Smith Family Home

If a person could only visit one city in China, Beijing would have to be it (sorry Shanghai). Despite its rapid modernization, Beijing has the biggest concentration of famous historical sights in China--and in the four days we were there, we pretty much saw them all. We took the overnight train from Shanghai (we're big fans of overnight trains) and arrived at 0730 on day one ready for a long day of sightseeing. We visited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park, and Wangfujing pedestrian shopping street before topping off the day with a fantastic Peking Duck dinner. On day two, our gracious Beijing host (OSC 2006 classmate) arranged for a car and driver to take us to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. We left at 0800 and spent most of the day there. It was super hot and very humid, but we hiked nearly the entire stretch of wall (much to Sabrina's chagrine and Steven's delight). We ended the day with a visit to Yaxiu Market for dinner, shopping, and, best of all, massages in the fourth floor parlor. Michelle and Sabrina also had their nails done professionally for the hefty sum of three dollars each. Day three itinerary included a trip out to the Summer Palace followed by a visit to Fragrant Hills and the twenty minute chairlift ride to the top of the mountain for terrific views of the city. Not on the itinerary (but added later) for day three was a trip to the night market (near Wangfujing) where one can purchase some of the tastiest food in the world including scorpions, beatles, starfish, and barbecued slugs. Michelle talked me into trying the slugs. She ate four. I ate one. It tasted like what you imagine it would. Day four (our final day) included a visit to the Underground City (massive bomb shelters honeycombed under the city--no pictures allowed) before visiting the beautiful Temple of Heaven complex. We had an interesting dinner at a great little No Name restaurant in Houhai before rushing off to catch the night train to our next city--Datong.     

The Datong leg of our trip got off to a slightly stressful start even before we left Beijing. We were booked on an another overnight train scheduled to depart Beijing at 2330. We walked in through the front doors of Beijing Main Station at 2300 sharp and spent the next five minutes trying to figure out why our train number wasn't listed on the departure board. I went to the information desk where the clerk kindly pointed out the pesky detail plainly printed on the ticket that our train didn't depart from Beijing Main, instead it departed from Beijing West Station on the other side of town. I made the snap decision to run--and run we did--straight to the taxi stand in front of the station. We had twenty-five minutes to make it to Beijing West Station or our travel itinerary was sunk. Mind you, this is a trip that normally takes an hour or more during the day--that it was nearly midnight was in our favor. The first cab driver we approached clearly understood our dilemma and charitably offered to get us to the station on time for about five times the going rate. I told him politely where he could go instead. The second driver was a good guy and said he'd use the meter. With Michelle and the kids in the back seat praying for some providential green-light intervention (which we got), the taxi driver sped his way through the heart of the city and we made it to the station with three minutes to spare. I gave our driver a 50 yuan tip and he was all smiles.

Now for Datong. It's got about 2.7 million people. It's a coal mining and and power generation center which actually makes the city kind of grimy. At its peak, it was the capital of northern China during the Northern Wei Dynasty in 450 AD. We were met at the train station by our CITS guide and car who took us to check in at the hotel, then a local breakfast, followed by the 90 minute drive out to the Hanging Monastery west of the city in the beautiful mountains. On the way, we got to stop and see how some of the local people in the province of Shanxi live. This is loess plateau country and the soil is yellow. Deforestation over the last couple thousand years left people without the lumber to build homes, so they began building their homes by excavating into the sides of the loess soil cliff faces. These cave homes are cool in the summer, warm in the winter and nicely weather proof. The gentleman in the pictures below was kind enough to let us visit his home.

The 1400 year-old Buddhist Hanging Monastery was a spectacular sight as you see from the pictures below. I got a little vertigo when climbing up to the third pavilion because the guard rails only came up to my knees. Michelle and the kids were running around completely unaffected, but I was glad to climb back down. The mountains here are very reminiscent of Utah and Colorado.

The main reason we came to Datong was to see the 1500 year-old Yungang Cave complex of massive (and miniature) Buddha statues carved during the Northern Wei Dynasty when Buddhism was starting to receive official imperial patronage. The Yungang caves are a UN World Heritage Site and deservedly so as they are impressive. There are more than 50,000 Buddha carvings cut into the stone cliff face extending for more than a kilometer from east to west. The biggest statue is in the neighborhood of 18 meters high while the smallest are only about two inches tall. I worry about the preservation of the site because it is open to the air and only half a mile away is a huge coal mine which has left a dark layer of coal dust on many of the unprotected statues. Still an amazing sight to see.

After a little more exploration of the city that evening, we went to bed early in preparation for an early morning start on the next leg of the trip. Next stop--the ancient walled city of Pingyao.   

Getting to Pingyao was also an adventure. We took a big, beautiful, air-conditioned bus from Datong to Taiyuan (Shanxi's capital) which dropped us off in the city center. We then took a cab to the other long-distance bus station in town where I purchased tickets for us on the next bus to Pingyao, roughly ninety minutes away. The second "bus" looked like one of those buses you see in movies about South America--no air conditioning, hard seats, chickens in cages, stuff strapped to the top, etc. It was supposed to be non-stop, but our driver and his fat, shirtless assistant were very enterprising and spent an extra hour trolling around town looking for additional passengers to cram into the aisles. The assistant put a large handmade sign in the window saying something like "cheap fares to Pingyao" and when someone waved the bus down they negotiated a cheaper fare and then got a little fold-up wooden stool to sit on in the aisle. The driver and his assistant got to pocket their extra earnings this way. As everyone else seemed to accept this, we didn't get too upset and instead observed the interesting economic phenomena unfold. Ah, China...

Pingyao was once the financial capital of China as banking was developed here. It is one of the few cities in China which still has an intact city wall completely encircling the city. Many of the homes and buildings inside the old city are original and almost all of them are built in traditional architectural styles. We spent two and a half days here (way too long) but would have been better off with a day and a half. As it was, Pingyao was a great place to relax. Our hotel (Yi De Guest House) was a beautifully preserved 18th century courtyard home and the staff was awesome. The kids could roam free through the courtyards and played badminton and Chinese hackey sac with the staff and other guests for hours in the main courtyard. For this reason, Pingyao was their favorite place on the trip. Pingyao's streets are crammed with vendors and tourists and in this respect it wasn't much different from any other bazaar town in China. It was easy to imagine what the city must have been like three hundred years ago. Still, we recommend staying only a day and a half for any friends planning to visit--you can only walk the same streets so many times.  

There's no other way to put this--Xi'an was disappointing. We have never been so offended by blatant attempts to scam foreign tourists out of their money in any other Chinese city as much as we were in Xi'an and that's saying a lot. If you don't speak Chinese and haven't lived here a while to know better you can easily get suckered. On top of the people trying to scam you are the beggars who position themselves outside the main entrances of hotels and many tourist sites. They don't approach Chinese people--only foreigners. Begging is quite common throughout the country, but it was especially bad in Xi'an.

Xi'an itself is actually quite beautiful. It has broad, tree-lined streets radiating out to the north, south, east and west from the Bell Tower at the city center. Massive, stone city walls. Historical sites everywhere. In fact, Xi'an can't have a subway system because everytime they begin excavating, they unearth ancient archaeological artifacts. That's what happens when your city is the capital of more than a dozen imperial dynasties dating back 3,000 years.

In our two days here we packed in a lot of sight-seeing. On day one we visited the Shaanxi History Museum, quite good and worth a visit, but also our introduction to the scamming trade in Xi'an. The gift shop was selling a certain souvenir for 3,600 Yuan. I told them that was a bit expensive and they immediately offered it to me for 1,500 Yuan. They would only come down to 1,000 after continued bargaining and I declined to buy. They told me that the reason it was so expensive was because of its superior quality. The truth is that most foreigners are shepherded to these tourist places by their tour guides who get commissions from the vendors for everything their clients buy. We later bought an identical souvenir in the Muslim Quarter Bazaar for 80 Yuan. We also visited the Bell Tower, the city walls, the Forest of Steles (another foreigner scam place), and then shopping and dinner in the Muslim Quarter.

On day two we met our CITS guide and driver who took us to the Big Goose Pagoda (where Chinese Monk Xuan Zang deposited the first Buddhist Scriptures upon his return from India as told in the classical Chinese story "Journey to the West"), a factory manufacturing Terra Cotta Warrior replicas (the first attempt by our tour guide to get us to buy expensive stuff), and the Huaqing Palace where ancient emperors spent their winters because of the hotsprings there and also the site of the Xi'an Incident when Chiang Kai-shek's own generals kidnapped him to force him to fight the invading Japanese instead of Mao's communists. After lunch we saw the Terra Cotta Warrior Museum which really was impressive. It's the main reason most people come to Xi'an in the first place and it didn't disappoint. On the way home, our guide tried to pressure us into buying tickets for a T'ang Dynasty dinner theater show that evening. Tickets "only" cost 700 Yuan each (about $90). Failing that, she said there was an identical show in a different theater and tickets were only 550 Yuan each. I declined again. I later talked to a friend here who attended the first show on tickets purchased for him by a Chinese friend. The cost per ticket? 80 Yuan. Unfortunately, despite the amazing Terra Cotta Warriors, the scamming in Xi'an will be our lasting impression of the city...       

The final stop in this odyssey around China was the beautiful city of Luoyang. I thought Luoyang was kind of cool--figuratively that is. Temps hovered around 96F and it was extremely humid when we were there. This city of of 6.2 million people was the ancient capital of 13 dynasties and it has the same problem Xi'an does when it comes to digging anywhere and finding priceless artifacts. Indeed, one of the museums we visited was built underground around the actual discovery site of an ancient nobleman's tomb--found when excavating for a new highrise building. We stayed at the Jing'an Peony Hotel which was a nice four star hotel where the rooms cost only $30/night. They had a rotating restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet on the top floor from which we got a great bird's eye view of the city. Best of all it was right across the street from a long park (think Washington Mall) with children's playgrounds and little cafes where we could go walking at night to let the kids run off some energy. This was a popular place to be for the locals as well who were out by the thousands doing the same thing we were with their own kids.

The big attractions in Luoyang are the Longmen Grottoes and the Shaolin Temple which is about 90 kilometers outside of Town. Our CITS guide and driver took us to both places on our first full day in Luoyang. The Longmen Grottoes are literally twice as impressive as Yungang--they run along two opposing cliff faces for more than a kilometer separated by a river. Where Yungang has 50,000 carved Buddha statues, Longmen has more than 100,000. They were built roughly 50 years after Yungang when the imperial capital left Datong and arrived in Luoyang. Longmen is also a protected UN World Heritage Site and the recipient of significant aid grants to study and preserve the site. Despite the terrible heat, we left very awed by the immensity of what we saw.

Next stop was the Shaolin Temple. This is the place made famous in the old 1970's "Kung Fu" TV series and other countless movies. It's the birthplace of Chinese martial arts and today hosts thousands of martial arts students from around the world who still seek to perfect their art. We had a great time visiting the main temple complex and then watching the Shaolin Monk martial arts show held daily in a nearby indoor stage. These monks were pretty amazing as they kicked, punched, flipped, and flew around the stage with the greatest of ease. After the show, Steven and Sabrina went up on stage and took pictures with some of the young martial artists. We asked Steven if he wanted to stay on and become a Kung Fu monk. He said "Uh, no. Why?" Sabrina said she would like to learn Karate, but was disappointed to learn we were in the wrong country for that.

That night Michelle had a scare when her drunk Chinese neighbors tried to kick down the door adjoining their rooms. She called me at midnight (Steven and I were in the room next door on the other side) and told me what was going on. I called downstairs for some security and went next door to sit with her until things calmed down. We had the management talk to the neighbors about their unacceptable behavior (which made them more angry) and asked for security to be posted outside in the hall to make sure things stayed quiet. Sabrina and Steven slept through the whole thing.

On day two we visited the White Horse Temple (the very first Buddhist temple in China) and the underground museum mentioned above. At the end of two weeks of non-stop traveling we were down to one set of clean clothes each. The kids did really well (relatively speaking) considering all the walking and moving we did. I was very impressed with them. It was a terrific trip to some amazing places, but we were tired and very glad to be going home to our apartment in Shanghai. We caught the evening overnight train to Shanghai and arrived home the next afternoon.