- Dad and I enjoyed a large breakfast at the hotel and then tried to find a place for laundry (where they weight it, not charge you by item). Impossible in this town and we ended up just leaving his sports coat to be dry-cleaned.
- Hired a private driver to go to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China, even though that’s the section I’ve already seen. Raining on the way there, but luckily it was relatively dry when we were on the wall and the clouds looked beautiful sitting between the mountains and the Wall (although it meant you couldn’t see the views)
- Took the cable car to tower 14
- Dad got his pictures on the wall and we walked from tower 14 to tower 16 to get some different views before taking the cable car back down
- Drove back to Beijing which took three hours in traffic (more details below)
- Quickly change for services and try to find a taxi in the rain, no luck! Back to the hotel and get directions to the subway where we change lines three times (more details below)
- Finally find the building for services at 7:15pm, almost two hours after leaving the hotel (services started at 5:45pm but were still going). When services ended at 8pm, we talked to some people to find out if they know a good place for Peking duck (somewhat sacrilegious given it was Yom Kippur but we hadn’t eaten since lunch and didn’t want to fast on our last day). A nice couple from Houston (Charlie and Carla) ended up driving us there (with their private driver). Traffic was so bad we got out and walk the last 200 meters.
- Ordered the duck and they told us it would take 50 minutes! So we got an eggplant dish and some local beer to hold us over. Duck arrived at 9:45pm, so much meat and lots of scrumptious duck pancakes.
- Taxi back to the hotel, takes 20 minutes as there is no traffic; we were so close the whole time
China breakdown: The drive back to Beijing was horrible once we reached the city. The traffic was at a standstill and it took us an hour to go the last 5kms. We watched some movies on the flip and looked at some of my photos to occupy the time. Since it was getting late, dad called a duck restaurant we’d heard about to make a reservation for dinner. He was trying to speak Chinese over the phone and I started quietly laughing, but when he said he name was Bob and had to repeat it four times, I just broke down. I was laughing so hard I was crying, but I think I was crying too, not at dad, but at everything. After 2.5 weeks we are still having tons of trouble communicating, we were stuck in traffic in the rain not going anywhere, and all the memories of our trip just flooded back to me. One crazy adventure. It took me a good few minutes to finally calm down.
That car ride was followed by a two hour journey to the synagogue less than 30 minutes later. We didn’t get back to the hotel until 5pm, so we quickly changed and left for Yom Kippur services. Our 20 minute attempt to find a taxi on the main road ended in vain and we walked back to the hotel to see if they could order one. The wait would be 30 minutes, so got directions to the subway. It looked like we could go one stop, change to another line for one stop and then change again for two stops. However, it turned out that the line we wanted to take is for the airport and costs (25 Yuan instead of 2), so we had to continue on a different line three stops and change to line 10 for three stops. I kept pushing on since I knew dad really wanted to go to services but once we got off the subway, we had to figure out how to walk to the synagogue since the traffic is horrible and there are no available taxis. Luckily the hotel had printed a map of the area and we were able to find the building. However, since services were in a room, not at an actual synagogue, we had no idea how to find the room we wanted. The address wasn’t coming up on my iPod and we only had the building location on our map. Dad saw a woman sitting in the security room with a laptop, so he tried to explain that we wanted to borrow it. I quickly found the address and showed it to the woman, who told the guard where to take us. We finally made it at 7:15pm, completely drained and fortunately, the service was still going. We got about 45 minutes in and were both happy we made it. I even got a bit teary-eyed thinking about being in London with the Moss family last year. At dinner, dad told me that he was impressed I kept going. He had been willing to give up and say it was silly to try to find it but he kept pressing on because I did. It filled me with pride because I had done it for him and had been worried that we wouldn’t make it before services ended. It turned into a special evening after an exciting but tiring day.
No comments:
Post a Comment