Kelsey’s parents flew over to the Far East to join us on our adventures. They would be spending two weeks throughout China on a sightseeing tour that took them from the Forbidden City in Beijing,
to the Terracotta Warriors in Xian, the silk of Suzhou and finally it would land them in Nanjing, where Kelsey and I were living. Kelsey and I took a few days off from work and heading north by overnight train to Beijing. It was Kelsey’s first trip on an overnight train, and she said it was quite 
pleasant. We took second-class sleeper, which involves 6 bunks in a cabin. The cabins are all open to the car of the train. At 11:30pm the lights go out, and at 7am the lights turn back on and they wake up. The only problem with this is that you don’t arrive for another 3 hours.
Once we arrived in Beijing we went to the hotel where we would be staying which was down a very rustic alleyway called a hutong. It was quiet and pleasant neighborhood. Then we went to where Kelsey’s mom and dad were staying, which was a five-star hotel. They were a bit jet lagged for the first day so Kelsey and I went and checked out the Silk Market, which sprawls from floor to floor shoving piles of bags, shoes, clothing, silk, tailor-made qi-pao’s and more, at wide-eyed tourist.
- Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The first evening in Beijing, Kelsey’s parents took us out for a luxury dinner. As suggested in the Lonely Planet, we knew it was mandatory to try Peking duck when we were in Peking. At the Beijing Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant, we laid pancakes flat before adding slivers of roasted duck, scallions and cucumber, dripping on plum sauce and rolling up the parcel. Et voila!
Beijing is the capital and seat of the communist political power in China. But if you look past just the political capital you can see a city of centuries of history, with its oldest citizens speaking beijinghua (the Beijing dialect of Mandarin) and playing mahjong (Chinese chess) watching the world go by.
On the second day in Beijing we joined Kelsey’s parent’s tour and went to the Forbidden City and ran through Tiananmen Square. I say, “ran through”, because by the time we made it to meet them we were late. It was snowing, and in China that means the taxi’s can join forces and decided to charge the fare 10X as much. Uggh! After arguing with a few taxi drivers in Mandarin Chinese, I finally gave up and we took the subway there.
It’s not a city, but the Forbidden City seems as large as an Alaskan city. For 500years, the home of the emperors of the Qing and Ming Dynasty was off-limits. It’s the best-preserved collection of imperial
architecture in China and definitely is worth a visit. The last time I was here, I was in shorts and a t-shirt. This time the Dynasty halls and statues covering the imperial gardens were dusted in a few inches of freshsnow as more snowflakes fell around us.
The Imperial Garden is a peaceful place 
with fine landscaping, classical walkways and pavilions among ancient and malformed cypresses popped up on stilts. The West and East sides of the Palace are the former living quarters. In one quarter is the home of the Emperors 999 concubines, which now is famous for the Well of Concubine Zhen.
After the Forbidden City, we ventured around the famous Hutongs near the Forbidden City. A journey in this area is much like a journey back in time to the original heart and soul of Beijing. Many of these charming alleyways have survived, crisscrossing east and west across the city linking one-story, ramshackle dwellings and historic courtyard homes. The history of the hutong’s goes
back to the era of Genghis Khan. His army reduced the city of Beijing to rubble, and the city was redesigned with hutongs. By the Qing Dynasty there was over 2,000 such passages, leaping to 6,000 by the 1950’s, but now it has drastically dwindled. We had lunch at a small house in the hutong’s.
That evening we took Kelsey’s parents to a restaurant near our hotel, to show 
them the type of food we normally eat in China. It wasn’t street food but if we eat in restaurants it was a lot like this one. The menus were pictures that you could point at and I could ask if it was beef, chicken or pork. This is how China is for Kelsey and I. Always an adventure when ordering.
On the third day, Kelsey and I took a packaged tour from our hotel to the Great Wall. It was the highlight of our trip to Beijing! As Mao Zedong puts it, “He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.” The ‘original’ wall was begun over 2,000 years ago during the Qin Dynasty, when China was unified under Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Separate walls that had been constructed by individual kingdoms to keep out the marauding nomads were linked together. The effort to build such a massive wall, required thousands of workers—many of those said to be political prisoners. Legend has it that the wall is made from 180 million cu meters of rammed earth and human bones from the deceased workers. The wall never did succeed to keep out the nomads or Genghis Khan, but it did work as a sort of highway to transport cannons, soldiers, etc. Its beacon tower system, using smoke signals generated by burning wolves’ dung, quickly transmitted news of enemy movements back to the capital. Learning all this history, all I could think of was “where’s Mulan?”
The day we visited the part of the wall named Mutianyu was a snowstorm. Our tour continued on, but to our luck many of the other tours turned back. The wall was deserted if you hiked a little ways away from the gate. Our tour group included a very nice Chinese young man who went to University in Nanjing. 
It was nice to have a new friend on the wall. We took the cable car to the gate of the wall, and started our trek. It was really fun, with all the fresh snow. We could hike up slowly and slide down the Great Wall on our butts! That is definitely one way to travel the Great Wall.
After we got back from the city Kelsey’s parents took us to a Kung Fu Show. We got really good seats in the front and watched a martial arts show about a young man who is wandering outside an ancient temple, dreaming of becoming an
ancient Kung Fu Master. On the road to enlightenment the young man encounters many difficulties and temptations. It is a fusion of acrobatics, modern dance, with Chinese martial arts, which makes the performance graceful and divine.
On our last day in Beijing, right before we hopped on the express train back to Nanjing, we went to Tiananmen Square and walked around with enough time to spare. In the square, you stand in the symbolic center of the China universe. It’s the worlds largest public square, but despite being a public place the square 
remains more in the hands of the government than the people, monitored by closed circuit TV cameras and plain-clothes police. The square’s meridian line is straddled between the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall and the Forbidden City. On National Day (Oct. 1st) a parade marches by Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City with thousands of people. In my Chinese Culture class back in Montana we watched this parade as it aired worldwide. To many Chinese, the 1989 pro-democracy riot that happened here doesn’t exist. The great firewall of China has blocked all negative media and information that doesn’t suit the communist party.
Overall, Beijing was a great introduction to Chinese history and culture. But it was winter and a bit too cold for us to stay too long.
heatherkayericson 
