BeiJing: Great Wall, performing arts, and street food

from Peter:

All along the watchtower…

We decide to take one of the Chinese tourist buses out to the Badaling Great Wall site. The wall is 75 – 90 km outside Beijing (depending on the site). We'd asked at the hotel about taking a taxi out. My friend Frank Qi told me he'd hired a cab for $40 for the day to go out and see the wall when he was in Beijing a few months ago. The guy at the hotel says the hotel car would cost $125 but he's got a friend that can take us in an Audi for $100. Frank and the guidebook say this is way too much, but I'm too jet lagged to try and organize a taxi on my own for the day so we take this bus which costs us about $22 and gets us a ticket to the wall and lunch. What a bargain! The bus is full and we are the only non-chinese on the bus. We make friends though. Everyone is from out of town – we're just from further afield. The wall itself is incredible but completely overrun with tourists. There are several entrance points to the wall and we've gone into one in the middle so even if we walk 1 -2 km we just hit another bunch of tourists. I don't know how to describe things so vast – just seeing this wall snake over mountainous terrain makes one marvel at the work that went into its creation. But then you consider this is a mere fragment of a construct that stretched for 100's of km across northern China. I can't convey they scale.



Princes kept the view…

I can say that it must have been a cold, lonely existence stationed on that wall waiting for the Mongols to show up.



Women came and went, barefoot servants too…

We get back in Beijing around 6pm and there is an internet café next to the bus stop so we have some tea and Vera starts this blog stuff. We decide to go to a performance at the Lao She teahouse. Lao She was a famous Chinese poet. At the teahouse they have different performances and in the evening at 8pm they have a 2 hr omnibus show. Over tea we saw a shadowbox show, a lighted drum show, a magician, some acrobatics, shadow birds, juggling, Sichuan opera, and a kung fu display.

The shadowbox is like a puppet show behind a screen where the puppets appear as shadows. Traditional music accompanied the story which I could not follow. Some woman (or high pitched man) did a lot of shrieking and 3 blokes on mounts stood round. One was riding an ostrich or some large bird.

The lighted drum ceremony saw a woman holding a candelabra suspended from her cheeks. She had a castanet in one hand and a drum stick in the other. She sang and clicked and beat the big drum. An impressive feat.

[Vera's note - as soon as this lady came on stage Peter commented on her massively defined cheeks, saying "do you think that's makeup?" It turned out to be pure muscle...]

Then we had the magician doing sleight of hand tricks. He looked a bit like Jacky Chan in his later years, but of course had a beautiful assistant.

Then came the monkey king in a re-enactment from the Journey to the West. I don't remember the story – monkey king got into big trouble with king of heaven because he ate all the food before some big wedding banquet and got booted out of heaven and had to wander around. Then two knights come along and try and attack him with their mighty swords but of course the monkey king is too clever and by just using a stick defeats both the knights at once. Lots of cymbals and leaping about.

Next, two big chaps came out whistling birdsong. They then went behind the shadow screen and made shadow bird puppets with their hands while doing birdsong. This was amazing. It sounds silly, but they were really good. They sounded exactly like birds and their puppetry was exquisite. They did another show with different animals – dogs, geese, etc.

The next act was "juggling with flower jar". A big squat chap came out and had a couple of big flower pots. One was about the size of the planters in front of our house (about 2.5 feet in diameter) and probably weighed about 50 pounds. He slung that thing around and tossed it into the air and caught it on his head! Then he balanced it on an edge on top of his skull and spun it round. I have no idea how he managed not to cleave his head open.

Sichuan opera is famous for characters that are masked and change their mask to change identity. The face changes are incredibly fast and you cannot see them make the change. They may spin or wave a fan and hey presto it's a different face. This guy did about 15 face changes over about 5 minutes.

Then came the kung fu guys who showed a variety of different styles. Also impressive but something that we were more familiar with. Still, breaking a stone block with one's head never fails to impress…



Outside in the cold distance…

Our guide book said the teahouse also did meals which was true but not for the performance, so now it was 10pm and we were getting hungry. We wandered back toward our hotel, up through Tianamen Sq and the gate to the Forbidden City. After walking for about 40 minutes we come into a street market. I am now sooo hungry that I throw out my rule against eating street food and tuck into some meat on a stick. Vera gets some stuffed pancakes and the blood sugar returns. Then we get these great fruit on a stick things where the fruit is covered in a sugar glaze like in candied apples. Strawberries, kiwis, pineapple, and some unknown fruit kind of like a cherry but with white inside. Fortunately we hit the hygenic street vendors and no ill effects were manifested.