Chinese Toilets and Hotels

Well, I guess my trip is coming to an end. There were so many wonderful things that we were able to experience, and only a fraction of them have I been able to share. Now, that things are coming to an end, I guess I will just ramble on a bit about a few things that I found of interest.

Public toilets for one. I was fortunate enough to never have to use one of the pay public toilets, on the streets, but my suspicion is that they might look even better than some of the public toilets we used in the government tourist shops or the restaurants we stopped at. That, however, is not what I find most interesting. Most public restrooms have a sit down toilet, but all have squaters. Hope not to offend anyone, but I set my natural inhibitions aside and took a photo of the toilet as I felt my descriptive writing to be less than adequate to describe them (in case you can’t tell from the 2-D photo, it is a porcelain basin flush with the floor). Ya’ just hoist up your pant legs (so they don’t get on the floor), drop yer’ drawers and pretend you out in the woods. Enough potty talk; on to other things.

I didn’t mention our room in Beijing. It was pretty nice. It had a lot of little amenities that one doesn’t find in other hotels, such as a few office supplies like scissors and a stapler, a nice shower, battery alarm clock, shoe shine oil, razor, and a few other things like that. They didn’t charge for internet usage, which was nice. However, our hotel in Xian (pronounced “she - on”) was still, overall, a much better hotel. They had more bilingual staff members, better concierge service, and were simply much better equipped to handle large groups. And did I mention the beds in Xian were soft? The beds in Beijing were about the same as the first hotel. But as tired as I was every single night, I didn’t really make too much difference, except the conspiracy sleep-wake dreams got progressively worse. I have those dreams anyway, but one member of our group works for a government contractor which does classified work for our government, so he was briefed before he came on the trip. He didn’t tell me about the briefing, but did tell his mom a bit about some general things of the briefing, who then told my mom, and just that little bit of information I got would be enough to make anybody a little bit(or even a lot) paranoid.

Photo: Olympic Stadium (Bird Nest) of the Beijing Summer Games

Back to the hotel. It has a wonderful looking garden in the back, but because of our busy, busy days, I only got to see if from our room window. There wasn’t too much else to see around it. We did go for a walk the first night in Beijing to see what we could see. Sure, it was a little bit worrisome to be walking around a huge city, obviously tourists, at night, but overall, I felt safe enough to do so. We may not agree with the semi communist / socialist, oppressive government of China, but I have to admit that their harsh criminal law keeps crime (according to my subjective impressions) very low. I can’t think of any other huge city I would dare walk around in like that at night. Anyway, we only found a convenience store where I bought a couple of Diet Cokes and saw a Hyundai car dealership which was closed, so I did not buy a car. We also saw a lady riding her bicycle at night, with no lights, wearing dark clothing and talking on a cell phone. Well, I guess everybody does it. One other thing I find interesting about all the hotels, is that in order to have electricity in the room, you have to take your key card and insert it into a slot right inside that door, which is a mechanical switch for all of the room power. When you leave the room, you obviously take the key, and all the lights go out. I am sure it saves a lot of electricity.