The Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010

Day 5, Saturday. One of my American-style indulgences last night was a vanilla Coke. In retrospect, this was a Bad Idea. Eric and Owen both slept all night for the first time since our arrival, as I can testify because, well, I didn’t.

I had thought that Owen might get less attention in Beijing, but so far that seems not to be the case. Yesterday a young woman checking in at the same time as us asked for a picture with him, and this morning at breakfast the waitresses are cooing over him like mad. He is not at all ready to deal with the attention so early in the day, and sits very stiffly with his eyes averted until they leave him alone. Eric’s brother Kevin had warned us that on his trip to China, the “Western breakfast” at his hotel seemed to have been created by people who knew of some American foods but had no clue which ones were eaten at breakfast, so we are pleasantly surprised by the non-random nature of the hotel buffet, which has both Chinese and Western options. Owen is overjoyed to get “weg’lar” tea (that is, black tea with milk) and sausages.

Guangsho meets us promptly at nine with his colleague Long, who is going to be driving. Long has a toddler as well, so there is – glory be – an actual car seat for Owen. The drive out of Beijing takes quite a while; we pass a couple of accidents that are holding up the traffic. Well before we get out of the city, we can see mountains in the distance ahead (later I will realize that we can see them from our hotel window on a clear day; it was just too smoggy yesterday). On the very edge of the urban area we pass a bizarre, forlorn complex that looks like a knockoff of Disney World, fake castle and all, which appears to have been totally abandoned halfway through construction. Soon after that we pass the first big entry point to the Great Wall, complete with gigantic parking lot and billboards, but Long says we are going a bit further on. We drive several more miles into the mountains and arrive at Badaling. When we pull in, it is clear that we are by no means off the beaten path – a solid quarter-mile of souvenir shops flank the long, narrow parking lot. We hop out of the car and are immediately accosted by three young men in uniform who ask to get a picture with Owen. (Guangsho says they are not real army but some kind of civilian militia.)

Sky gondolas take us up the mountainside to nearly the highest point of the wall. There is a bit of a precarious walk to get onto the Wall itself, and then – here we are. On the Great Effing Wall of China, fergoshsakes. It is utterly jammed with people and very steep. Some of the surface has been remade with stairs, but some of it is just a steep paved slope. I have to be careful and go quite slowly. Guangsho and Long stay back with me while Eric powers ahead through the crowd with Owen in his arms. We are very high up, literally on the mountaintop, and the view is both unbelievable and weirdly familiar in that I’m-at-a-world-famous-landmark way. The air is very cold and very clear, and the Wall snakes all over the hills beneath us until in the distance it becomes a tiny string with a few black ants crawling along – serious hikers who are doing some serious wall-walking, far away from the main entry points. We are not serious hikers, even at the best of times; with a pregnant woman and a toddler in the party, all we are up for is a climb up to the highest accessible point and then back down to the gondolas. In total we spend perhaps half an hour on the wall, but it’s too steep and too crowded to want to hang around much longer.

Having declared himself ready to go home while we were still up on the Wall, Owen falls asleep as soon as we get in the car. The drive back to Beijing goes much faster without a huge traffic jam to contend with. Long has suggested Mongolian barbecue for lunch, which sounds great to us, and we pull in at what appears to be a campground of yurts. Each one turns out to be a private dining room, all served by glass-walled kitchens in the center of the compound (the sign over the kitchen reads “Xibei 99 Yurts.” I’m not sure if that was hyperbole or if there were really 99 of them). Inside our very cozy, rug-covered yurt, we settle in for yet another amazing meal – a milky tea-and-rice soup, noodles, potatoes, boiled lamb and vegetables, and finally the specialty grilled lamb, and homemade yogurt and fruit. There is even Western-style bread that Owen will eat.

After lunch Long drops us off at the Institute for Zoology Museum. Now comes the part our child has really been waiting for: dinosaur bones! But first there are… dinosaur ROBOTS!!! An audioanimatronic tyrannosaurus, triceratops, and sauropod of some kind (looks like a brontosaurus to me, but that wasn’t the name on the sign) all flank the entrance. Owen could easily spend the next half hour watching them shake their plastic heads and roar, but the museum is closing in forty minutes, so we drag him inside. The building looks very new and spacious. There is a gigantic whale skeleton hanging in the central atrium. I can’t find a sign telling me what kind of whale it is, but it absolutely dwarfs the Tay Whale back in Dundee, which is a humpback. Some dinosaur skeletons stand beneath it on the lowest level of the museum, and more are arranged on the top floor landing, roughly level with the whale. Owen goes around with the camera getting his own pictures of the dinos, and we coax him to let us a take few as well, as he will otherwise have only blurry close-ups of tyrannosaurus feet. We take a quick walk around the rest of the museum, which, apart from a black-lit “Butterfly Valley,” is not very exciting and mostly consists of taxidermied animals in glass cases. As the museum closes up, we get pictures of the dinobots outside and catch a taxi back to the hotel.

A few hours’ nap time later, Guangsho meets us for dinner at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel. Notwithstanding our protests that we still have barely any appetite after our huge lunchtime feast, he orders about eight dishes, including pancakes for Owen, which the kid refuses to eat because there is no syrup (grr). [ETA: the menu has allegedly been translated into English, but if you can figure out what "the burning characteristics of taste pigeon" is intended to convey, you're doing better than I.] Eric and Guangsho are eager to talk science, and eventually I leave them to it and take Owen up to the room for granola bars, yogurt, and the Asian Games men’s gymnastics on TV (home team China wins!).