China Part 3: Hostels and Hiking

When my trip to China was being planned, travelling in China was not on my to-do list. There were just too many practical issues. I wouldn’t have enough time; I wouldn’t have enough money, blah blah blah. I would just stay in Chengdu, where it wasn’t exactly like I would be bored, and one day in the long distant future when I’m not a poor student any more but (hopefully) a career money with some cash in the bank, I’d return to China and explore properly later.

But then I got to China, and I got jealous of everybody talking about all the travelling they’d been doing, and someone said, “Hey, let’s go to Beijing for a weekend!”

I thought about it.

For all of about two milliseconds.

Carpe Diem, as they say.

So ten days after I landed in China, I found myself back on a plane and Beijing bound. We managed to book tickets on the 07:30 Sichuan Airlines flight out of Chengdu and were in Beijing nice and early.

We stayed at Sanlitun Hostel, in the Chaoyang district, which we found on hostelworld.com. It was perfect for what we needed; not expensive, and it had a small restaurant/bar where we could grab breakfast or a drink in the evenings, and it was only 20 minutes or so away from Tiananmen Square and the like, which was where we headed first.

We started out in Tiananmen Square, which aside from being extremely large (it’s the largest public square in the world, and can hold over 1 million people) is perfectly unassuming, and it’s hard to relate the square as I saw it to the famous tank man picture taken during the infamous events of 1989.

It’s home to the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the National Museum of China (or something like that, I forget exactly what it was called) and a large monument in the centre which Google tells me is the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

It’s also roughly where you go to get into the Forbidden City, which was the imperial palace for the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1987, and you can see why. It is extremely impressive. The buildings are huge and ornate, and the gardens were beautiful. You can’t really go to Beijing and not visit.

That said, there are drawbacks to visiting. The Forbidden City is also the world’s largest palace complex (the Chinese like to be the biggest, apparently!).

Seriously. Once we got inside, it seemed to go on and on and on and on forever and ever and ever. I thought I was going to die there, old and grey, if I didn’t melt first. (Not really). There are so many courtyards, one after the other, and after a while, everything began to look the same and all we wanted to do was find the exit, which took a while. Also, even though it was a weekday, we are slap bang in the middle of peak season, and the crowds were pretty bad.

So – if you ever go, here’s my advice. Don’t go in the middle of summer, when it’s at its most boiling, and make sure you get an audio guide or something, so you actually know what you’re looking at (rookie mistake, I know, but there we have it).

We also had a bit of a weird food moment in the Forbidden City, when I was dared to buy a pea flavoured ice cream. I shouldn’t need to tell you that it was absolutely vile, and went in the bin pretty quickly. (Also, out of curiosity, I looked up #peaicecream instagram later on, and apparently if I had actually tried to eat the thing, I would have found actual peas on the inside. Gross)

Luckily, food for the rest of the weekend was perfectly fine. That night we went to Gui Jie and found a restaurant to have some proper Beijing Peking Duck, which (when it arrived – we were sat waiting for it for ages) was tres bien.

We essentially organised our Saturday around the tours that were advertised in the lobby of our hostel, so we started the day by heading about 70km northeast of Beijing on the coach, hopping on to a chair lift and up a very large mountain to see the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China.

I don’t know what was more impressive, really: the fact that this wall, crawling over mountains and through thick trees, was just so massive – it’s quite the commanding site – or the fact that something so massive and it was built by hand. On said mountains, through said thick trees, and from the middle of the 6^th century, no less.

Anyway, once we got to the top and took a few lots of photos, we decided to hike towards one of the many watch towers on this stretch of the wall, and the last part open in that direction before the dilapidated section, and then head back and do the other direction after that.

This proved to be a bit optimistic.

The mid 6^th century Chinese builders did not build the wall with 21^st century tourists in mind, and in places the stairs up to this watch tower were so steep that the staircase was essentially vertical. Rock climbing gloves would not have gone amiss (okay, I exaggerate, but seriously, climbing the wall took effort. When they say that you go hiking on the wall, they mean it, it’s no gentle stroll!). It also did not help that on the wall; the temperature was at least 40°C, with little to no cloud cover and little to no breeze.

Anyway, having sweated out at least half my body weight, we got to the top (yay!) where there was a little man selling bottles of water. He wanted ¥20 for one, which was a bit steep when we’d been paying about ¥3 in Beijing, so I didn’t buy one. Looking back, this was exceptionally stupid, given just how hot it was, and given that the man only wanted what was essentially £2, and this was probably one of the reasons why I ended up severely dehydrated by the end of the weekend, but perhaps I can blame said dehydration for my pig-headedness (Can’t I?)

Still, the wall was very impressive and offered some seriously brilliant views of the valleys around the bottom of the mountains, and we really couldn’t have gone to Beijing without going, could we?

Going back down to the bottom of the mountain, we took a slightly more interesting route than we had on the way up. We tobogganed down, which was quite fun (if slightly alarming on the sharper corners), and then went to a restaurant for our lunch, which was included in the amount we’d paid for the tour, and which turned out to be a lot bigger that I’d been expecting. We definitely got our money’s worth :)

When we got back to Beijing, we showered up and grabbed dinner at the hostel before heading a few minutes down the road for a show put on by the China National Acrobatic Troupe, which was also really good – there was a contortionist, and a juggler, some seriously cool stuff on a tightrope and loads of other stuff. You can see why the Chinese win so many medals in gymnastics, with the way this lot were jumping around. They must put so many hours of training in to do what they do – would you want to climb onto a tower of people balanced on a moving bike? I wouldn’t!

After the acrobatics show finished, we got back on the subway and went to Wanfujing’s snack street. It’s packed with food stalls which served some seriously strange street food – live scorpions on sticks, anyone? No? How about starfish? Still, it was actually really fun to meander around and look at the good and the stranger elements of Beijing, and we all did a bit of souvenir shopping.

Next morning, we decided to head back to Tiananmen Square and go to Mao’s Mausoleum, which is worth a visit if taking a few hours out of your day to see an embalmed communist leader is your thing. This was a simple enough plan, except that when we got to Qianmen station, we emerged into what can only be described as chaos. When we had been to Tiananmen Square on Friday, visiting hours at the Mausoleum were already over, and it was quite quiet. We wandered up to the Forbidden City with no problems.

Not so this time.

People were queuing up to get through security in droves. There were thousands and thousands of people, none of whom knew the definition of queuing, all of whom knew the definition of queue jumping, all of whom were happy to yell and scream and elbow the people next to them to get through quicker. Similar behaviour when we actually got into the square; similar behaviour when we actually got into the queue.

Then the realisation that we weren’t actually allowed to take any bags into the mausoleum. Helpfully, there were no signs anywhere to point this out, and the City Guide by TimeOut Beijing, which we’d been relying on, also very helpfully neglected to mention this. So (once we’d eventually established what the problem was and where I had to go to solve it) I had to dip out of the queue, head to the opposite side of the square to deposit our bags, and then wrestle through queues and security again to try and get back into the queue, which was exhausting. And then we spent an hour and a half queuing to get in (under relentless sunshine and with no water, seeing as we weren’t allowed our bags or anything really in the way of possessions, which just led to us feeling simply awful later).

It was actually this visit to the Mausoleum where I really saw for the first time that, for all its friendly façade and influx of capitalist brands, China is after all a communist country. When a big figure dies in the UK, or wherever, there’s obviously some public mourning – think Princess Diana, and the like – but it goes beyond that in China. It’s not just your average respect for the dead: there is a personality cult surrounding Chairman Mao (I mean, there’s a giant portrait of him adorning the entrance to the Forbidden City, which predates the communist regime by thousands and thousands and thousands of years!)

When we finally got close to the Mausoleum, people were buying yellow flowers, which, when we got inside, they laid in front of a giant statue of Mao, usually bowing at him several times. And then of course, there’s the fact that they embalmed him in the first place, for people to go and gawk at.

It’s an interesting phenomena, particularly when you take this in the context of a simple google search - the Cultural Revolution, or the famine caused by the 'Great Leap Forward', which killed 30 million Chinese peasants, or thereabouts, in between 1959 and 1962... I don't claim to be particularly knowledgeable about Mao, and I'm sure he did good things for China, but there is a reason he has his critics. 

It’s all very odd, and slightly uncomfortable.

Anyway, after this brief interlude (we were only actually in the mausoleum for about five minutes, after all that), we went and got our bags, and some lunch, and headed over to the Temple of Heaven, which is another complex of China’s ancient sacrificial buildings (the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest is the most famous part).

It’s also yet another UNESCO World Heritage site – China has 47 of these, second most in the world behind Italy, who has 50. I managed to visit a fair few of them in the short time I had.

By this point, though, I think the heat just got too much. It was extremely hot, we were sweating faster than we could replace the water, we’d done a lot of walking, and although we had time to do at least one more thing if we had wanted to, I think if we’d tried, one or all of us would have ended up with pretty severe dehydration and heatstroke. So we headed back to the hostel to freshen up and hang around in the air conditioning until it was time to head to the airport for our flight back to Chengdu.

Obviously, Beijing is a lot bigger than just the stuff that we saw. There was loads of stuff that we didn’t see, like the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs and the famous Olympic Park, and that’s just the sights, not the real Beijing. But we just ran out of time, (and I suspect we wouldn’t have been able to summon the energy to do more in any case, it was just so hot).

Still, it was a really good weekend, and I’m so glad that I went and got to see a little bit more of China while I was there. It would have been silly to travel more than 5000 miles to somewhere I am extremely unlikely to be again very soon, and not make the most of it while I could.

I know this was another super long post, but you can’t go somewhere like China and not have a lot to say about it!

Next Time – China part 4: Tianfu, Tinder and Tea

Vicky xx

Un weekend des châteaux: #2 - Fontainebleau

As I mentioned in yesterday's post (two in a row! And there'll likely be more this week), one other thing on my bucket list which I have now managed to cross off is the Palace of Fontainebleau, about 55km outside of Paris.

Anne-Marie and I took the transilien from Gare de Lyon (one of the most confusing metro stations I have ever been to, thankyou very much), which took about forty minutes or thereabouts, and then walked from Fontainebleau-Avon to the Château itself, through quite a lot of lovely parkland.

This area is actually home to the Fôret de Fontainebleau, and people come here on droves at the weekends with their bikes to follow the trails. It's home to several endangered European species and used to be a royal hunting park, which I would assume is why the palace was built where it was, essentially as a rather over the top hunting 'lodge'. Although don't quote me on that. It's a bit of a lame description for a château which, along with its park is actually listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The palace is simpler than Versailles but still very grand. The chapel and the throne room (which used to be the King's bedroom but was converted by Napoleon) are two such examples.

The palace's library is also pretty impressive and held a certain amount of appeal to a bookworm like myself!

Despite it's royal heritage, I actually found myself more interested in the château under Napoleon (Bonaparte). His famous uniform is displayed there (and really, I know it's famous that ol' Boney was very short, but seriously, he was short!) as is the room where he abdicated before he was exiled to Elba in 1814 (from where he later escaped). 

It was an another absolutely boiling day though, and I found myself flagging pretty quickly. The park (and its nice shady trees) ended up being much more appealing to me than the château, interesting though it undoubtedly was. I think I would have appreciated it more if I hadn't been to Versailles just the day before, and I think that at times Anne-Marie and I were thinking more of how much our feet hurt than what was in front of us, but it was a very lovely day!

Vicky xx

Plus de tourisme...

Paris is, or rather, was, in the midst of a fair heatwave this weekend just gone, and with four of my five exams done and out of the way, I decided to give myself the weekend off before returning to revision for my fifth and final exam on the 18th of this month.

Saturday I spent sunbathing on our balcony (something which I am so thankful we have!) having found out too late that the Queen was at the Marché aux Fleurs, which was being named after her. 

Sunday, though, I made sure to go out, and Palais Garnier - home of the opera here in Paris, is somewhere I've been meaning to go for quite a while now.

I've never actually seen an opera myself, and I tried to get tickets to see La Boheme or Tristan and Isolde, but they were all either sold out or out of my price range, so I'll have to try again at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden when I head back to London for my final year.

That's not to stop you from going inside though - it's a beautiful building, very decadent, and I can imagine that the atmosphere on the night of a performance must really be something.

After this, I went over to Pére Lachaise cemetery, last resting place of many of the late and the great.

It's an absolute maze, inside. If you ever go, you'll definitely be wanting the help of a map - which can be found on this page - and even then, I ended up getting lost several times and several graves I was searching for eluded me entirely. 

Not all of them though. I found Chopin, Edith Piaf, Moliére and Oscar Wilde, to name but a few (and quite handily, I turned up at this last one at the same time as a British tour group, so I stuck around and got to hear a few interesting facts about the rather interesting sculpture that marks the spot).

Also, a word of advice. Don't do as muggins here did, and forget to take a bottle of water with you. The cemetery is massive, and on a hot day, you'll be wanting a drink! D'oh.

The hot weather was unusually thick, though, and so for the past few days we've been treated to lots and lots of thunder and lightening, which I happen to really like but which probably sucks for all the poor people here in Paris who are scared of thunderstorms. I don't think I've ever known such a protracted period of thundery weather - we're now on day three, although I believe it's supposed to let up tomorrow.

Still, at least the temporary lack of sunshine makes it easier to revise. It's hard to focus when all you want to do is go outside and chill (ignoring, of course, that this blog post is quite obviously an exercise in procrastination...)

Vicky xx

La touriste est retournée!

My blog has been sadly excitement free of late, what with one thing and another, but I woke up this morning, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and so I decided to go for a walk. I ended up going all over the place and having a really lovely Sunday afternoon.

My apartment is in a brilliant location in that we are exceptionally close to the Latin Quarter, and therefore close to pretty much everything. I don't start out with any particular destination in mind, I just meandered around for a bit appreciating how lovely Paris is in May.

Eventually I ended up on the banks of the Seine and literally right in front of a shop that I've been meaning to go to for ages.

Shakespeare & Co is an English language bookshop located at 37, Rue de la Bûcherie, and it's quite quirky.

The original Shakespeare and Company was founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach and was basically the centre of English Language Literature in Paris. Writers such as Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald spent loads of time there, and James Joyce basically used it as his office (in fact, Sylvia Beach published Joyce's Ulysses, a plaque as to which I found on my way home this afternoon...)

The original Shakespeare and Company closed in 1940, supposedly because Ms Beach didn't want to sell a Nazi Officer the last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It never reopened, even though...

"...Hemingway, as a major in the US army... at the liberation of Paris in 1945 drove his tank straight to the shuttered Shakespeare and Company and personally liberated Sylvia Beach."

Which I think is just brilliant. 

(Quote taken from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/07/shakespeare-and-company-bookshop-paris)

The existing Shakespeare and Company was opened in 1951, but as Le Mistral. It was renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964, and having spent a good while in there this afternoon, all I can say is that the atmosphere is brilliant and I could probably go back and read for hours if you'd let me. 

As it is, I spent much more money in there than I should have done, and although I know I shouldn't have done it, and although I know I should have been much more frugal, I can't bring myself to regret it. 

Sorry, not sorry. 

Anyway, after this, I headed over the Pont Saint-Michel to Île de la Cité to look for the plaque indicating Kilometre Zero, whose existence I only learnt of about a fortnight ago, and which I failed to find even after phoning my brother back in England and asking him to tell me where it is. #fail

Giving up on finding the plaque, I went to Sainte-Chapelle, built between 1242 and 1248 by Louis IX to house the relics of the Passion of Christ. It's all very interesting, but if you want to know more about that, I'll tell you to Google it, because right now what I'm interested in is the architecture and the building itself.

The visitors leaflet describes it as "A gem of High Gothic Architecture", which it is. The following three photos are of the Lower Chapel - and they're all very lovely. 

But calling Sainte-Chapelle a "gem of High Gothic architecture" is, quite frankly the most inane and rubbish description ever.

Why? Well, here's what I have to say on the matter.

I am a very lucky young woman, I know that. I've been to loads of places, very stunning places, and I've looked up at ornate ceilings, and to masterpieces of artwork and architecture, and down to mosaic flooring, and I've appreciated what I've seen and made the appropriate comments of, "Oh, isn't that beautiful."

But never, ever, before today have I been to a place that literally made me suck in a breath - an audible breath, no less - when I laid  my eyes on it.

La Haute Chapelle, or the Upper Chapel at Sainte-Chapelle did exactly that. 

I climbed up the narrow, winding stone staircase, I got to the top, I looked up, and my jaw dropped. I felt moved by its beauty. 

It is quite possibly the most beautiful and stunning man made thing I have ever seen, and quite possibly ever will see. 1113 scenes are depicted in 15 stained glass windows of the like I have never seen before, telling the story of mankind from Creation to the Resurrection of Christ. 

No words of mine will do it justice. No pictures of mine will do it justice - you'd need a much, much better camera than my puny iPhone and my pathetic efforts on instagram, and even then, I'm not sure you can truly appreciate how beautiful the upper chapel truly is unless you go to Paris yourself and look upon it with your own eyes. 

If you ever do go to Paris, and find yourself with a spare hour, I cannot recommend enough that you make the effort to go over to  Île de la Cité and go in to take a look for yourself - you absolutely will not regret it. 

That said, I will now let you take a look at what I'm talking about.

The photos speak for themselves, even with an iPhone camera. 

If you've even begun to see what I'm talking about, then I'm a happy woman, and you'll be adding it to your bucket lists as we speak. 

Just next door to Sainte-Chapelle is la Conciergerie - both buildings are part of the current Palais de Justice. The Conciergerie began life as a royal residence, later became the administrative centre, if you like, of the French Royal family, and finally ended up as a prison, most notably during the French Revolution. 

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of people appeared before a tribunal at the Conciergerie charged with being an enemy of the Revolution, including Queen Marie-Antoinette, who was kept there up until the very morning of her death, when she was taken to Place de la Révolution, now Place de la Concorde, and, ironically, Robespierre, who had sent hundreds of people to be guillotined himself, during the Reign of Terror. 

Marie-Antoinette's Cell

La Cour des Femmes, or the Women's Courtyard.
Condemned prisoners would wait in groups of twelve in the 'Corner of Last Goodbyes'
for the cart that would take them away to be guillotined. 

Exterior of the Conciergerie

Emerging into the sunshine, I crossed the Pont au Change onto the la rive droite (Right Bank) and headed down Rue Rivoli, passing the Hôtel de Ville ('City Hall') on my way and dipping into Starbucks for a Mocha Frappe, which went down very nicely, in case you were wondering :)

Hotel de Ville

Le Marais is a district which spreads across the 3rd and 4th arrondissements of Paris, and it's one that I've not really explored very much, except (kind of) at night. It's home to one of Paris' main Jewish communities and lots of little art galleries and boutiques.

Anyway, that  was where I was headed, in particular, to Place des Vosges, which is, according to Wikipedia, the oldest planned square in the city. It's also very pretty, and at one time or another has been home to several famous français, including Cardinal Richelieu and Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

Being a Sunday, and being a lovely warm day, it was predictably full to the brim with Parisians and tourists out to enjoy the weather :)

Anyway, after spending a little while sat on the grass, lapping up the sunshine, finishing my frappe and starting one of my new books, I headed home, sat out on the balcony for a while, and then decided to blog about my day before I forgot it all.

Speak soon!

Vicky xx

Une vie tranquille...

My blog has been more silent than I'd like it to be of late, and the absence of much to post can well and truly be blamed on the fact that my classes are well and truly underway and I'm pretty sure I already have more on my plate than I did at this point last semester - November wasn't the most exciting of blog months, either.

That being said, I think I have finally reached a turning point because despite the increased workload, I'm feeling remarkably positive and calm(ish) about everything. At the very least, as I said to my friend the other day, I now feel like I'm treading water rather than drowning in it. So that's definitely a positive!

It's also getting to the point in the year now - I've been in Paris for 6 and a half months, which quite frankly I find unbelievable - where I am starting to look ahead to my return to London and the final year (finally) of my degree, thinking about what modules to take, where I'll be living and so on. It's quite exciting actually :) 

Life's not been all work and no play though and the reason for that can be summed up like this:

The weather has been beautiful! Which makes for a very happy Victoria. Everything seems better when the sun is out - cliche but true. Just walking to and from Uni is a pleasurable part of my day. Paris is a beautiful place at the best of times, but never more so that when the weather is good. 

We took advantage of that last weekend and had a 'barbecue' of sorts - my flatmate Parisa got up really early and went trekking halfway across Paris looking for an actual barbecue but there was none to be found [which is really bizarre to a Brit like me who not only completely agrees with the below statement but is also perfectly willing to have a barbecue whether the weather is sunny or not]:

Buying 10 cases of Pimm's the second the temperature nudges 12°C
— VeryBritishProblems (@SoVeryBritish) March 8, 2014

So we just trashed our kitchen cooking everything instead and then ate out on the balcony. (and when I say trashed, I mean it. Took ages to clean up!)

So I spent the day sunbathing, stuffing my face, and watching England beat Wales in the Rugby [hooray!!]

That's all for now but tonight I'm going to the cinema with Parisa to see The Monuments Men, and I mean to use the next week or so to get on top of my workload so that I can start taking advantage of the beautiful weather and so a little more exploring!

Til then - 

Vicky xx