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(note: this is one of my pre-scheduled posts set to appear at 5:00am EST each morning I am in a port city. I will post follow-up information about each trip once I am able to get back on the computer.)
- see description from previous post for today's activities
Update:
This was the specific schedule for today...
Breakfast at hotel
09:45 Depart hotel for tour
10:15 - 12:00 Tour the Temple of Heaven
12:30 - 13:45 Chinese lunch at Wahaha restaurant
14:00 - 15:00 A scenic cruise across lake in Beihai Park
15:15 - 17:15 Explore hutong lanes by trishaws with home visit
17:45 - 19:00 Buffet dinner at CTS Plaza
19:30 Arrive at airport for flight CA 1525 (ETD: 20:50) for Qingdao
21:40 Arrive at Qingdao airport. Local representative will hold a "Semester at Sea" sign to meet you at arrival hall. Transfer to pier to board MV Explorer.
video of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, China
(click here for bigger version of the video)
video from a hutong lanes trishaw ride in Beijing, China
(click here for bigger version of the video)
I'm back from my Beijing trip. The group of students I had was pretty good. The only "problem" I had to deal with as trip leader was when we got off the plane in Beijing and were waiting for everyone to gather around after going to the bathroom, etc., one girl came up to me and said she was feeling sick and was getting violently ill. She asked me where the bathroom was and basically wanted me to confirm to her that we weren't going to leave her! I told her I'd come check on her when we were ready to head out and that we would figure out what to do from there. I spoke to Toni, the other professor on the trip, and we thought that it would be best to just send that girl in a cab to the hotel if she wasn't feeling any better after throwing up. Our guide told us that the cab ride would be about an hour to the hotel so I went to go find the girl and she was still feeling horrible. We told her we were going to send her back to the hotel and I offered to go back with her if no one else was, but two other students accompanied her back to the hotel too. The main group then went to the Summer Palace and then went to the hotel. Upon getting back to the hotel, I went to go check on the girl that was sick and she said she had just been sleeping and was still not feeling great, but obviously better than she was. She ended up feeling well enough the next day to join the main group.
I'm glad that was the worst of it though. In the airport in Beijing, the wife of one of the professors approached Toni and me asking if we knew if there was anything special she needed to dial to call the ship emergency numbers because she couldn't get through with the number that was listed on the emergency sheet we all got. She needed to call the ship because a girl on her flight (their flight was after ours apparently) had a seizure on the plane. I think the professor's wife is a nurse though (which for some reason I didn't know until now) so she at least knew what she was doing to some degree in helping the girl. They were just going to call the Medex emergency number to get the girl to a hospital. I later found out from my friend Emily (the nurse) that this girl had had seizures in the past so it wasn't completely out of the ordinary for her. I'm just glad I didn't have to deal with someone having a seizure - I'd be clueless.
At any rate, as for the tour we saw all the main touristy sites - the Summer Palace the first day, the Great Wall the second day, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and the Lama Temple the third day and the Temple of Heaven and a park on the last day. The main observation I have about Beijing is that every main street in Beijing is 4 lanes wide (at least)...so crossing the street feels dangerous because you have to cross 8 lanes any time you want to go to the other side of the road. Luckily I didn't have to do so very often, but when I did, I made sure I ran and looked out for oncoming cars. Cars were everywhere in Beijing too - not the bicycle culture one thinks of when one thinks of China. Our guide told us that apparently the Beijing city government WANTS people to buy more cars and there are incentives for people having cars because the government can then tax them. In other cities the opposite is true, but in Beijing, it seemed like traffic was everywhere. It took us forever to get places that probably weren't really all that far away.
The other thing of note is that hardly anyone speaks English - our tour guides were 26 and 24 and it seems to be the trend that people under 30 (some of them at least) are semi-fluent, but by and large, I know people had trouble communicating. To go anywhere in a taxi, you needed to have the destination written in Mandarin so that the drivers could understand it so our guides helped many people who wanted to go various places. The guides were really good though and their English was perfect. I benefited from being trip leader because when we got to the hotel check-in desk, our guide gave me a fan (whether it was from her tour company or the hotel, I'm not sure), but this reflects the whole Chinese gift-giving culture as a means of networking. I also got a book about Beijing that no one from our group claimed (we had a group photo taken in Tiananmen Square and people could put in requests for a copy of the photo and a book) - the guides took a count of who wanted a book and photo and apparently when it came time to give them out and collect the money, they still had one book left. I offered to buy it from them, but they told me it was a gift for me so I got a free book and photo out of being trip leader!
I think that's all for now. I'll try to update this more later. I just uploaded my photos from the trip so check them out!
