Chinese about the wonders of Chinese medicine. Then everyone applauded when two "professor doctors" came into the room to give free examinations. It's not that I don't think there's not merit to Chinese medicine. Its approach to homeopathy and balance can provide benefits overlooked by Western medicine. But that doesn't mean this place wasn't a racket. I let them do a free diagnosis on me, just to see what they would say. The "doctor" did the three-finger touch of my wrist, looked at my complexion, looked at the color of my tongue, asked me my age and where I was from, and then asked about a few symptoms they thought I had. "Tired?" Yeah... "Pain in back or shoulder?" OK, that one was spot on because at the time I had a big knot in my shoulder. But from all this they decreed that I had a kidney imbalance and needed to take the requisite red pill. Also they could give me a 30-day prescription for Drug # 309, which "conveniently" was available in their pharmacy downstairs. "What is in this pill?" I asked. "All natural ingredients. Made from trees and leaves." "I know, but which?" They wouldn't tell me. Anyway, there's no way I'm ingesting mysterious, unknown substances, even if my kidneys truly are out of whack, and the impetus to ply me with drugs rather than provide any holistic treatment (even my US doctor asked me about the bar exam when I talked about being tired...) made it no better than Western medicine and set off my "scam" warning bells.
But the rest of the tour was ok. There was one other official stop, at the underground Ming tombs where several emperors had been buried. Unfortunately soldiers in the latter half of the 20th Century had raided the tombs and taken the treasure. They also burned the corpses. Today China takes its history more seriously and takes measures to preserve it. On the other hand, there are still tensions. Our tour guide, a young woman, talked about how the young generation was full of optimism for China's future - the darkness their parents and grandparents felt from the Cultural Revolution would be no more. At the same time, from my time in China I gleaned that many younger Chinese people seem to feel burdened by the history. With such an ancient nation there's history everywhere, and some people would like to not be so beholden to it and instead be able to drive on straight to a modern future. Unfortunately if they are not careful, China will lose its connections to its past and not be able to get back. Even now, despite its long history, it's hard to find things (particularly structures) in China that date back more than a couple of hundred years, and of those that remain many were rebuilt only within the last century. Even in Europe you can find structures that are one or two thousand years old, but in China even the things that are old seem much less so.