The Chinese Empire. The Silk Road. Paper and compass as famous Chinese inventions. Chinese medicine. The Chinese places we like. Chinatown. The Great Wall. Chinese checkers. Made in China. China, China, China.
Often in newspapers, an exotic part of history books, on countless products we own, sometimes right around the corner, China is everywhere. In Hungary (and some other countries), it’s common to say ‘this is Chinese to me’ when encountering something incomprehensible or that you don’t know much about. Last summer I took a trip to China, primarily Beijing, with a last-minute day trip to Shanghai, hoping to explore a place so close yet so distant, both in culture and in time.
The flight
Needless to say that as a professional low-cost flyer I was amazed by everything starting from the pillow and the nicely folded blanket prepared on the spacious seat, to the tasty meals and the frequent beverage service. Not to mention the multimedia setup. The safety measures video was the cutest animation that kept me hooked for the full three minutes it lasted. And this wasn’t business class, just my first long-haul flight.
The plane ride lasted about 10 hours, of which I spent one and a half hours watching Kung Fu Panda 3 (it had just come out). I suppose adding that it was part of the spiritual preparation for the journey just makes it more awkward. But maybe even worse, I spent almost no time sleeping. This was because, as a first-time jet lag battler, I went for the strategy of keeping myself awake. The flight landed at 4 am local time, which was 10 pm back home, so I decided to stay awake until the night after, for a total of 40 hours. Doesn’t seem like a big deal for a university student, but by the second evening I could’ve fallen asleep standing straight. However, I didn’t really feel the jet lag after, so I took it as a win. And all this without coffee. Double win.
Feeling lost
The predawn taxi ride to the hotel was one of those usual early morning car rides, with a few other vehicles in circulation, a soft music playing on the radio, piercing traffic lights, and everyone half asleep – except the roads were huge, the buildings were huge, everything was huge. It was humbling.
While the others were sleeping I decided to wander around the area a bit, with the main objective of finding some food, so ideally a grocery store. There were none. I felt completely lost, I found myself on a huge pedestrian street with multiple shopping centres on each side and for the life of me I couldn’t find a single supermarket. I did find a Starbucks, a KFC, and multiple street food places on the lower floors of the shopping centres. In the end I returned to the hotel with some food from KFC, and some familiar-looking stuff (among which Oreos with cute pandas on them) from a corner shop. Some of the products there I couldn’t even tell if they were sweet or salty, and the characters were written so tightly, that my translator couldn’t decipher them. We did find a supermarket eventually, it had three floors and it looked like your usual Lidl on a bigger scale, but this was only a couple of days after.
I have to say the food in general didn’t impress me. Of course, the duck was great, the other typical Chinese meals weren’t bad either, but I can see why people say that the Chinese food in Europe is adjusted to the local palate.
Cultural (anti)shocks
“Anti” in brackets, because some of these were actual shocks, but some other were just familiar things “dressed” differently. For example the Apple or the Armani store were the same (at least seen from the outside), just bigger. And some of the usual things just felt misplaced, like the little, old Catholic church surrounded by big, modern glass buildings.
By the way, Google Maps does not work in China (not with local internet connection at least), however Apple Maps does, and the strange thing is that it’s all red. The country and city names were all written in red characters, it felt somewhat creepy.
Something even creepier was the amount of cameras all around the city. The control was insane, some of the pavement was divided with fences between pedestrians going in one or the opposite direction, and also separated by fences from the traffic, so that people could only cross at designated crossings. Every couple of blocks there was a tent with police officers checking people’s documents, especially in more frequented areas. One of us ended up in a tent like this at one point without their passport on them, and the officers wouldn’t let them go until we sent a picture of the document. They couldn’t just turn around and get away from the tent, as it was a one way “street”. And in general if we accidentally chose the wrong direction we had to go around. At times I wished I had a GPS just to navigate the sidewalk.
Every time we used the metro (fairly often, given how big Beijing is) we had to go through airport-level security checks, with X-ray scanners and metal detectors. There was a poster hung up in multiple places in all metro stations saying: ‘Attention! Please untie the anti-lost wristband to avoid danger before leading your child to get on or off the train or the elevator.’ This text was accompanied by a mother and her daughter tied together by the wristband on opposing sides of a closing door. Made me think of horrible episodes.
Indeed, some of the children were kept on lead. Not the dogs however, because there weren’t any. Not even pigeons, almost no animals in the city. We only saw some cats in a cat café.
The Forbidden City
One of the main sights, and rightly so. It’s huge (as everything else in China), the area is 72 acres large. The Palace itself is supposed to have more than 8000 rooms. It was the winter residence of the Emperor, we also visited the Summer Palace, that stretched over an even larger area, located a bit outside the city centre, by a lake. The Summer Palace complex also had a part which looked a bit like Venice, namely Suzhou Street, where court ladies and the emperor could ”play at shopping” in a mock marketplace.
Both residences were built in the style of the traditional colourful Chinese architecture with an admirable attention to detail. One of such details was a line of gold wooden statues of animals on the roofs of buildings, also called roof ridge beasts, which were believed to protect from misfortune. The more of these mythological beasts a roof had, the more important the building it belonged to. You can check the details online, I prefer sharing the probably made-up folk story behind these statues told by our guide. The dragon is supposed to be the Emperor, his wife dies and he turns to Buddha to ask how he could bring her back to life. He has to marry and have children with all the other beasts lined up there, until finally gaining back his wife in the form of a phoenix.
Just like animals and clean air, nature was also very much lacking in Beijing, or rather it was concentrated in green “hubs” (mostly the sights and some parks). The Forbidden City didn’t have any green areas for the most part, except for a small garden which is just a fraction of the whole territory. This was because the cement floor is so thick that no tree could survive there, and the thickness is motivated by the desire to prevent the common people from trying to dig a tunnel to get in from the outside. The “forbidden” adjective is not by chance.
A small cultural shock was seeing a relatively big number of Chinese visitors wearing traditional clothing, especially in places like the Forbidden City, but also outside in the streets. And they didn’t receive any strange looks, like people probably would in Milan in response to a similar move.
The Great Wall
Massive, as expected. We went up in a chair-hoist and came down in bobsleighs. We only walked a couple of kilometres on the wall itself, most of it is overgrown with vegetation, so it’s closed to tourists. We had to walk up and down, it was a real workout with the pleasant temperature of 40°C, humidity ten times worse than Milan, and of course no shades, except when arriving to a tower. But apart from these minor inconveniences, seeing the Great Wall for me was maybe the main highlight of the trip. After all, walking on one of the seven wonders of the world comes with a feeling one cannot easily forget.
The Wall’s surroundings had a strange fauna. There were two typical insects, both bigger than I would have felt comfortable around. First, you had a yellow-striped long caterpillar, they were everywhere, and unfortunately many tourists stepped on them. But they were harmless. There was also another type of insect, namely cicadas, I just call them loud flying beasts. They emitted a constant deafening whirring sound echoing through the entire forest.
Shanghai
We took a last-minute trip to Shanghai, which was only possible thanks to the high-speed train which took us there in 4 hours (it’s a 1300 km journey between the two cities). There’s a joke in Hungary, it goes something like this: one time the president of China came to Hungary and he was curious to know how much time it would take to get from Budapest to a city close to the Southern border of the country. When he found out that it would take about 8 hours, he exclaimed: “Oh my goodness, Hungary is bigger than China!”
Shanghai was very Western-like, probably because of the English and French influences. Compared to Beijing, where you had a strange mix of traditional Chinese architecture and decorative motifs, mixed with plain glass buildings, Shanghai was all modern. It is also one of the world’s largest cities with a population of 24 million, although Beijing doesn’t fall much behind with its 22 million.
We saw the city from the Oriental Pearl Tower, a futuristic TV tower with pink ”belts”. The view was simply breathtaking, and seeing the tall skyscrapers paired with the endlessness of the East China Sea again made me feel small in a vast world of enormous human- and nature-made creations.
Photos, photos everywhere
There aren’t many foreign tourists, and the Chinese are still surprised when seeing people from abroad, even in Beijing and Shanghai, while especially the latter is supposed to be more international. A lot of people came to ask for selfies with us, some even took pictures without asking (this was much less appreciated). We kind of felt like celebrities with both fans and paparazzi, a little bit at unease. Some people took it a bit too far with the sneaky pictures. For example, there was a man in the metro stop who I noticed was trying to take a selfie with me in the background. But in general people were very friendly, and it felt nice to connect a bit with locals through these short interactions.
Final words
I would add both Beijing and Shanghai to the long list of places you must visit at least once in your life. And especially the Great Wall of China, you won’t regret it. After this trip, I can maybe say that China is now less Chinese to me. Apologies, this dad joke was “Made in China”, just like the wonderful memories one makes in such a culturally rich and somewhat exotic place.
I’m a third-year BAI student from Budapest. Being Italo-Hungarian I always found it challenging to define where I belong, in all the places I’ve been to I found a piece of home. Travelling and learning languages are my favourite hobbies, beside reading and writing. I have a deep passion for science and research.
