::A Geek in Korea::

Part of my contracy negotiation for my contract was the settlement of my bonus. My manager tried to tell me that since I was resigning my contract, my bonus was deffered to the end of my next contract. I pointed out that signing a new contract doesn’t cancel out honoring their prior obligations, so I would be getting a bonus at the end of each contract.

The original contract specified I would get a bonus payment roughly equal to the cost of airfare to Korea. Since I was in the country, this was basically just a nice gesture, as I didn’t spend anything to get here. I got to pocket all the money. The bonus would be paid in two parts, one at the beginning, and one at the end of the contract. This second payment was what I was fighting to receive.

The first part of the "bonus" never physically changed hands, as the amount I was receiving was exactly equal to the amount I needed to pay as a security payment for my apartment to the school. Rather than get paid an amount, then immediately hand it right back to them as a security deposit, the previous manager called it even, and didn’t pay me anything up front. If I left at the end of the contract with the house in one piece with all the bills paid, I’d get the entire bonus amount, since he wouldn’t need to keep my security deposit.

This made sense to me, but when I got to the end of the contract and resigned, I didn’t get that second payment I expected. They kept my security deposit, as they should have since I was staying at their place, but I didn’t get the money that made up the second half of my "airplane bonus" that I was owed.  When i talked to the new manager about this, he promised to call the old manager and sort it out.

I started pressing him about this today with the help of my wife. We were even willing to get in contact with the old manager ourselves to see what he would say. The current manager got around to calling the man he needed to contact, and I got to speak to him on the phone to sort everything out. The man agreed with everything I had said, but suggested that since there was no receipt proving I had paid my security deposit, or had gotten my first "bonus", they had a problem. Nothing got done in the school without a papertrail that showed where all the money had went, so the "calling it even" we did as we signed the contract had caused a bit of a disrupture in the accounting state of affairs.
 
The compromise he said, was to get paid the entire amount, both bonuses at the same time to honor the contract, then immediately hand one bonus back and say, "This is my security deposit". That way everyone would have a paper, or some sort of proof that business was done instead of a gentleman’s agreement. This idea was good enough for my mananger, who finally agreed to pay my bonus after weeks of stalling on the issue. So, now, as soon as their is payment into my account to honor my bonus, I’ll send half of it back as a security deposit. Then, when I leave the school, they’ll send the rest back to me when they see I paid all my bills.

I hate bueraucracy.

We’ve recombined our classes for this new term, mixing students from different teachers at the same level depending on how they scored on their placement tests. I’ve got some of my own students, but I’ve also got returning students as well. It’s very interesting to see how the teaching styles of the other teachers has affected the students as I start to break them into how I teach a class. We all have unique styles as teachers, focusing on things we think are more important in the same text books, and the students personalities reflect this. You can see how the teacher they previously affected their attitudes and class room behaviors.

I had a hard time getting one of my students to participate in class. I was giving out stickers for people that answer questions, do their homework, and win games. One boy started to become more withdrawn as soon as I did this, instead of trying harder. I was trying to show him that the less he spoke, the less rewards he got. I didn’t yell or punish him, only let him fall behind in rewards. Soon he was quietly sobbing to himself, and refusing to read, speak, or do any work.

When questioned about his behavior, he said I wasn’t giving him enough rewards, so he thought he was doing a bad job. I wasn’t giving him any rewards because he wasn’t doing anything at all. He hadn’t gotten punished, he was only not getting rewarded. He needed to prove to me he was willing to work before I was going to give him something. The teacher he had before me was overly generous, so the minimal effort was rewarded more than what students that work hard get in my class. This student thought that I disliked the class because I gave out only one sticker per homework, instead of dozens per day. I basically won’t change, as I won’t ruin my reward system to appease a student that expects to get something for nothing.

Another student wanted to answer a question, but didn’t know the answer in English. He told me in Korean, which he shouldn’t do, but since he got the question correct, I told him he did a decent job of getting it correct, translated his answer back into English, and helped other students. When students need to use foreign words to explain something they don’t have the vocabulary for, I try to understand the best I can in Korean, and let them know if they are on the right track or not. I might even give a hint if I can. I don’t let them just answer in Korean. I don’t try to ignore the fact that they know what I am saying, but just can’t share it without some help. I’m often a victim of having a tiny vocabulary in a second language, and I can’t stand it when people don’t try to work with me. I also respond to complaints I hear in class, shoot down rumors, or laugh at jokes I hear in class when students speak to each other thinking I won’t know.

One of my students was fairly shocked that I knew enough to understand him sometimes, didn’t yell at him, and was generally lenient on helpful Korean in class. The teacher he had before was much more strict and refused to respond to any Korean answers in class. I actually think I might be a little too permissive, but there are times when it saves time. I wonder if some of my old students are struggling to keep themselves from speaking only English in their new classes?

I’ve got a kindergarten class once more, three times a week for fifty minutes. The mothers wait outside, peering in the windows, but I have yet to have one student to see their mothers or cry in my class. We’ve had two classes together so far, but already the class has had some memorable moments. I really enjoy hearing the little comments the kids say to each other in Korean as we work.

Today was the first project we really did where I let the kids handle some coloring and cutting things with scissors. We were making puppets with paper and some taped on chopsticks. The students would then act out the words, "Hello," and "Goodbye" with these puppets, even if they were too shy to talk to me. I showed the students what to do, then set to the task of coloring my own puppets, helping students work, and keeping order, while trying to get the students to learn their new basic vocabulary.

One of the students couldn’t remember the word, "Hello," so he started to scratch his head in a confused manner when I asked him a question. The boy next to him said, "Hey, you look like a monkey!" The boy then started acting like a monkey, making sounds, scratching himself, and doing a decent monkey impression. As the class wore on, the boy would turn to the confused boy and say, "Hey, act like a monkey again!" The boy would comply, and eventually got so into his acting that he fell off his chair.

The boy that asked him to do the impersonation said, "Ah, you must be a five year old boy if you fall off a chair. Us six year old boys don’t find that funny. Am I right?" He looked around the table to see if any other six year old would agree with him. No one else was really paying attention, but the monkey-boy had been stung, and looked for his chance at revenge.

When I got around to helping the students cut things out with their scissors, the "mature six year old" boy was trailing behind due to all of this excess conversation and needed some help so he could finish with the rest of the class.  I took his paper and helped him cut out one of the puppets to speed him along. The monkey-boy then looked over at the "mature" boy and said, "Ah, you must be five years old. Us six year old students don’t need help cutting our papers."

Zing!

The Great Wall of China is around 6000 kilometers long. I visited a very, very tiny portion of this gigantic wall, but came away amazed.  I had never imagined in my entire life that I would be able to say, "I visited the Great Wall of China." Even when I decided to live in Asia with the specific goal of traveling as much as possible, I still never expected to see something so old, so long, and so well known world wide. Even when I was only three hours away by plane, it still seemed so large and far away that it was difficult imagine ever getting there.

We took our tour bus to a drop off point near the cable car lift. This place had turned into a tourist area, complete with a camel to ride on. The tour guide mentioned that if you wanted to ride the camel, the handlers would tell you one price, then get you on top of the camel before telling you the "actual" price of the ride. You could come down of the smelly animal once you agreed to pay the entire price. Seems like a fairly good way to make some money as the camels looked fairly foul looking to be around. That sort of scam only works once per tourist bus though.

We got up the mountain with no problems thanks to the cable car lift. In windier weather, the lift doesn’t run, so you had a long walk up to the wall, as well as the climb back down. We spent the time taking pictures instead. We got to the top of the mountain only to be told that the lift ticket didn’t include the price of admission into the wall itself. They posted the sign at the top of the mountain….why? Anyway, our tour was all expenses paid, so the guide had taken care of us already.

The view from the Great Wall was incredible. The winter weather, snow, and clouds hinted at the distances involved with everything, yet kept things mysterious at the same time. I took some huge pictures that will probably be my computer wallpaper for as long as I own a computer. The wall was extremely steep at places, with near vertical areas covered in ice in places. One slip would have sent dozens of people tumbling down. The places was crowded with tourists from dozens of different places. Every group was speaking a different language, snapping pictures, and gasping at the view.

We got to the top of the section we were at only to be surrounded by people selling merchandise at inflated prices! Talk about ruining the atmosphere! People hauled their stuff all the way up the mountain to sell things at prices 100 times the usual cost.  If I hauled the stuff up the mountain I’d charge a premium too. We decided against anything when we realized that even the smallest trinket would have cost us the remaining money we had in our pockets.

We turned around, went back down snapping pictures as we went. Picture with my wife. Picture with me. Picture of the landscape. Wash, rinse, repeat as we went down the steps. We even got a few together when we could  get someone to take a picture of us. There were so  many people walking that it was often hard to get a picture with only one person in the shot however.

Every time I thought I got a sense of scale and magnitude of this work, I was blown away to see another part of the wall hiding behind another mountain. The Wall went in the most amazing places. The mountains weren’t exactly friendly to begin with, I can’t imagine the effort it demanded to put a gigantic wall on top of it. Parts of building a wall seemed almost redundant anyway, as the mountain peaks were already pretty hard to climb anyway.

The wind was so cold it was hard to believe that people to stayed on the wall as guards their entire lives. People worked, lived, got married, and died all while living at the place I was standing, and I could barely take my hands out of my gloves to snap a few pictures. Given enough time, enough people, and total power, people can accomplish (or be forced to do) some very impressive things.

This chance to see the Great Wall was why I went to China. Yet when we took the cable car down to the tourist area only after thirty minutes, I was still happy. It’s a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I’ve got pictures to help me recall what it was like, but the feeling of standing on the Wall was in itself an experience I’ll cherish. I’ve been on the largest structure created by mankind in our entire collective known history. Words kind of fail you when you try to put it in perspective, so I’d recommend anyone, and everyone, to visit this wonderful place whenever you can. It might seem like a distant destination, but something you can’t appreciate unless you go there.

I’ve seen the Great Wall of China, and it was truly a great thing.

After the third day of Chinese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (with the exception of a trip to a North Korean restaurant), I was getting pretty tired of the Chinese cuisine. I had the same thing for nearly every meal, and every item on every table was covered in lard. Even the peanuts they served as a side dish were covered in oil. Jasmine tea helps cut down oil in a body’s system, but when the oil levels are hundreds of times higher than they should be, something is going to give. If you have any chance to eat something not drenched in oil, you double up on it.

We had breakfast on the third day of the trip as usual in the hotel buffet restaurant. We took extra yogurt packs and two boiled eggs to our table as we had in the previous days, intending to supplement our oily diet with something a little healthier. We didn’t have the chance to choose our restaurants because the tour, and we never had a chance to go shopping for something we might want.

I went out to go to our room to pick up something I had forgotten, and when I returned to the restaurant, I met my wife as she was heading to the bathroom. She passed me her bag, and we had a chat about where we were going to meet up after she got out of the restroom. I was going to wait outside the restaurant for her to show up.

No sooner had I stepped out of the restaurant than a security guard/waiter fellow came up to me and told me to return the yogurt I had "stolen". There was no sign saying anything about taking food out of the buffet. We had done this the previous two days without incident, but this man wanted to search my bag for a cup of yogurt. I looked at him like he was insane, then I remembered that if I was in charge of a buffet’s security, embarrassing a foreigner would probably be the highlight of my day. I asked him if he wanted the yogurt personally, or if I should return it to the tray I got it from. He said I had to go back to the tray, aka, "The long walk of shame". It’s not like this guy had a gun or something. He was a waiter that could speak enough English to tell me to put something back. I wasn’t intimidated, and sort of wondered how important a yogurt was to someone that was willing to cause an confrontational incident about it. He came off very hostile about something so small. However, I was in China, so I did what he asked.

I returned the yogurt and walked out to meet my wife. We still had the extra hard boiled eggs in her bag, and I have expected the security guard to try to stop me again in a quest to further "shame" me. She said that she had put the yogurt in her bag as she was walking out, instead of at the table like we had done the previous day. I guess this had caused the high alert status.

After breakfast, we got onto the bus, and I started to have horrible stomach pain. The oily food was really starting to have a conflict with my stomach. I was lucky, as we only had to go across the city to get to our first "stop", which was a Chinese "medical" university.  I ran to the bathroom and vomited a few times and came into the group tour room a little late.

The scam at this tourist trap was to put a group of people in a room with a "doctor", or just a person wearing a white coat for all I know, and tell people about the benefits of Chinese acupuncture and herbal remedies. Then, after you get people to drop their defenses, you bring in people that "examine" you, and make suggestions about medicine you can buy at that very hospital to cure you.

The examination was an older Chinese doctor, wearing a white coat, touching your wrist, asking your age, and looking at your tongue. From that information, he would ask a few questions, then make a diagnosis.  He asked me, through a translator, if my hands and feet, "get cold." I honestly didn’t know how to answer that question, so I told them they did. He then declared I had a completely healthy system, but needed to exercise more. I had just gotten done vomiting and being sick in the bathroom, but according to him I was in perfect health. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been to the doctor and not had a negative diagnosis, so I was happy, even if it was totally bogus.

My wife, according to the "doctor" had kidney problems that could be fixed with two courses of medicine that would cost us around ~$400 USD total. Some of what the man had said guessed was accurate, as he stated he thought she might have a hereditary condition.  My wife said that her mother did actually have the thing he had talked about, so maybe he wasn’t a complete scam artist. We waited to return to Korea to buy some medicine just in case. I’ve heard some horror stories about Chinese medicine purchased at these types of places.

From there was a stop at a state owned jade store. They tried to build a sort of museum style atmosphere with the introduction about jade and a tour guide, but they quickly dumped us off in a gigantic jade shop. The quality of the stuff was really bad, and we had to kill over forty minutes walking around looking at terrible quality jade. I did end up buying a name card that had my name phonetically written in Chinese characters. It’s relatively close to the sound of my name, but people in Korea and China pronounce the name a little differently. The three characters mean "horse", "special", and "to make perfect".  The tour guide, and a few other people I showed the card to gave me a generally positive opinion of the characters.

This was the last tourist trap we were taken to the entire trip. The trip was about get a lot better. The next stop was the Great Wall of China.

As the group got back to the hotel after the opera, we had a discussion with some of the other people on the tour. We decided that since we had been taken to so many crappy places in the day, we needed to go out to see something for ourselves. We grabbed a few of the revolutionary conspirators and headed out of the hotel to see the nearby Beijing train station.

I brought my GPS along, just in case, but the Beijing train station was one of those "can’t miss" sorts of buildings. It’s easily four or five times larger than any train station I’ve ever been in, and Seoul Station and some of the European train stations I’ve visited weren’t exactly small either. This thing dwarfed everything short of airport hangers in terms of scale. It was absolutely enormous.

We didn’t exactly know the protocol. They scanned luggage as you walked in the building, but we passed through security by simply waving our hands in a "I don’t know" gesture. They didn’t demand to see our tickets, since we had none, and we walked around. We went to "Store number 8" which had exactly the same things for sale as all the other stores in the building, but was located at the end of the hallway we eventually walked down. Seeing as our options didn’t change the more we explored, we went inside.

The people we were with looked into buying Chinese jelly candy, while I walked around. I did however find some things picture worthy:

 

Who in their right mind would buy that candy? Anyway, we eventually got the transaction completed despite a lot of communication problems on both sides. The Korean people my wife and I had went with didn’t know if they were buying candy or soap, which turned into a hilarious set of pantomimes that baffled the cashier. The cashiers were under the impression that  by speaking louder, Chinese was easier to understand.  My wife would also try to clarify things in English, which they also didn’t understand. They would just speak louder in response to anything we did. It was hilarious and frustrating at the same time.

The people waiting at the train station had brought blankets and were sleeping on the floor. A policeman with a golf cart would roll around, almost drive over them, then stop and pull out a bullhorn. He’d yell at them, then get out, make threatening gestures, and reach for something on his belt clip that looked like a night stick. The people would get up long enough for him to drive off, then set their stuff down, go back to sleep, and he would move on the next set of people, threaten to beat them…etc. People did eventually move out of the area as we walked through it. They were sizing up the people I was with like fresh meat, so we decided we had enough adventure for the night and headed back to the hotel.

Of all the things I had heard about on my trip’s itinerary, the "Chinese Opera" was my least favorite. I have some sort of mental breakdown when exposed to Chinese music. I’m not talking about nice instrumental music, but specifically anything involving Chinese music with vocal elements. I simply react with a flight reflex, as if my ears were going to start bleeding at any moment. It’s just not something I want to be around.

After the bus ride of terror, I had no choice but to go see the "Chinese Opera". This show was to take place at the same theater we had seen the acrobat show the previous day. We were ushered into a smaller room on the second floor, and we had to grab seats where ever there was room. One side of the room had a scrolling LED sign with a brief synopsis of what was going to occur in English. The other side of the room had a sign in Chinese. My tour was Korean, yet I was the only person that knew what was happening. Brilliant.

We sat for a while, but eventually a pudgy Chinese man dressed like a flamboyant Chef Boyardee impersonator came into the room and started screaming Chinese. I knew from the synopsis, this guy was supposed to be visiting someone at an inn. Another person arrives, and the two start dancing around in a sort of "Kung-fu" show. The idea was that the lights of the inn were out, and the two were fighting blind in the dark, yet we could see what was happening. They were supposed to be feeling their way around the stage, listening and swinging their swords trying to hit each other without seeing each other.

Except, they COULD see each other, and we could see them. It was like trying to watch two extremely near-sighted people fight. It was a little comical, as they would sit on a table and move just as the other person reached for them. The timing of some of the prop "sword" battles meant they were swinging at each other without hitting one another, which took skill. This was a mostly non-verbal performance, thankfully, so we could be spared the problem of listening to the actors speak Chinese. When it was over, people clapped politely.

The next "show" was another thing entirely. This act was a god blessing Earth by singing a song that caused a rain of "flowers". This had the joy of both interpretive dance and full on Chinese singing. The woman came out wearing a traditional Chinese robe with really long sleeves. She would dance around, singing at the top of her lungs, and then twirl the sleeves as she sang about virtues or something. The music was provided by a group of musicians that sat in the first row of the theater and played Chinese instruments way too loud. The music itself was like rubbing a cat on a washing board, but it also was as loud as possible in the tiny room. People were covering their ears because of the music, and I actually took out my ear plugs to keep myself from having a headache. It was beyond awful.

I have a tremendously high tolerance for "absolute complete bullshit", but the Chinese Opera at that point went far, far, FAR beyond anything I was willing to try to understand. At one point, I started to write down a transcript of the song she was singing. This is an approximation of what I sat and listened to for 10 minutes:

"AH-AHHHHHHHHHHH-WEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-WEEEEEEEEEEEE OHHHHHHHHHHHHH-OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, OHHHHHH-AH-WEEEEEE-AH-WE, SAAAAAAAAAA RAAAAAAAAAAA NAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, OHHHHHHHHHHH! OHHHHHHHHH! SHI-NAAAAAAAAA!"

It went on like this, over and over, and at one point, I think she sang the A-B-Cs, except something more like "AHHHHHH BAAAAAAAAHHH CAHHHHHH!" for a little while. It was, by far, the worst thing I have ever been physically present to witness, and I’ve been to middle school dances in the 90’s during the popularity of Vanilla Ice. Consider that for a moment.

This singer is responsible for the torture of hundreds of tourists. I don’t normally walk out on people trying to entertain me, but even people that had traveled to China specifically to see the opera as a highlight of their trip walked out. That’s got to be harsh. The third show, which I didn’t stick around to see for sanity reasons, was a "Monkey King" messes with people show. It was supposed to be action packed, but at that point my brain was a puddle of mush and I couldn’t do anything but crawl out the door to the relative sanity of the theater outside. 90% of the tour was already waiting for me, as they didn’t have the benefit of ear plugs and probably were in more pain than I was.

All good will about the trip’s planning for the day had dissolved. The people that had wanted to go to the opera were curled in a fetal position covering their ears when we got back to the bus saying, "We really regret what we did. Sorry." The tour guide even said, "That show wasn’t very good, I’ll sing something else for you to cheer everyone up." We just wanted to be left alone for our ear drums to recover.

After the shopping trip, we went to another Chinese restaurant. In an offer to quell the source of the revolution, AKA, that uppity foreigner with the Korean wife, the Chinese guide bought me my own bottle of extra strong Chinese alcohol. This was 56% alcohol, so 112 proof? It smelled bad enough that an open shot left on a table would have people gagging next to you. The bottle was a green that is usually reserved for poison. He was trying to get me drunk so I wouldn’t bring about any more suggestions to the tour plan.

No matter the consequences, I did drink the alcohol. One shot was usually accompanied by about a cup of jasmine tea to get my taste buds back to functional levels. Between the alcohol, the tea, and the meal, I injested a lot of water. I had also finished an entire 500 ml water bottle, and another plastic water bottle between all the stops we made at the different locations. I was keeping hydrated to stave off a hangover from dehydration. It turned out, I was a little too hydrated for the ride back into town.

I had gone to the bathroom once during the meal. When we got back into the bus, I was thinking we were going on another short trip to the Chinese “Opera house” I had so desperately wanted to avoid. It turns out it was over an hours ride through heavy traffic to this Opera house. Bumpy roads. Rain. Suddenly, the urge to urinate burned in my bladder so fiercely that I was afraid. I wasn’t going to make it off the bus with clean pants without a miracle.

I did my Zen “There is no need for a bathroom” meditation I reserve for the most dire of times. While it cut my urges a little, the bumpy traffic made me want to let go. It was a mental and physical struggle. I looked at my options.

1. Piss all over myself and have everyone see: Last resort
2. Piss on someone else: Only moderately better, still to be avoided
3. Somehow hold it: Impossible
4. Somehow piss secretly while still on the bus, smuggle out the piss, and let no one know: Best course of action

I alerted my wife to my situation. She offered a little bit of hope by pulling out the empty water bottle the bus driver had give us at the beginning of the day. A small bottle, with a small neck. How would I possibly use this without a disaster occuring? I thought that this was as good as I was going to get, but then I remembered my own 500 ml camping water bottle with a large neck. It’s almost as if it was made for peeing in.

I scouted out a location in the back of the bus. There was a family two rows up from the back of the bus, but no one else behind them. We were second to last. I moved my seat the end of the bus, which unfortunately sat in plain view of the large windows on the bus. I hurried to cover the windows, then went to work thinking about the physics and logistics of the undertaking I was about to do. I had gotten the attention of the mother of the family as I walked pass, but she turned and looked away as I started clawing at the windows for some privacy. Who knows what she was thinking about what I was going to do.
My wife, bless her heart, went to the back of the bus with her large trench coat. Instead of lone pervert in the back of the bus, she offered some privacy for me as she blocked the view of the mother with her jacket. The woman kept her head turned around, facing the front of the bus thinking I was probably doing something entirely different with her in the back of the bus. Either way, I still looked bad, but this was an emergency. There was no time to waste.
I never had been in a situation where I could quanitatively measure the output of what I usually do in the privacy of a bathroom before. I think that since I filled up the entire 500 ml camping bottle, I had proof that I was clearly a desperate man. In fact, I could have filled up the second bottle I had with me at the time, but luckily I had released enough pressure that I was able to wait until I reached the Chinese Opera house. I was actually strangely proud of my accomplishment, as I filled the entire bottle.

I ran to the bathroom at the Opera house, disposed of my evidence, then went to work cleaning the bottle. It will be forever tainted, no matter how many times I wash and sterilize it. The smell, oddly enough, wasn’t the ammonia smell of urine at all, but the harsh tequila smell of hard alcohol. Whatever it was that the Chinese tour guide had bought me, it passed through my system completely untouched. It was as potent as piss as it was as alcohol. I probably sterilized my bottle at the same time as I filled it up. Awful, nasty Chinese alcohol. I always regret drinking the vile stuff, but it’s probably for the best I wasn’t entirely sober for the Chinese Opera that would follow.

Whenever you have a subsidized tour, part of the money the tour company loses to the cheap airfare is made up by forcing you to go to tourist traps. You are on a bus in a foriegn country, don’t know where you are, and they drop you off saying,
“This is a real nice place. Let’s go inside!” You can’t help feel a little annoyed, but at the same time, what else are you going to do?

We had already done the subsidized tour in Thailand, so after our first day full of actual sights and sounds of China, my wife and I expected the hard sell to come. We went to a great park early in the morning. Elderly people were exercising, doing ballroom dancing outside, playing “hacky sack” with a bean bag with a trailing feather tail, and other activities. After we left there, we got herded back on the bus and taken to a tea store.

We were told on good authority by a Chinese teacher in Korea that this is not where you want to go to get tea in China. The overpriced stuff they sell to tourist isn’t what Chinese people drink, so why pay a premium price for it? My wife and I decided to walk out of the tea shop and head out for a nearby park that had huge totem poles you could see from the street. We didn’t know how long to stay out of the tea shop, since they never give you a time to meet back on the bus. Since we didn’t want to be left behind, we came back a little early.

Our guide, who surely got paid based on the number of tourists he delivered at the places, urged us to go in before they were finished to be included in the “count”. We sat in a small room, got told about the health properties of different teas, then had a few sips of the different items they offered. They wanted ~$150 USD for a few bags of tea. Yeah, sure. That’s a fair price for tea.

We were then taken to a silk blanket factory. Here we did want to purchase something for our relatives back in Korea. We got to see them roll the silk, touched the nearly made blankets as they were streched, and saw the result. We paid around ~$100 USD total for two 100% pure silk comforters. We later saw the same items, duty free, for ~$220 USD each. We were happy with this particular distraction to our tour.

From there we went to a North Korean restaurant in Beijing. I’ve seen this restaurant on television before, but it was strange to be there in person. The waitresses are all young, polite women from North Korea. You are warned not to talk about politics or anything other than restaurant small talk. The women can’t answer anything about their lives back home, and if they violate any of their rules of employment, not only do they get punished, their families at home are punished too. This was enough to keep everyone on their best behavior.The food was delicious, the service was outstanding, and everyone was happy when they waitresses started to sing and play music for us.

From there we went to an ice park. Well, it was more like a giant freezer with some ice statues. They had an ice slide you rode down with a piece of fabric under your coat. It was too dark to take nice pictures, and more of a thing for very small children. I went down the slide several times.

From there, we went to a pearl factory. This was the most annoying tourist trap, as it was before our dinner, out of our way, and really over priced. The pearls were artificial, as they took oysters, inserted sand, then harvested the pearls. They opened an oyster for us to see how they dig them out. Someone asked if they could eat the shellfish after they were done. I actually guessed someone would say it before I entered the building.The jewerly was absolute overpriced junk. No one bought anything.

As we were waiting to go, some people that had seen us walk out of the tea shop started talking about what we did. They wondered if we could get out of going to some of these tourist traps by complaining. They wanted to know why we were interested in going to other places off the tour. We told them that our Chinese friend had recommended going to a Chinese supermarket and simply buying good tea there. It would be cheaper, better quality, and also authentic. Everyone loved this idea, and it spread to the rest of the group slowly. No one was willing to bring up a deviation to the tour to the guide however. This would be a serious breach of the nun-chi group dynamics. They actually wanted to elect me as the person to bring it up, but I had to point out I was the person least likely to accurately articulate their concerns.

Eventually, smelling the revolt in progress, our tour guide did come over and the idea was brought up. He, of course, tried to give lots of different reasons why letting a group of people that couldn’t speak a word of Chinese into a supermarket a bad idea. It was too late, and we had already been to three tourist shops today. We got him to conceed a twenty minute shopping spree at a local store.

We set off from the bus once dumped in the parking lot. We headed to the first level of the store and approached the store map. We knew they had food, but we didn’t know how to get the the basement where the food was. The escalator only went up from the first floor, not down to the basement. We grabbed a person and started doing wild pantomimes involving stairs and flailing arms. She held up a shirt and thought we wanted to buy it. Progress was not being made.

We ditched the woman, and the sign, and ran around looking for the stairs. Eventually we found our way down, and got shopping. We purchased several kinds of tea, some snacks, and some fruit. They had TANG at the Chinese supermarket. Why can’t I get no TANG ’round here?

We ran back to the bus, and most of us made it in the time alotted. Some of the people in our revolution dawdled a little too long, but only the people that doggedly refused to get off the bus would have complained anyway. Everyone had a good time shopping. We picked up tea at price so mind bogglingly cheap I can’t imagine how bad the people that had fallen for the tea shop scam had felt.

My wife and I went to China via a Korean tour company. We arranged for the flight and the entire vacation on the “no tip/no option” plan, meaning we didn’t have a choice where we were going, but we didn’t have to pay for anything extra once we arrived. Prices for English tours were basically double what we were paying, so I was happy just to have a simple translation and listen to what I could understand from the guide.

We left our house to catch a bus at 4:45 AM at the local bus stop. Once we arrived at the airport we met the tour guide. We were assigned teams, and this determined the buses we would be riding in for the rest of the trip. Our first sight was Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. That’s a fantastic way to start out any trip.

We took pictures of everything, but the sense of scale on the Chinese buildings dwarfs anything I’ve ever seen in Korea. Bulgoksa temple, a rather large temple in Korea, could fit in a corner of one of the large entrances of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was absolutely enormous beyond anything I can describe easily. 2 kilometers of dedicated buildings for the Emperors.

One of the coolest things the tour guide mentioned was the engineering they did to try to protect the Emperor. Not only did they create a giant moat and walls along the entire structure, they also fortified the ground underneath the most important buildings. The places where the Emperor would spend the majority of his time had been set atop stone brick laid into the earth 10 to 30 meters thick. That way, entrance was blocked for people that would attempt to dig under the walls instead of going over them.

After we went to the Forbidden City, we went on a rickshaw tour of the surrounding neighborhood. We had a train of about fifteen rickshaws going through the neighborhood with their bells and brakes making noises as we squeezed past cars and navigated around construction blockages. The neighborhood we went through was comparable to a poorer area of Daejeon. The people had their own houses, and maybe a car, but no toilets. They used a communal public toilet building. The small, low buildings were all unpainted and very dull looking, with the air pollution giving everything a dull sooty grey look. They couldn’t be taller than the Forbidden City. The tour guide said that the proximity of the Forbidden City meant that not long ago these people were considered “rich” by Chinese standards. Most of the apartments and buildings we saw in the city were unpainted, stained by heavy pollution, and not all that nice looking. The architecture was taking a turn for the more modern as foreign companies started building in a highly compressed area in anticipation for the 2008 Olympics.

The city was definitely trying to improve it’s image in anticipation for the Olympics, but aside from it’s historical buildings, nothing was all that beautiful architecturally. I’d say the prettiest modern building was the Korean LG company building, simply because it was finished and didn’t look dirty from a distance. After the rickshaw, we went to an acrobatics show.

This was basically the same show I had seen in Expo a few months ago, albeit on a larger scale. This wasn’t a disappointment, as they had new tricks I hadn’t seen yet, and the show was still impressive no matter how many times you see it. After the show we arrived at our nice hotel and collapsed in our room before even attempting to do anything else except get ready for the next day.