The Mom Chronicles: Beijing

After I arrived in Beijing, I booked it to the Laos Embassy to get a visa because in February I am meeting Carolyn in Cambodia and we are making our way through some of the SE Asian countries. The security at the Laos embassy was very small compared to the U.S. Embassy in Shenyang. I just showed my passport and walked into the Embassy, filled out some paperwork, paid the fee and was given a slip to come back to reclaim my passport 2 days later.

Compared to what my friend, Alec, had to undergo for an Australian visa, it was effortless. I met up with Alec for lunch to catch up, as he is temporarily living in Beijing for a job. He is from Jilin, and his English is superb. He got a scholarship to study in England, which is very competitive. The program doesn't start until later this year, so he was planning to go visit his friend in Australia. He had to fill out a bunch of paperwork and go for an interview. Even though, he explicitly told the government officials that he already had plans to go to England and was only going to Australia to travel and had no plans of staying, they told him that he still might decide to stay and not go because the cost of living is cheaper than in England.

I felt bad that it was relatively easy for me as a US citizen to have the opportunity to visit almost any place that I want to, whereas he had to go through a whole ordeal, including flying to Shanghai for an interview, and still got rejected.

Anyhoo, I met up with my mom later that day and was very excited to see her. That evening, we walked to a row of night snack stands. They had everything from scorpion kabobs to stinky tofu (my fav!), called chou dofu (臭豆腐). Stinky tofu doesn't exactly elicit a mouth watering response, but its comparable to stinky (expensive) cheese.

On a side note, the character for stinky has an interesting explanation. The top character of chou is zi (自) which means "self" and the bottom part is da (大) which means big. So put them together and you have "big self" or someone who is arrogant: 自大. So no one likes anything stinky (besides stinky tofu and cheese) and no one like anyone who is arrogant, thus the character for stinky is combined from arrogant: 臭.

Eating a fried eggplant kabobMom signing the word deer and happens to be eating some too!

The next few days involved seeing all of the major sites of Beijing. We went to Tiananmen, Temple of Heaven Park, the Forbidden City, Lama Temple, a Tibetan temple and some other places. Everyday was cold, I am a wimp when it comes to negative Celsius weather, so I was always bundled up. At least our hotel room had heat!

On new year's day eve, we ended up joining this Chinese tour, which ended up being a disaster. I was warned beforehand about hokey tours, but I thought that it might have been legit. We went to the Great Wall, which was great but then they schlepped us around to places that tried to sell us jade, Chinese medicines and the deal was that the tour operators gets money from bringing in tour groups and makes a commission off anything that is purchased. C'est la vie. At least we made it out to the Great Wall.

New year's eve, we went out for a wonderful dinner. My mom was SO excited to see frog on the menu and she hadn't eaten it in ages. I'm not quite sure where I stand on eating amphibians, but I am sure that I wanted my mom to be happy, so we ordered it and I managed to eat a leg or 2. Beijing photos are here. Our chilly adventures continued the next day with a flight to Dalian...