Mr. Good Price

We went to the Great Wall today. To save hassle we signed up for a"ride" there from our hotel-- we were told it also included lunch, and thought it would just be easier to go straight from our hotel. A snapshot of our day:

7 am: get on bus with 6 other English-speaking tourists. Assume we will spend the day going to the Great Wall, then to lunch, and back to the hotel.

8:30: arrive at Great Wall. Cloudy day, coupled with extreme pollution, made it so that we could barely see the wall. Horrible picture taking possibilities. However, we had our picture taken by Chinese children approx. 315 times.

10am: arrive at "largest jade jewelry store in Beijing". (WHAT??) Taken on a tour of jade-making facility, then given an hour to buy jewelry (note: we received almost as much time there as we did at theGreat Wall). (Second note: we bought nothing.)

11:30: arrive at Ming Tombs to see the tombs of dead Chinese leaders. (WHAT??) Spend almost an hour wandering around a site that none of our group had any interest in seeing. When getting back in the bus (finally!), we were hounded by the hordes of women in the parking lotselling bags of peaches. (Of course there had to be SOMETHING there to sell us!)

12:30: arrive at lunch, which is at the government-run "Friendship Store". Even though there were literally 54 empty tables, we were told we had to wait and were taken on a tour of the vase-making facility that was conveniently located there. After lunch, we had another half-hour to kill and were expected to shop at the "friendship Store".

1:30: arrive at tea-house, where we are given a demonstration and tasting of various teas. Afterward, of course, we are given the hard-sell, for both the teas and the pots they come in!

2pm: Best part of the day... they took us to a room (next door to the tea-house) where we were told to take off our shoes and soak our feet in boiling water. Then a"doctor" lectured us about chinese medicine and sent in students to massage our feet. While this was a good thing, I assumed the first foot would be free and we would have to pay for the second foot (what else could they charge us for?), but then they sent in the Tibetan expert who offered to read our palms and tell us what diseases we had. We were the most captive kind of audience-- one whose feet were being massaged (and who wants to leave that?!)-- so a few of our group had their palms read and were shockingly all told the same thing (apparantly everyone had high bloodpressure running in their families and needed better digestion). He of course tried to prescribe all kinds of herbal remedies for these ailments, but most of us were not buying.

It appears capitalism really has made a stronghold in this technically Communist country...