Day 18 Olympic Stadium, Summer Garden

My knees and thigh were starting to twinge yesterday evening, but they seemed fine this morning. Clearly, the time I've spent walking daily on this vacation have toughened up my leg/feet muscles such that a 'short' jaunt up the Great Wall is no longer an ordeal. XP

Anyways, this morning we made a stop at the plaza where all the Olympic buildings were. We didn't actually go inside any of them, though they are supposedly open. We did take some photos of the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube, and the... Dragon hotel thing (with the IBM office on the 'head'!).

After that we headed off to the Summer Palace, entering through the eastern gate. We passed a couple of halls, and I think but am not sure we found the courtyard where Dowager Empress Cixi had supposedly imprisoned one of the late Qing emperors (where was our guide?!).

The trip down the Long Corridor was cool. I tried to pick out all the images that I could recognize the stories of, and had fun telling the tales to the twins. Unfortunately, I spent so much time talking that I didn't get to take as many photos of the corridor pics as I wanted to. I did note that there was a huge variation among the quality of the art - some of them look very obviously restore/repainted, while others look like they are still in their original state from the Ming/Qing. Our tour guide said that the whole corridor had been restored recently in '06-ish, but given some of the other inconsistencies that I caught her at, I wasn't sure if her statement was accurate.

(BTW, if anyone can tell me, is the "official" story still that Cixi used money that would have gone to the Qing military to build/restore/expand the Summer Palace, or has that been reduced to a vicious rumor?)

All too soon, we finished the Long Corridor and hand lunch at a place where they supposedly serve authentic Imperial cuisine (or is it just cuisine served in Imperial style?)... Frankly I wasn't too impressed with the place or dishes, but then, I guess I prefer minimalistic aesthetics to a lot of the gaudiness of the Ming/Qing styles.

My aunt had her heart set on visiting the Suzhou Street area toward the north side of the garden. Our tour guide tried to talk us out of that plan on various reasons including that there was nothing much to see and it was too long a walk. In the end, my aunt had her way, and the kids actually enjoyed the climb over the shallow hill over to the Suzhou Street area (they love to climb, period *shrug*). Since we didn't get to visit Guilin/苏杭 on this trip, it was a cool intro for the kids of China's version of Venice. I snapped quite a few photos as well.



After that, we made our way back to the shore where we took a dragon-boat ferry over the artificial Kunming Lake to where we were to exit the park. Hopefully, my photos from the boat/shore will come out ok, since the camera does horrible when shooting against the light, and I have not had too much luck in forcing a flash on the darned thing.

Today is the last of our guided tours in Beijing. Tomorrow and the day after, we'll be completely on our own. My aunt has already decided that tomorrow we'll be going to the Capital Museum (or whatever it's called). We'll probably want to take the subway since it might be easier than to get two cabs to take five people. I don't think it should be harder to navigate than Shanghai's subway...right?

Introducing our tour guides

Although our vacation in China isn't wholly over yet, the guided portions of it are. So I thought I'd write a bit about the various tour guides we've had on this journey while they're fresh on my mind, especially since they've been the topic of much discussion among my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

Let's start in order with Shanghai. Although we only had one (and a half if you count the trips from the airport and to the airport) day of guided tour with Kathy, my memories of her were generally ok. She did what a tour guide was supposed to do. Her tour of the French Concession area showed that she knew the area and its history well, and could communicate such just fine with English. Overall, our impressions of her were fair, though not spectacular.

Next was Jessie from Xi'an, who was by far the favorite of the twins and the rest of us. She gave me the impression of a peer much more than Kathy did, though our ages are all about the same, and she could certainly relate to children the best. When the girls joked around about the mistranslations on one of the museums near Yongtai's tomb, Jessie was able to laugh and contribute to the joke. She was also the most loquacious of our guides. On the car trips to/from our tour spots, and even during the tour, she would engage in long and deep conversations with my uncle about every topic under the sun - politics, religion, economy, history, China's place in the world and in the eyes of the people. She wasn't afraid to give her own opinions of everything, and it was very obvious that she loved learning and was a very wide-read scholar as well as well-traveled young lady. She also went above and beyond to accompany us through my aunt's very serious and detailed examinations of every item in a museum even though she must have been walking her feet off much as we had felt the first two Expo days. In fact, even after we left Xi'an, the twins kept comparing the following two tour guides against her and found them wanting. Well, I have to agree...

In Pingyao, our guide was a young man named George. Coming from a much smaller and poorer town, it came as no surprise that his English was not as good as our previous two guides. There were several times where I had to play translator myself between my uncle and our guide. However, he was pretty honest about when he didn't understand something we said. He also put the extra little effort to finding us good restaurants for dinner in the two days we spent there, even though dinner was not included in the tour arrangement we'd originally paid for. My uncle figured that he probably got a kickback from those diners. He was also the only tour guide to actually join us for lunch without a separate receipt (meaning the tour agency paid for his part of lunch too, which is technically against regulations). But since we were happy to find decent (and sanitary!) eateries in such a small town like Pingyao that we really didn't mind the small perks he got out of things. The man did give a general impression of earnestness...

Finally, that brings us to our last tour guide in Beijing, Selena - she who has been the topic of many a dinner conversation. At first impression, she seemed to be very fluent in English and had a pretty impressive resume (lived in Vancouver a few years; lead tours to or in foreign countries). However, the more time we spent on her tours, the more it seemed like...she really isn't suited to her job. Even ignoring the incident at the Forbidden City, and her attempts at talking my aunt to changing her tour program from Mutianyu and Suzhou Street... there are the small things. She would very often lapse into Chinese whenever she wanted to get a point across quickly, despite repeated reminders that we all spoke English as our primary language. She usually addressed only my aunt (half in Chinese), even if it had been my uncle who'd asked the question - as if she expected my aunt to do the translation to the rest of us for her. She hardly spoke a word to the twins and when she spoke to me, it's as if to a high-schooler on a homework assignment rather than an adult vacationing on her own time and money. As well, she would often say that she'd wait for us at such and such a spot for us to be done with taking photos or visiting Such-and-such Hall or climbing a nearby hill to see what was there. She also had a tendency to get picked up in the morning by the driver after we were picked up first, and get dropped off before we were dropped off at our hotel. These are things none of our previous guides had done; they'd always accompanied us no matter where we were dragging them, and saw us from/to our hotel from beginning to end. It just didn't seem quite professional here, since, well, just who's paying for who's time?

I've overheard various other small tour groups with only a few foreigners and an English-speaking tour guide. Most of them act more like Jessie (or Kathy) than like Selena. I guess we just had some bad luck with our last guide. Honestly, I think she'd do better at a desk job arranging schedules than in the field. Other than the last one, I think we had a pretty fair run of guides on the rest of our trip. Anyway, in the end, it's going to be our wallets talking when we do the tipping, and we already know what the math is going to be there.

But, in case anyone else ever thinks about ordering a tour from CTS for Shanghai, Xi'an, Beijing, or with CITS for Pingyao, hopefully this will help you make decisions or know who to request/avoid. :)