Following the end of the school term and our release from our work contracts, the foreign teachers all part ways, many returning home and others of us staying to travel for a while yet.  For me, it meant a trip up north to Beijing to arrange my future, specifically in the shorter-term.  Beginning in September I will begin life anew as an English lecturer at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.  The first step to all this was to get up there and renew m Chinese visa.  The second part of the journey to Beijing was to meet up with my sisters.  Yes, plural.  This time it was not just Tori who I would be gallivanting about China with, but two of my other sisters would join us.  For Winnie, 18, and Lexie, 16, it would be their first trip outside of North America and Tori and I would serve as the tour guides/translators.  Naturally, for those of you who have met Tori and I, we are of course excellent at such things.

The girls landed in matching outfits with their money purses swinging off their necks at Beijing airport.  With them firmly in tow we headed back to the city center and to the hostel for the first couple nights.  Early on our activities were dictated by doing the Beijing circuit of sights, kicking off with a walk-by of Chairman Mao’s waxen corpse to the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, and the Summer Palace.  We got out to the 2008 Olympic site as well, doing our best to take ‘buddy pictures’ and see just how the girls were adjusting.  Beijing is a shock to just about any new arrival, but the rest of China makes it look like the kiddie pool.  This was best illustrated when we left from Beijing to get to Xingcheng, a small city near the coast in Liaoning province.

Leaving Beijing was a simple matter, boarding the bullet train to Tianjin and arriving a half hour later.  No tickets remained for the trains towards Xingcheng, as the sleeper spaces and the seats were all sold out.  Graciously, Chinese Railways sell standing tickets.  These are what they sound like, and inevitably any time you are in a position to buy a standing ticket it will be a crowded, miserable time.  True enough, we found ourselves pushing and telling the girls “keep pushing people” as we boarded the train in the night, part of the seething crowd of humanity.  Winnie and Lexie seemed a bit nonplussed with it all.  A group of younger people made space for Lexie on a bench and then Tori was able to crowd on the end of one as well.  I set up shop on the floor, using my bag for a chair and Winnie did likewise for herself.  It was a fun six hour trip.

Xingcheng itself is a bit nondescript but actually turned out to be a quite charming town.  It is one of the four remaining places in China with an intact city wall remaining from the Ming Dynasty and the city’s bell tower still stands in the center as well.  Here we took advantage of the isolation and after some hefty bartering with the taxi drivers made our way a few hours down the road to the Jiumengou section of the Great Wall.  Here, the girls faces really lit up and we had a good time, though the spotting of some yurts at the base of the wall was cause for some minor concern.  Apparently the Mongols weren’t in an enterprising mood though and we passed our time safely before returning to Xingcheng to meet very curious locals in the old city and receive only a partially understood lecture on Sino-American friendship and the evils of Mao Zedong from a Chinese man.

The next stop was Harbin up in the far northeast.  It is one of several cities that has been called the “Paris of the East” over the years, though in this case Moscow may be more appropriate.  The city center area is littered with architecture of Russian heritage as well as a few onion-domed churches that create a lovely city center area with numerous souvenir stands selling Russian-themed junk.  Harbin is also the only place where Chinese would first ask if we were Russian, to which I would swiftly answer nyet.

Harbin is also the home of the Siberian Tiger Reserve, a home for…Siberian Tigers.  Largely it is just a fence enclosed turf of land north of the city where you go through the various areas protected by a mesh of iron bars in a bus.  One of the more interesting activities here is buying a live chicken for 7 dollars and hanging it out on a pole to feed the tigers.  Gruesome at times but pretty impressive to see and in my case even feel the animal snatch its prey and devour it.  We left from Harbin on a soft sleeper as no other tickets were available.  It is by far the nicest way to go by train in China, and for twice the price, it ought to be.

The second half of the trip to follow soon.