It's 1200 miles between Shenzhen and Beijing, south to north (think of it like between San Diego and Seattle), flight time 3 hours. The plane was all packed, but the seat was fine (it's a Boeing, anyway) and the service was fair, except when after the plane landed and as it often happened some jittery passengers tried to unbelt themselves to get up, the flight attendant called out a stern "Sit down!" command that sounded so much like a school teacher disciplining her classroomful of students it amused us to no end (and I could not help but fake an attempt to get up myself).
Picking us up at the Beijing airport was a weird shaped, Chinese made minivan (which we later found out was exactly the same model used by police in Tiananmen Square), our main and sole transportation means for the next few days in and around Beijing. We got a good taste of Beijing's bad traffic right after we entered the city circles--the 5th-Ring (五環), 4th-Ring (四環) "speedways," then finally into the 3rd-Ring (三環) proper to our Friendship Hotel (友誼賓館), the once prestigious lodging reserved for foreign dignitaries that probably not looking as sharp as many of its contemporary competitions, but charming and elegant nonetheless. After checking in, we did a cursory visit to the all famous Bird's Nest (鳥巢) and Water Cube (水立方) that were built for the 2008 Summer Olympics and now have become city landmarks. We then had a dinner of, what else, Peking duck, at a restaurant recommended by our "Old Beijing" driver (“Much better than that over-rated 全聚德," he said), and indeed it was quite good. The irony of that was it was a chain restaurant from Guangdong, place we just traveled from :)
We played tourists the full day next day, visiting the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and had dinner at a pomp-and-circumstance restaurant converted from the residence of an old time Qing nobleman. Two notes I'll only add here for the day: 1. My wife did meet up the unexpected hazard the trip dealt her: We unknowingly took an open-air chair lift up the Great Wall trolley, and having never taken such lift before and realizing there was nothing except a wire and a chair to support us up in the air, she panicked, and literally kicked and screamed, eyes closed, all the way to the top; 2. They crowned me "Lord Daddy" (王爺) at the p&c restaurant--just to have fun when we ordered food, I suppose, and for the rest of the trip that title could not escape me, or rather I could not escape that title :(
We went back to hospital visiting business the next day. First thing we did that morning, though, was to meet up with Jason Liu, who, like Alex, was another key person that helped define the tone of this trip for us. Jason was a Beijing University graduate student 10 years ago when he found out he had leukemia, a disease that is almost fatal if no bone marrow from a compatible donor can be found and transplanted. Even though he later found out his doesn't require transplant and he can survive and live well on advanced medicine alone, he started and continues to lead a charity foundation that promotes and collects voluntary registrations of potential bone marrow donors all over China for leukemia patients.
Joyce met Jason in her last PEACE trip to China in March while visiting a 3-Self church in Beijing of which Jason was a member, and started off a good working relationship with him, along with other church officials. He was the one who suggested we visited Inner Mongolia in place of Tibet when the latter got scrapped from our trip plan. He had been having some notion himself of going to Inner Mongolia, where he came from, to build some healthcare network for remote villagers, which somewhat coincides with the idea Joyce has for the PEACE plan. Long story short, he became the person who not only arranged our hospital visits in Beijing, but also planned and accompanied us throughout our trip to Inner Mongolia.
The first hospital we visited was a Beijing University affiliated women & children's hospital, with several child leukemia patients sponsored by Jason's organization already. The doctor/administrator in charge of the child leukemia department, a woman in her early 30s, took us for a tour of the facility and chats with patients and their parents, then did a presentation on the work they do and discussed with us their needs and observations. It looks like they have been doing quite some good work here, resulting in high survival rates and great demands for their services, many of them from the poorer side of the country. The problem is they don't have enough beds to meet their demands, and the living expenses are so high in Beijing that parents of the out-of-town patients have to find work during the day and sleep on the hospital floor at night to accompany their patient children throughout the treatment that can last for months.
The second hospital we visited that day was a Beijing city affiliated children's hospital. Here we did not get to tour the hospital but only met with a senior doctor/administrator (again a woman) and chatted with her about the general status of the healthcare needs and how she thinks things can be improved here, etc.
We had some spare time left for the day after the second visit, so we drove to one of the famous "seas" (big royal ponds nearby the Forbidden City), the North Sea, that we missed seeing the other day. Great move! It had a beautiful lake, swaying willows, balanced landscape, and pleasant amount of visitors. It restored for me some romance and glamour relics of golden ages ought to inspire but was totally lost in the rushy, rowdy, trash-strewn "old palace" we visited the other day in the place called Forbidden City.
Came Sunday the next day, and we were ready for church, the 3-Self church in Haidian (海淀) District, the one Joyce and her team visited last March. Some may still have legitimate doubts about how truly free religious freedom is allowed in China today, but here we are, in one of the busiest districts of Beijing, standing outside a tall shiny building that has a giant white cross in front and big Chinese and English inscriptions that say "Christian Church" on top, waiting in line among a crowd of predominantly young people to get in for a regular Sunday worship service, with no hint of obstruction or intrusion from authority of any sort.
The service proceeded at a well orchestrated pace, beginning with a young worshiping band, then a young lady pastor-in-training who happened to be doing her first sermon ever in English today, for about 45 minutes, then the welcoming of newcomers, the announcements, the end of service, etc. Take away some rigidity, this could well be like any modern day church service in America.
After the service, Joyce took us to greet Pastor Peter Wu and his wife Ruth, both she got acquainted with last time she visited here. We chatted, took a picture, then left.
That about concluded our business in Beijing. Now we were getting ready to leave for Inner Mongolia in the evening. We got to the airport in time and waited in the long line that didn't seem to move much for quite a while, then we started hearing announcements of flight cancellations, due to some thunderstorm that's happening here in Beijing, it seemed. A few moments later, voila, we heard our flight got delayed. To what time, the clerk wouldn't tell, and the board wouldn't display, you have to come back to the counter to check with us later, the clerk would only say.
So we pulled our luggage up the food court floor and started out waiting. Now, "who's responsible for such a mess," I asked my feudal subjects, pretending I was the Lord Daddy again. "I tremble (臣惶恐)," one of them confessed. "What are we going to do now, Lord Daddy," one of them asked. "Lord Daddy trembles (王爺惶恐)," I said.
Our flight finally took off after midnight, a 4-hour delay, for a one hour flight, to Hohhot (呼和浩特), the capital city of Inner Mongolia, where Jason and Ruth, who had both taken an earlier flight from Beijing to Hohhot that day, had long been waiting for us.
Pictures of the days:
Day 4 (July 14):
Day 5 (July 15):
Day 6 (July 16):
Day 7 (July 17):
