China pt. 2: Beijing and the Great Wall

Ok, so I left you as we finished our first full day in China with an exciting visit to the Forbidden City.

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful. We worked all day, ate lunch at the community cafeteria in the tech center where our client was located. We were on the very edge of Beijing. Beijing is organized with what is called the "ring roads". Basically, as the city has grown over the centuries, they add a road that circumscribes the city. It takes about 50 minutes to drive from the center to the 5th ring road, where we were.

We were even farther out than that. We had open fields where we were... and lots of cranes and new buildings going up everywhere. We did have a Subway Sandwhich place near our hotel, which was nice. Not for the sandwiches, those were nasty. But they had a nice supply of Diet Coke, which is hard to come by that far away from the center and I bought their entire supply.

We had a good time working wtih the Chinese auditors. They were very nice and took us to dinner every night. We enjoyed a Hot Pot dinner the first night. They bring a huge pot of boiling water with herbs and spices and you dip raw meat and vegetables and then put it in a dip. It was darn tastey. The dip was really good and the CFO, bought a bunch of lamb, which I think is pretty rare and expensive in China. She also learned that we had not had Peking Duck, and ordered one. It was not good. The Chinese girls didn't even eat any.

The next night we ate at a Japanese place and it was an amazing meal. It was actually Korean and Japanese. They dropped the hot charcoal into the table and then brought out tons of meat and vegetables (reoccuring theme?) only this time the servers would cook the food for us. Again the sauce was amazing. We had some susi. My compadre, Mark, had never tried any. We all ate some with the fresh Wasabi they provided. We all nearly choked to death on the wasabi. It wasn't a matter of heat. I can handle all the heat you can dish out. This stuff made it impossible to BREATH. The fumes coming off this stuff made it impossible to breath from mouth and nose. I had to spit it out. It was embarassing that the girls handled it and I couldn't.

The next night we went to Subway and, as I said, not that great. It was nice to get in and out in short time. Dinner in China is a 2-3 hour event. Which gets frustrating when you are trying to get work done.

One night I noticed a shop "Blind Massage Therapy". I insisted on going and found a shop of blind massuers and massueses that only charged $11 for a one hour massage. Mark and I stripped down to the waste and let them at us. It was nice.

The auditors finished up on Friday and we weren't leaving until Sunday, so we decided to go see the Great Wall. After our disaster in the Forbidden City, the CFO insisted on sending us with two auditors and the company driver to make sure we didn't get lost or killed or robbed. The day was beautiful and sunny, but quite cold and windy. Waiting in line to get the tickets nearly killed us. Luckily there were people hocking their goods to the tourists and I was able to get a scarf and hat. Once on the wall, the ramparts actually cut the wind and the 50 degree inclines made the hiking difficult enough that I got quite warm.

I will put some picture of the great wall on the gallery for you enjoyment. It was staggering how big the structure was. It was basically a castle wall that extended up impossible hills and mountains over miles and miles. Every quarter mile or so, there was a guard station with windows and rooms and usually stairs up to the roof and sometimes stairs down to the ground. It was cool to see the walls and the barracks and the defensible wall. The crazy thing is the location of the wall, at least where we were. It must have been tough to build that wall on such steep hills.

dyspeptic old woman

But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have "broken his digester."

Herman Melville - Moby Dick