[This post is a little long, but you don’t want to miss the pictures at the end.]
Ni hao! Welcome to my trip to China! Technically, it’s my trip to East China and North China. Someday, I hope to make a trip to South China. That would include my return to Hong Kong, the city I fell in love with while I was in the Navy many years (decades, actually) ago. Lately, I’ve also been thinking of visiting West-Central China, home of giant pandas and spicy Sichuan cuisine!
My trip to (East and North) China was an amazing adventure. Over the course of the upcoming posts, I hope you’ll get an idea why. This trip was definitely one of my biggest adventures yet, and probably my biggest challenge as well. The challenge mostly came from one source: language. On my two most recent sightseeing trips, Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia, language wasn’t much of an issue. Use of English is widespread in the countries I visited on those trips—Singapore, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, etc.—as those countries had previously been affiliated with the British Empire as colonies or protectorates. In Western Europe, of course, the same Roman alphabet that I’m using right now is used. So even with a limited knowledge of the language, I can often make an educated guess when I’m there as to what a sign is trying to tell me or what dishes a menu is offering me.
China is a different story. I made a point of learning some basic Chinese words and phrases before my trip using a phrasebook and an app I downloaded. (I always say the most important word you can learn in any language is “please”, which is “qing”–pronounced “ching” in Chinese, by the way.) But with thousands of Chinese characters (vs. our 26 letters) there was no chance I’d learn how to read or write Chinese ahead of my trip. And that’s not the only difficulty. Chinese is a tonal language. This means that any word can have completely different meanings depending on whether your voice goes up or down or stays the same on the vowel. What might appear to be one word could have four or five different meanings. “Bēi”, for example, with the vowel said in a high pitch, means “cup”. “Bèi”, with the voice going down on the vowel, means “by”. “Bĕi”, with the vowel going down and then up, means “north”. Yet, in each case, the word is pronounced the same as “bay” in English. Bottom line: yeah, I wasn’t going to be mastering Mandarin any time soon. Mandarin, by the way, is a variety of Chinese and it’s China’s only official language, referred to as Standard Chinese. It has the world’s most native speakers, at almost a billion.
The language challenges notwithstanding, I found China to otherwise be very tourist-friendly overall, by which I mostly mean that there was plenty of signage and a great deal of it was in both Chinese and English. (Also making China fairly easy to navigate is their outstanding user-friendly transportation systems. And I mean German levels of outstanding. That good.) Where a great deal of the language challenge came in was when it was time to eat. Most restaurants had neither English-language menus nor English-speaking staff. Sometimes I ended up going without a meal and just getting a snack. And sometimes when I was able to order, I didn’t always get what I was expecting. Chinese food is definitely not the same as Chinese-American food. Things did get better as the trip progressed, culminating in my great triumph at an English-free restaurant on my last night. I’ll go into all of the culinary highs and lows (with pictures) in my upcoming posts of the ever popular Food Diary. Another area where language was a challenge was on China’s no-English buses. I had a few unplanned adventures by bus that I’ll fill you in on in the upcoming travelogues. I did always manage to end up where I needed to be. Eventually.
In a few days, I’ll begin posting my travelogues and food diaries for each day of my trip so you can get a sense of what made it such an amazing adventure. I’m also including a smidgen of history for each day. I believe that understanding Chinese history helps to put the sights that I saw in historical context. Chinese history is long and complicated. But it’s also fascinating and at times exciting and even suspenseful. I hope you enjoy!
Yours till then,
Weilian Ou’kanele
[That’s my best sorry attempt of converting my name into Chinese syllables.]
Oh, right, I almost forgot. Ahead of my trip, I read plenty of warnings to watch out for scams. The gist of what I read was that basically anyone approaching you speaking very good English was out to scam you. I came across many such people; and just about every time, I was tempted to go along with it and see how they would try to scam me. But of course my regimented sightseeing schedule would not allow for such a frivolous diversion. There was one time, however, where I was a fool who was soon parted from his money. On Day 7, I was touring the grounds of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. At a souvenir stand within the site, I was asked by some eager ladies if I wanted my picture taken. Well, as many of you know, I like to include something goofy from each trip in the introduction. And here I was presented with the opportunity to deliver to you the most gloriously goofy photos of me ever. The goof de résistance. La goof de la goof.
But I got more than I bargained for. The ladies weren’t too happy that I insisted on a small photo, rather than a more expensive larger one. I don’t know if they took revenge on me, or if I just looked gullible. The photographer was great. He kept putting me in honorific poses with imperial props. But the photo opps kept coming. Just as I was about to tell him no more, he finally stopped snapping pictures. Then I got charged for ten pictures, not the mere one picture I was expecting. After I forked over the equivalent of $100, the photographer began printing and laminating the photos. I’m quite sure if I had balked at paying for all ten pictures, they would have grumbled and let me pay for fewer. But I had just fallen and hurt my back a short while earlier (yes, I had a great fall on this trip, another reminder that I should start looking into travel insurance), plus it was frigid, and I didn’t have a fight in me. So, I can’t really say I got scammed. It was more a case of my niceness being taken advantage of. The good news is that you get to see the results of my folly. Enjoyment guaranteed! Presenting, Emperor Bili:
[click on each picture to enlarge]
That is how I normally picture you.
Neil
That’s why you treat me like royalty!
Oh, don’t worry about that “photo scam.” It happens to the best of us! I once bought a gorgeous, hand crafted picture frame from a small flea market on this resort I stayed at in the Dominican Republic some 12+ years ago. They charged me $20 US for it, and while I thought it was a fair price (it wasn’t).
It wasn’t until I got home until I later realized that the glass cover for the frame was actually just a thin piece of plastic film. As if that would properly protect a photo! Anyways, it has been sitting in a box somewhere for years. Lesson learned here is to always bargain if that it was the cultural norms are for whichever country you are in.
The funny thing is that I kept reading that you haggle everywhere in China. The couple places I tried, they said, “We don’t do that here.”
Thanks for reading! I still need to check out your blog soon.
Sounds like some B.S. to me that they were giving you and that they were just trying to see how far they could go to push you around before breaking down. Oh well! Lesson learned for next time, right? And I always believe that even if you overpaid for something on a trip, it is the experience that matters most. Money can always be made again.