Saturday, March 11: Summer Palace in the Winter

Today we toured the Summer Palace with a number of people from our group. The Summer Palace is actually a huge estate with many buildings and its own man-made lake. It started out as the Garden of Clear Ripples during 1115-1234 and had extensive construction during 1644-1911. In 1888, after it was bombed, Empress Dowager Cixi rebuilt it (and made it even bigger) and renamed it the Summer Place. It was a favourite spot for Cixi who indirectly ruled China for about 50 years. I say indirectly because she ruled through her son, her nephew and the last Chinese Emperor. They were all very young when they came to the thrown (the latter 2 she chose for this reason) and she told them what to do. In particular, she liked to spend the country’s money on rebuilding and maintaining the Summer Palace where she lived in the summer (guess that might have been obvious by the name!) rather than putting money into making the country a better place for its people. As you can imagine, she is not very popular in China, even today. While we were touring the grounds, the weather went from nice and sunny to cloudy and cold and then it started to snow. We felt that it was simply China welcoming a bunch of Canadians by trying to make us feel at home.

After a group lunch we kind of faded and spent the afternoon napping and packing to go to Nanning tomorrow. The limit for in-China flights is 20 kg per person, so we had to choose what to take and what to store at the hotel for when we return. We then went to a local restaurant, which turned out to be the biggest adventure of the day. It’s one of those “you had to be there” kind of stories. No one spoke English and we couldn’t tell what anything was on the menu. Luckily one of the couples we were with spoke Cantonese, but this still posed a challenge when trying to communicate with someone in Mandarin. It ended up being a pretty good meal. The prices here are the opposite to what they would be at home. If you eat at a local restaurant it is very cheap. Our meal tonight consisted of tea, beer, soup, rice, and at least nine different dishes of food. It cost $215 Yuan, which is about $31 CAD. This was divided among 8 of us! In contrast, another couple and their two children had burgers and Cokes in the hotel and it cost them $400 Yuan, or $57 CAD.

After dinner Doug, Doug, Joanne, and I went to the bar at the top of the hotel to celebrate our last night in Beijing without children. When we return next week we will no longer have the same freedom. We were the only ones in the bar and were entertained by a four-piece band who played a variety of tunes, such as Country Roads, Unchained Melody, I Just Called to Say I Love You, Moon River, Beautiful Tonight, and a few Chinese songs. Very surreal – it kind of felt like a scene from Lost in Translation.

Tomorrow we are off to visit a silk factory in the morning on the way to the airport. We then fly to Nanning, which about 2.5 hours south of here. We receive our babies at 3:30 the next day (Monday). I’m not sure what the Internet situation will be there, so this may be the last post until we get back to Beijing. Even if there is Internet access, I’m also not sure what we have in store for us from little Jin Xia Hua, soon to become Norah. Our guide, Mary, is teaching us a few phrases in Mandarin that we can say to our babies to comfort them. Today we learned how to say, “I love you” and “good baby.” It’s both such a happy and sad occasion that we are going to change these little girls’ lives forever.