北京 Part 2: Summer Palace, bargaining, The Tree, and fried apple pie
Part of the series: K80, mitcho (+Magi!)'s haphazard trip to China
- Going to China just got more expensive
- Hong Kong
- 北京 Part 1: Fulbright love, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Houhai
- 北京 Part 2: Summer Palace, bargaining, The Tree, and fried apple pie
- 北京 Part 3: The Great Wall of China! and noodles
Day 3: The Summer Palace
Day 3 begins with the Summer Palace. After Magi, K80, and I finally met1 in the morning, we hit the (new) Summer Palace (頤和園). The Summer Palace is way out north-west, past Tsinghua University (the Beijing one), but well worth the trek. In retrospect, I would recommend going earlier, as I could have spent more time there.
The Summer Palace is built around a lake which, apparently, is quite shallow, as it was covered completely in ice on our visit, making for some great skating/sliding.
Much like the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace houses a museum-style areas, with various cultural relics on display. Again like the Forbidden City, however, the architecture and gardens are the reasons to visit.
The main attraction is probably the Tower of Buddhist Incense, which involves going up stairs after stairs, moving up this small mountain. At the top is a beautiful Guanyin.
Behind this tower is a little temple with many beautiful Buddhas on the walls.
We had a great time at the Summer Palace, with one exception…
Suzhou street: a warning
I must warn any potential travelers away from the part of the Summer Palace known as Suzhou Street (蘇州街). But first, an aside on park ticket pricing.
In some parks, such as the Summer Palace, you can buy two types of tickets at the door: a “gate ticket” (門票) and a “through ticket” (聯票). The gate ticket will let you into the park, but it doesn’t include the separate tickets for a number of “special sections” of the park, while hte “through ticket” includes these. You can also just buy a gate ticket, enter, and pay the 10 yuan or so for each special section. The Summer Palace has four such special sections. If my memory serves me right, the gate ticket was ¥20 and the through ticket was ¥50. Each special section was ¥10 if you paid as you went. So the through ticket is a great deal!
So if you’re cheap like me, you’ll buy the through ticket, and then make sure to go to each of the places listed on your through ticket. After all, you paid for them, right? One of these was the Suzhou Street. Suzhou Street is on the north side of the Palace and is a little hard to get to… many signs make it seem like you’re just a few steps away, when in reality it is still at least a 15 minute walk. Once you get there, it’s the definition of a tourist trap… it does look nice and you must pay or have the through ticket to enter but, once you’re in, you must walk around this lake (it says one-way, so you can’t get out quickly), along which there are stores with touristy junk and little tea places. There are no exhibits or anything of real cultural interest here. You have to walk around the lake, at least half way, in order to leave.
In conclusion, the through ticket is convenient, the other three “special sections” were great, and you won’t be wasting money if you get one and don’t go to the Suzhou Street. Just don’t waste your time finding or visiting the Suzhou Street.
Bargaining
After the Summer Palace we went back into the city and to the Hongqiao Market (紅橋市場), a mall in the city famous for pearls, which the girls were interested in. I realized I just don’t have the attitude to bargain properly—I’m just too soft. I tried, and I believe we did get a fair price, but I’d definitely need more practice to get good at it, and it’s not the kind of practice I particularly enjoy. At least the price did immediately drop to half or so once they saw that I spoke Chinese. Funny how things work.
The Tree and fried apple pie à la mode
Finally we met up with Magi’s friend who took us to The Tree, a great pizza place in the Sānlǐtún bar area. Magi reminisced about darkly-lit bars like this in Germany, and we enjoyed the conversation and hearth-baked pizza. I highly recommend The Tree.
Finally, we went over to another bar called Rickshaw for desert, and I had the deep-fried apple pie. I felt like I was back at the state fair.
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A warning for all of you traveling to Beijing: transfer stations can have multiple different Exit A’s, one for each line. This is not immediately apparent, given that you can transfer for free between lines at these stations, and that each Exit A outside has a pole saying, for example, “Exit A: line 5 and line 1.” ↩
Related posts:
- 北京 Part 1: Fulbright love, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Houhai
- Hong Kong
- Midyear conference in Hualian and Taroko
- 新年快樂! Chinese New Year with Andy
- Family in Taiwan
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Tags: Beijing, Buddhism, China, museum, pizza, religion, subway, temple, tickets, travel
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February 11th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Funny how bargaining can work out - one time in a marketplace in Ecuador, I didn’t hear very clearly what price a vendor was saying something was, so I asked her in Spanish to repeat it just in case I’d misheard her, and the second time around the price she said was definitely a dollar cheaper than what I think she said the first time around.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:31 am
“At least the price did immediately drop to half or so once they saw that I spoke Chinese.”
That reminds me of the women from the Balkans in the long flowy skirts who descend en masse upon the tourist sites of Paris, asking for money if you respond affirmatively to “Hey, y’speak Engliish?”, but ignoring you completely if you shake your head (or respond in some other language). You’d think that if their parents were really dying in the hospital in Bosnia (according to the card they show you when you admit to speaking English), they would gratefully take money from French-, Spanish-, German-, Italian-, and Japanese-speakers too…. I think they’re up to something, as they arrive in a group, fan out in an organized fashion, and all have the same card. This being France, they’ll soon be unionized and start going on strike. :o)
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:42 am
[…] this “the best pizza in Asia” (possibly only matched by The Tree in Beijing which I went to back in January). The owner went to Cornell and speaks English fluently. She returned to Yilan and opened this […]