25 August 2012, Beijing, China---
When we
went to the Forbidden City last Sunday, there was a throng of people passing
out flyers for tours to other parts of Beijing. I have always been one to turn
down flyers and not pay attention to who ever is busking the streets, and made
no exception once I came to China. My friends however, took a flyer with
interest. A couple days later we were talking about the Great Wall and my
friend called the number. We would be picked up at 7am on Saturday morning for
a trip to see The Great Wall at Ba Da Ling, the Ming Tombs, and the Olympic
Stadium. Lunch would be included.
At 6am on
Saturday morning my phone starts ringing. “Hello, my friend, we can pick you up
earlier if you take a train and we can beat the traffic. The traffic is very
bad because everyone has the day off. Or we can pick you up from your hotel
later. Which is better?”
“We’re not
at a hotel, we’re at an apartment. You can pick us up from here.”
I give her
the address and the name of the subway station we live right next to for the
third time, and she says she’s knows where it is and will be here around 8. I
still don’t know how she and the driver managed to find the train station just
north of us, but not ours. We have to take the subway just one stop north to
where a van where three other tourists are waiting. They are from Russia we
find out later, and I can’t be sure about how long they have been waiting for
us, but they look genuinely annoyed. We have nearly a two-hour ride to the
Great Wall.
Along the
way Annie, the name of our guide, tells us the itinerary for the day. She asks
us if we know what we will see and we tell her. She explains that the Ba Da
Ling station of the Great Wall is broken, so we will go to the Mu Tian Lu
station where we have to take a ropeway up and a toboggan slide down. “We are
lucky, though,“ she explains, “because usually this is 400kuai, but today we
are only paying the normal 100kuai rate. But the ropeway and toboggan aren’t
included so when we get there we have to buy the ticket for 80kuai. Also,” she
goes on, “the Ming Tombs are so boring, so we aren’t going to do that either.
Instead we will go to a Cloisonné factory and a silk factory. Later we will
stop for tea. This is free so don’t worry".
Sleepy,
confused, and not sure what else to say, we consent and continue to the Great
Wall. Annie is young, only 23. Her sister is a tour guide also. During the ride
up to the Great Wall, she explains that her job is difficult because she has to
coordinate with her boss and won’t know her schedule until 11 at night. She has
a lot of energy, though, and her English is decent. She claims to only have
studied for one month, but she communicates well and has a lot of practice on
these tours.
On the way,
we stop by a Cloisonné factory. Cloisonné is a beautiful art form and the
factory was interesting. The factory guide explained the process of shaping
copper, soldering it together, adding copper detailing, and then filling the
copper details with colored enamel. The process is tedious and takes a long
time. There were some really beautiful things for sale that were made at the
factory, but no one was interested in buying anything. This was our first stop
and I didn’t think twice about not buying anything. One of the people we were
with did tours in Turkey for a summer and explained that he would take tourists
places in hopes they would buy things and then he, the guide, would get a
commission. We figured this is what Annie was doing to, and accepted it as a
part of the trip.
The Great
Wall is amazing. We walk through a throng of people selling knick-knacks up to
the ticket booths. We pay, and make it to the ropeway. I am always so afraid on
ropeways. I manage to not look up at the tiny piece of metal attached to the
tiny section of rope. I maneuver my camera is such a way so that I don’t have
to turn my head, but can just snap photos around me so I can look at the
amazing view later. I am concentrating only on what is ahead of me. I don’t
want to contemplate death and life on my 7th day in Beijing. The Great Wall is a series of inclines and
declines on both terrifyingly steep and unnecessarily wide stairs. I think I
thought the wall would be more like a big stone bridge, but it’s definitely
more of a hike. We had to walk hike up
at down the stairs for about thirty minutes to get to a high point and we could
see the Wall dragon-tailing through the mountains. This particular station of
the wall was quite touristy. Large groups of people were following their
leaders with colorful flags at the helm. The toboggan ride down the mountain
was fun. We sat on these individual chairs with a brake in the middle, and we
could push forward to release and pull it to break the toboggan. We were stuck
behind some cautious people pulling hard on the brake the whole time, but
during moments of large gaps, I could push the release down and speed down the
toboggan slide. The Great Wall was the absolute highlight of the day.
The both
the Russian tourists and some of the people I was with were really interested
in buying some of the cheap souvenirs at the stalls around the Great Wall.
T-shirts, hats, knick-knacks, everything was there. Annie was visibly
frustrated by the slow pace everyone had while going from the wall down to the
van. She told me that everything here was cheap and not very good. Not to waste
our money. While this appeared as a way to look out for us in the beginning
actually was a sign of what was to come later on in the day.
Lunch was
after the Great Wall. Along the way we got a good 45-minute nap during some
seriously backed up traffic. We arrived at a small restaurant with bowls of
rice, hot tea, sautéed cucumbers, potatoes with a lot of good sauce, cashew
chicken, and a tomato with egg dish. Simple food, it was all good, and everyone
felt great afterwards.
Next stop
was the silk factory. As interesting as it was to see how silk is produced and
what can be made from it, the experience was boring. I live here in Beijing and
the last thing I want to buy is silk. I’m not a decadent person and I don’t
want to buy silly souvenirs. Our group strolled through the aisles of bedding
and pajamas, finally making eye contact with Annie to say we were ready to
leave. She said we had to stay for twenty more minutes and to just sit down
somewhere. Sit down somewhere in the silk store. This was clearly a part of her
commission. We had to stay at the silk
factory for a certain amount of time in order for her to be compensated. We saw
a few other groups of people just sitting around waiting to leave as well. It
wasn’t horrible, but by this time we were feeling weary and ready to see the
Olympic Stadium.
We thought
we were off to the Olympic Stadium, but we made a sharp right turn and Annie
said, “Next we will have tea. We can leave when you want this time. “ Not that
excited about another store, but drinking tea didn’t sound horrible, so we sat
back and silently went along with the ride. We made it to Dr. Tea, a government owned teashop
near the Olympic Village. The entry way had photos of Queen Elizabeth with the
Country Leader, not Mao, but someone else from the 80’s. The other photo was of
President Lu with Vladimir Putin from 1997. Annie told us that this was a place
where a lot of famous people are brought to drink tea. As the Cloisonné and
silk factories were before, each place has been interesting up to a certain
point. We learn about the product, why the product is interesting or important,
and then we are told of all of the deals they are having right now and would we
like to purchase these amazing packages of products. We would not.
When we got
to Dr. Tea, Annie seemed very friendly with the girl giving us the explanation
of the teas. When it was time to buy some products, we were at our wit’s end
and just absolutely did not want to buy anything. We were looking around saying
no thank you to every sales person that came up to us. The girl who told us
about the tea was growing more and more frustrated with our unwillingness to
buy. Soon Annie came up to us nearly shouting, “This is a SHOPPING TOUR! You
all need to buy something. Even if you go in on one thing together and split
it, it’s fine.” Her friend started saying that no, no, it was okay, but the
mood was broken. Annie broke the façade of the trip.
We thought we were tourist our to
go sightseeing and that 100 kuai was a good deal for us and that we would let
Annie make her visitors commission from the stores and go along with
everything. People I have spoken to who live in China for a year or more have
explained that there are many layers to China, and slowly the peels will begin
to fall off. Annie’s breakdown was my first example of outrage with the Chinese
façade and layers pulling back. We should have known that things were too good
to be true, and we felt guilty for not buying anything, but we also felt like
we didn’t want to be bullied into buying things we don’t need. I am not fully
comfortable in China yet, but I am aware of my position in South East Asia as a
white lady wandering around. People think I am rich. I am so, so not. I have
serious student loan debt. I live paycheck to paycheck and spent all of my
savings to move to China. My savings totaled $5,000 and I doubt I have half
left at this point, only one week in to life here. Crazy apartment fees,
deposits, etc., I am bleeding money. I came to China a week before my job
starts in order to get comfortable and organized, and while it has really just
been the most stressful week of my life, I was looking forward to a sightseeing
trip to relax and not have to think. To pay 180 kuai for the day was fine and
great, but to feel guilty for not buying things from the government arranged
factory trips, was stressful.
I thought
surely she would get the gist that we were fed up with the factory tours and
finally take us to the Olympic Stadium. Ai Weiwei is one of my favorite artists
and his bird’s nest design for the stadium is so magnificent—I had been looking
forward to the visit all day. Annie was unfazed and our next stop was a pearl
factory. Our Russian tourist friends were fed up. They said they had already
seen the Olympic Stadium, and had no interest in pearls. They would leave. We
agreed and pleaded to Annie that we weren’t going to buy any pearls anyway.
More infuriated than ever, Annie told us to get in the van, she went to the
front seat, and two minutes later were could see the Stadium. The Russians
wanted to go back to their hotel so Annie dropped us all off near the Subway
station. She pointed to the left for us to go to the Stadium, pointed to the
right to the subway, said a curt goodbye and they were off.
I am trying
to figure out if I would recommend the trip or not. I know that the price for
the Great Wall stuff was a good deal. I am a big fan of not spending a lot of
money right now, so I am debating my feelings about being upset. I can’t
decide. Should I be grateful that I got a cheap sightseeing “tour”? But,
basically I was duped, right? The tour said specific things, I had certain expectations
of the day, and I was willing to make some concessions for the sake of Annie. The
scene she made at the end of the day upset me. Cloisonné, silk, tea, pearls,
and the only thing on the advertised tour we actually go was the Great Wall and
lunch. Two out of four (Great Wall, Lunch, Ming Tombs, Olympic Stadium).
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| But look at how great we all look up there! Adventurers! |
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