Jaunted

Tags: Beijing Field Trip / Olympic Park / Olympics Travel / 2008 Olympics Venues / → All Tags

The Party's Over at Olympic Park

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

The Olympic Park, with the unmistakable design of its main stadium, the Bird’s Nest, is perhaps the best example of Beijing’s frenetic but seemingly misguided development. With a sparklingly-new subway connecting it to the rest of the city, the area is a quiet amusement park where nothing really happens.

Walking around the grounds gave us the feeling that we were wandering through a cluttered living room after the last guest has departed from a really awesome party. The leftover confetti is just a tad depressing. There’s a ferris wheel and some snack vendors, but otherwise, activities in the area involve marveling at the strands of steel on the nest or the fake blue bubbles of the watersports complex. Even the tower, used only to display the rings and elevate people to the top for a veiw of Beijing, is now cordoned off.

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Seizing the Forbidden City

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

The Forbidden City shows that Chinese penchant for the grandiose began centuries ago. From 1420 to 1624, 24 successive emperors surrounded themselves with concubines and eunuchs, thus populating the grounds of what is really a city in and unto itself with 980 buildings still standing.

On first inspection, it becomes evident how the Ming Dynasty got wrapped up in its self-made cocoon and lost track of what was going on outside those 26-foot-high, red walls, allowing enemy forces to eventually seize power in the 17th century.

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Tags: Beijing Field Trip / Tiananmen Square / Communist Travel / Mao Tse Tung / → All Tags

Mao Groupies Flock to Tiananmen Square

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

Tiananmen Square. For most in the West, it evokes images of a peace-loving student offering a daisy to oncoming tanks. For Chinese, at least outwardly, it’s a combo of Trafalgar Square and the Lincoln Memorial.

Every morning, thousands of pilgrims line up, white carnations in hand, to see the body of Chairman Mao Tse Tung, which lies in preservation in a mausoleum in the center of the cement-tile square, the largest of its kind in the world. The atmosphere is austere though a bit frantic, with armed police monitoring the seemingly-endless line and kicking out cutters.

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Tags: Beijing Field Trip / The Great Wall / Tourist Traps / → All Tags

Crowds and Grandeur at the Great Wall

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

Just 50 miles north of Beijing is the most visited portion of The Great Wall, Badaling. The hordes of tourists on this part of the wall have become almost as recognized as the long, brick barrier itself.

It takes about two hours to drive there by public bus from the city, and costs only 12 yuan (about US$2, entrance to the wall is another US$7 or so) per person, while a tour out to the site can cost upward of US$100—and you’ll be part of a horde of Chinese tourists in matching red hats led by a guide equipped with a colored flag and a megaphone.

One piece of advice however, is to pack a lunch. Whereas 95 percent of the visitors at the wall will be part of a tour that comes with packed lunch, the remainder are left to fend for themselves, and survive off $5 bags of seaweed-flavored potato chips.

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Tags: Beijing Field Trip / Smog / Forbidden Palaces / The Great Wall / Basketball Travel / → All Tags

Visiting The Land of Brown Smoke and Basketball Lovers

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

Post-Olympics Beijing vaguely resembles its former self. Subways are modern, pristine marvels, with train floors cleaner than our own kitchen’s. The cheapness of transportation emphasized its superiority over American and European cities, with subway rides costing about 30 cents in US money and taxi rides up to two kilometers costing less than a dollar.

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Tags: Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / Accessible Travel / → All Tags

Beijinging: Accessibility Is a Pipe Dream

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

How many people with disabilities are there in China? It's a tricky question. The China Disabled Persons' Federation say it's 60 million, a recent BBC report says 83 million and estimates based on the World Health Organization's population model are upwards of 125 million. But discrepancies of few million make little difference in a country of 1.3 billion people, and until now at least, nobody has much cared about the actual number.

In fact, when Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain's Paralympic athlete who's earned 11 gold medals, first went to Beijing, locals would to poke her to determine whether or not she was real.

The expected visit of just 4,000 more disabled people to Beijing this September seems, bizarrely, to have galvanized the Chinese authorities into action over accessibility. In terms of numbers, it's like a pinprick on an elephant's rump. But these disabled visitors are special: They're the Paralympic athletes, and they'll be trailed by 6,000 journalists.

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Tags: Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / → All Tags

Beijinging: Polluted Air (Made in China)

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

If you want blue skies in your Beijing holiday snaps, invest in Photoshop. If you want to blow your nose in the city and not turn your hankies black, wear a mask. And if you want clean air, take an oxygen tank.

Drastic measures, sure, but they're just some of those being contemplated by Olympic athletes and their hangers-on this summer. Other cities are capitals of culture or cuisine; Beijing has well earned its title of Air Pollution Capital of the World.

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Tags: Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / Active Travel / → All Tags

Beijinging: Keeping Fit with Pole Dancing and Fitness Paths

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

There's so much hype around the Olympic Games in Beijing that you might forgive the sponsors for counting their Chinese gold medals before they've hatched.

But what's going on at the more modest athletic level is far more interesting. Even NPR reported on the latest fitness fad to catch on with Beijing's women: pole-dancing. (The Chinese gracefully call it "steel-tube dancing.")

In sports clubs and community halls across Beijing, girls young and old are gyrating their hips and swinging their thighs to Western pop music, sometimes paying up to $1,200 for a year's worth of pole-dancing lessons.

Belly-dancing, yoga and bungee-jumping are also at the top of the list of trendy new sports to try. Yep, gyms and exercise salons in Beijing are becoming a voyeur's paradise.

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Tags: Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / Toilets / Bathrooms / Asia Travel / → All Tags

Beijinging: Do You Sit or Squat?

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

It was all going so well at April's inaugural event at the shiny new National Stadium in Beijing.

Bottoms were wiggling as a women's 20 km race-walking event got underway. Sexually frustrated male journalists were wriggling in their seats as they watched, and Chinese investors were rubbing their hands in glee. After all, they'd poured four billion yuan ($576 million) into the concrete-and-steel lump. It all looked very promising.

Until the Westerners began to visit the restrooms. A ripple of consternation spread through the watching crowd. Squat toilets, someone whispered. You know, Turkish toilets. State-of-the-art Swiss-and-Chinese design, 36 km of twisted steel and great solar power systems, and the Chinese had installed squat toilets.

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Tags: Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / → All Tags

Beijinging: Tick the Great Wall of China off Your List

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

"Badaling Expressway" officially refers to the new highway linking Beijing and the Great Wall's most popular spot. But it could easily be used to describe that section of the wall itself. Previously the site of a wall separating deserted wilderness from more deserted wilderness, it's now an ants' nest of photo-snapping tourists and Chinese kiss-me-quick hawkers.

Why is Badaling so popular? Richard Nixon left his footprint here in 1972 and millions of Americans (and Japanese, Europeans, Australians and the rest) have followed suit. We guess because it's the easiest way of scratching the Great Wall itch--just 43 miles north of Beijing and served by a horde of tourist buses--it's the obligatory day-trip from the capital.

Badaling is the Great Wall for Dummies, the easy way to earn another tick on your things-to-do-before-I-die list. It costs a whopping (for China) 40 yuan ($6) just to see the thing, which tells you something. There's a cable car (another 50 yuan, or $7.20) if you can't be bothered to walk up, and there's a rollercoaster slide if you can't be bothered to walk down.

Here's the rub: It's not actually the Great Wall at all. Almost all of what you see at Badaling is a modern reconstruction, built roughly where the wall used to be.

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