The problem was that the Far East was just too close. An hour-long bus ride away? Yeah, that will always be there. No need to make that a priority.  It fell into the same vein as where I have lived in the Bay Area all my life and not once stepped foot upon Alcatraz or into the JellyBelly factory (equal import). Plus the visa process was expensive and a bit of a nightmare – China is one of those countries that (rightfully so) changes their requirements for American visitors based on the requirements the USA is currently placing on Chinese tourists. Prices and rules kept fluctuating. So I put it off, jet-setting to “easier” countries like Japan, Thailand, Philippines, and if I say more it just sounds like bragging (Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, okay I’ll stop).

Then I found out I was being ousted from my job due to mismanagement and bad decisions and an end date had been placed upon my “well, came here for two years, but now it’s been seven, maybe it’s forever” schedule of living in HK. Once I had cried and long-walked enough about it, I knew my time in Asia was done and it was time to truly move on. So I bought the ticket to leave, looked at the calendar, and realized that seven years in Hong Kong without one visit to the legal motherland seemed a bit out of pocket. So I found a long weekend in hotter than heck May, and booked tickets to Beijing.

I was so curious and excited to see China and try to suss out the differences between there and Hong Kong. The relationship between the two have been a point of contention since forever, brought more to light with the 2019 protests (which were awesome) and kept in our collective conscious all the time, as protestors were always being brought to trial in the years since the movement was shut down. As a foreigner living in Hong Kong, I definitely felt the shift in mood and movement and freedom and free speech over the years. It’s not fun to watch democracy slowly smother to death right in front of you. But. Moral weirdness aside, I was going to China.

The day of, I ran like I was on fire out of work, with just a backpack and a purse and my passport. I hopped the Airport Express and had time to have an overpriced glass of prosecco at the airport bar and realize it was my last return ticket to Hong Kong and got deep in my feels for a minute. The airplane to China was so old that it had screens that unfolded from the ceiling every four rows and simply played a staticky nature channel show the whole time, which was unsettling. (Yet I can remember how amazing that technology first was.)

I landed in Beijing late, after several delays, and unfortunately my sim card situation didn’t work out well, so I was stranded in a REALLY big airport, had missed dinner, and wasn’t too sure where I needed to go. But then I was greeted by my booking.com driver, holding a sign with my name on it: one of my greatest thrills in life. My enthusiasm for this moment would doom me, however, as he mistook it for flirting, and proceeded to drive quite recklessly for the next hour and a half, violating all traffic laws by crawling on the freeway so he could use a translating app to ask me all sorts of private questions and make suggestions for how he could make my trip “better.” 

So, like countless women before me have in this situation, I invented an archaeologist husband who was coming the next morning to meet me. I stopped smiling and being any kind of friendly. I risked the roaming charges on my phone to track our progress towards the hostel, surveying the outside and wondering how much injury I risked if I had to spring out the door, tuck and roll away from a moving vehicle on a highway in the capital of China. Being a woman is SO awesome.

I eventually shook him off on a side street and then made it to my room, with the priceless quality of tundra levels of air con, took a wet shower (Chinese bathrooms combine shower and bathroom space, so everything gets soaked) and fell asleep to the world at 3am, to wake up for a 7am tour pickup.

When I’m in a place for a short amount of time, I try to book a tour to maximize sightseeing. After extensive research, I landed on a two-day private tour that could have up to 12 people, for $200USD, to see every famous thing I knew of in Beijing, and then some. Luck would have it that there was only one other person on my tour – an American gal from New York by way of Tennessee, who worked in marketing for McDonalds, doing cultural research to better advertise to Chinese families. We had a bit in common, chatted easily, I shared with her my idea to be sponsored by McDonalds to visit locations around the world and document their differences, and we happily agreed on all tour options. Plus i found out she’d paid way more than I had for the tour. Such a win. 

Our tour guide was named Nicky (we think) and she was a hustler. She had been in the biz for twenty something years, mostly carting Chinese people around the world, and supporting her no-good husband (until one day she came home from taking said Chinese on a three week tour of America and found out the no-good free-loader had been cheating on her and she decided to (bad words redacted) and we were highly encouraged to never tie our self-worth to a man and Nicky could not have found a more receptive audience as she poured her heart out over Peking Duck, which lived up to and past the hype)). 

The two-day excursion was the whirlwind I signed up for and more. We went on a breathless tour of temples and palaces and scrolls, weaving among the crowds dressed up in traditional Chinese wear to stage instagram photo shoots, and whole families in matching shirts on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, navigated local people wanting pictures with us (especially super-blond girl I was with). There was almost nothing in English at the tourist sites, which was kind of refreshing. I just vibed through ancient places of worship and formerly forbidden palaces and gardens and the houses of concubines and took a million pictures, unburdened by knowing anything real about them.

The security for everything was pretty intense, and as we drove through the city, our intrepid guide pointed out all the CCTV towers, where thousands of people worked, monitoring all of our every move. Wedgie redistribution and jaywalking and discreet nose-pickings were suddenly off the table. The idea that I was being watched so carefully, tracked through the world’s most sophisticated and unadvertised forms of facial recognition was pretty unsettling. But our tour guide praised the system, saying that China was a one-parent system, that she loved her country like a father, that she felt taken care of by all the monitoring and invasive knowing. Blondie and I smiled and waved, and showed our passports over and over, and spoke in loud, clear, praising English at Mao’s temple, asked nothing at all at Tiananmen Square, and stuck to significant eye contact during certain parts of the propaganda. 

I loved the weird of it all.

But things took a typical Rachel-esque turn – the slightly ill feeling that had started to creep in during the flight developed into a full-fledged illness. I enjoyed the lack of English that forced me to get creative until I suddenly needed a pharmacy. At the end of day one, I was pale and sweaty and just weird. I dragged my feverish body around for what felt like miles, trying to find somewhere that would accept Apple Pay in exchange for drugs, any kind of drugs, as my F3@&ing HSBC cards continued to not work and keep me stranded. I wandered, delirious, into a pharmacy run by a mother and daughter playing Animal Crossing, and managed to get their attention long enough to mime my problems, and then purchase, at great expense, what I was promised would fix me right up. 

I’ll tell you what it was next time. A hint – DID NOT A THING FOR MY FULL BODY ILLNESS. But at the moment, I’m too teacher-tired to continue this story, so I hope I’ll see you again soon. :) Reminder – you can subscribe so you don’t miss a weird moment!