Everything today seems to be multiplying. We originally started out with six on our tour……today our tour group is now almost four times bigger, multiplying to 22 people on the tour. This meant not only multiple people, but multiple issues, personalities, and, of course, multiple times we are counted. Twenty two seems small though in comparison to the 1.2 billion people in China. While we were informed that Beijing is not the largest city in China, it sure did feel like it (but it only really has 25 million). The ever present sounds of city life abound around our hotel, from the vehicles to the people just chattering away. What a great place to people watch!
After breakfast at the hotel, we boarded a bus for a tour of the Temple of Heaven. This is a religious complex from the Qing and Ming Dynasties. We walked through a temple, then another temple, and behind that was another temple, which led to another temple. They multiplied like rabbits (which we actually saw a statue of!) Or, they multiplied like Chinese people since there are 1.2 billion of them! And, a large percentage of them were also at the temple complex, all vying for a photo of the inside of the most important temple (which, when we finally squeezed our way to the door to peer inside, had but a single chair.)
After the Temple of Heaven, we were taken to a Chinese Medicine Center where we learned the difference between Chinese medicine and western medicine. In China, western medicine is used for emergencies like surgeries, while Chinese medicine is used to keep you healthy in the first place. We all received a foot massage and then were evaluated by a Chinese medicine practitioner. He looked at our hands and our tongue, asked a few medical history questions, gave us a diagnosis, and said we could buy some herbal medicine from them for $120 USD to cure us (for 90 days). We don’t discount the benefits of Chinese medicine, but we needed to do some research to see what it is they wanted us to take, the science behind it, and whether it would interact with the western medicines already prescribed to us before we decided to add some herbs. Of course, our tour guide regaled us with stories of how past tour guests called him after taking the medicine, crying at how it saved their life.
Our guide also told us of how in the 1960’s and 70’s, Chinese people were poor and had little to eat. Instead of greeting people with, “How are you today?” their standard greeting was, “Have you eaten today?” Then, in 1978, came economic reform. Prior to that, all businesses were owned by the government. Now, 98% of all businesses are privately owned. He said that taxes today run from about 2% for the poorest people, to around 50% for the wealthy. Today, China does not have a homelessness problem, he said, and we have not seen any homeless camps in Beijing. He described the government as no longer communist, but socialist. We do see a lot of Mercedes-Benz cars and nice clothes. Just as the US is not a true capitalist country, China is not a true communist country. Our countries have a lot more in common than they do tremendous differences, at least economically. Our guide also talked about how due to the “birth control policy” (not the “one-child policy” as we often refer to it in the US), many Chinese children were adopted by American families. He said that they thought that the children would at least grow up without poverty. However, he proclaimed, they were not happy to find out that 50% of the children adopted by Americans were used solely to harvest their organs! We guess that “fake news” is not the sole domain of the US government.
Back to the tour, we enjoyed a rickshaw ride along a tree-lined canal and tried our hand at the traditional Chinese art of paper-cutting. This was done at the home of a private Chinese family. By now it was about 2 pm and Dave is learning that Chinese guides in Beijing do not believe in lunch. Fake News yet once again!! We sneaked into a small shop and quickly bought a couple of cookies to quiet Dave’s stomach so that we could hear the guide again. Of course, immediately upon rejoining the group, the guide said we are now free to explore the area on our own for the next hour. We went down some side streets and found a place that sold some kind of doughy food that the vendor assured us had beef inside. She tried to explain something to us via charades, but we were unsure what it was. We found a place to sit on some steps at tried to enjoy our lunch. After a few bites, Dave discovered what it was the chef was trying to tell us. He took a bite and scalding hot liquid came squirting out! Kathy took a few tentative bites and saw nothing but meat that was red inside. We quickly ditched the “beef” and bought a box of the cookies we had tried earlier. Yum! The two cookies were multiplied into a full lunch!
When we returned to the hotel after the tour, we decided to try Taco Bell once again. This time, Kathy had downloaded AliPay and set it up. Score! We ate our three tacos and two drinks happily. Some of the other tour members sat at a restaurant across the hall from us where the food goes around on a conveyor belt and you sit at the counter, picking off things you want to try. It looked like fun, but with Kathy’s allergies, we didn’t want to multiply the amount of Benadryl in her system, so we played it safe. Pretty sure Taco Bell doesn’t serve shellfish, even in China.