Traveling in China (1)

By Ellen McCaffrey, 
English Department Head, Soldan International Studies High School
St. Louis Public Schools

	I knew that a long airplane ride would be necessary to get to Beijing when several other St. Louis area teachers and I visited China last summer.  Little did I know, however, that while we shared the adventure of touring China for three weeks, air travel would be only one of many transportation modes employed to see this fascinating, ancient country.

	Our group was constantly moving, absorbing the scenes of cities and rural areas, ancient and modern side by side.  Inside China, we traveled on foot, by plane, bus, train, boat, cable car, rickshaw, and motorbike.  Although we did not ride on bicycles to get to our destinations in China, we had to be careful to avoid their onslaught when we were on foot.  Beijing's streets vibrate with the movement of bicycles.  The streets around Peking University are particularly alive with students pedaling their bicycles to get to classes.

	In Beijing, our home was the Shaoyuan Guest House-really a modern hotel-at Peking University.  Elevators took us to our rooms each day after our tours around the city.  From Peking University, we rode our reliable bus to see the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, Mao's Mausoleum.  When we climbed the Great Wall at the Jinyong Pass outside Beijing, we were transported to the gate by bus; we struggled valiantly on foot to climb the uneven steps to the pavilions along the wall.  The steps were designed to deter ancient invaders.  We learned that the Chinese wall builders were not aware that tourists would be climbing those same steps a thousand years later, wanting only to admire the Chinese countryside from the vantage point of that engineering marvel.

	The steps on the Great Wall challenged even the most physically fit among us, but the most determined and able-bodied managed to climb to the highest pavilion and work their way down on the opposite side from their starting point.  It took about two hours to complete the trek that way. 

       	In the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City, rickshaws provided our transport.  In the soft summer rain, we teachers were maneuvered through the narrow, ancient streets by strong, able drivers who skillfully wended their way through the pathways of the oldest parts of Beijing.  We stopped to see the lush gardens, carefully tended by families whose ancestors had lived in the homes they now occupied.  Many hutong families have been there for several generations.  The highlight of the hutong tour was the homemade meal cooked for us in a tiny kitchen and served in the small dining room of a home that had been inhabited by members of the same family for over four hundred years.  A television set, refrigerator, and computer were evidence that we were in the twenty-first century, but it was very easy to imagine that time had not moved since the seventeen hundreds.

	The ancient walls, gardens, and shrines inside the hutong reminded us of another far away time, and the rickshaws, propelled over bumpy streets by the strong legs of the men pulling on their long handles, allowed us the experience of a transportation mode that did not belong to the present.

       	From Beijing, we flew to Xian.  On board the plane, the carefully coiffed and beautifully made up flight attendants treated the passengers to a syncopated recitation of the flight safety instructions.  Each young woman made the same movement as the safety rules were recited in Chinese. Their exact coordination was a dance at thirty thousand feet.

       	In Xian, we drove to the site of the terracotta warriors.  As we walked through the archaeological dig, we saw that each life-sized warrior had a distinct face.  Each was marching, driving a cart, shooting a bow, or caring for horses to serve the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi.

       	Jinan was our next stop.  We took a boat ride across a lake in Jinan's Spring Garden Park.  The touring boat had a pagoda-shaped roofline, with upturned corners, which we were told were there to ward off evil. Breezes comfortably wafted over us in the summer air, making this short water excursion very pleasant.   (Part 1 of 2)