26th continued
BEIJING: THE BEST CHINA HAS TO OFFER…
I had wanted, during our time in China, to go to a tea house or theatre to watch a tea ceremony and possibly a play. I particularly wanted to see some ‘Face Changing’ which is famous in Sichuan province. We checked in the guide books and asked Bobby at our hostel. He advised us of a tea house called Lao She Teahouse, just next to Tiananmen Square. It is famous in Beijing and has entertained people such as Bush and Kissinger
We were given the directions and name in Chinese so that we could get a taxi driver to deliver us directly to the door. After having a mooch around Beijing’s main streets, we walked in the direction I thought the teahouse to be. We stopped to ask a couple if we were heading in the right direction and they were so stunned that a white person came over to talk to them that they just collapsed in pathetic giggles. They were clearly going to be no use to us, so we walked off.
After much hunting we found the Tea House. We bought our tickets (near the back because they were cheaper) and settled in our seats nestled around a table with 6 other people. We were brought some little snacks and nuts and some very bitter green tea.
Lao She Teahouse claims to offer some of China’s finest traditional performing arts that are harder and harder to see today. Every night, for 1½ hours and at a maximum ticket price of £30 per person you can watch acrobatics, Kung Fu shows, comic dialogue, Peking opera, ventriloquism, and the celebrated face-changing dance while enjoying a cup of tea.
Face-changing does what it says on the tin. A dancer will change his mask by waving his arms and wagging his head, and his face mask will change in under a second, so quick you cannot see how he does it. The top performers can change their masks up to 30 times with the flick of a wrist. Due to difficulty of changing masks faster than the eyes blink, only a small number of artists can perform this old dance today, it is also a closely guarded secret as to how they do it. I thought it was FANTASTIC! I am so terribly gutted I didn’t take the opportunity to see the full length version of Face Changing in Chengdu as I would have been entranced for the whole time if Beijing’s version was anything to go by.
The Peking Opera section was… interesting. Lizzie and I were glad we saw it, not least because now we know never to go to a full length Chinese Opera. I thought it would be a little more elegant and with a little less squawking, although the costumes were marvellous. 
Another performance we saw was called ‘Han Deng Da Gu’. Singers of this ancient folk art don’t sing in the normal way. They light up a few of candles, put the candles on a holder, put the holder in their mouths, and sing. They have to keep the candles balanced with the face muscles, otherwise the candles will fall… while still singing Singers who perform Han Deng Da Gu at Lao She Teahouse are all considered masters. Around China, there are only a very limited number of singers who are able to perform this ancient art because of the difficulty. China really does like some weird shit. It’s no X Factor I tell you.
The show is also divided in to 4 sections with Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter tea ceremonies, performed by a different girl, in a different setting, in a different outfit. Essentially, all the same to a lay person, but I’m sure there are subtle/massive differences for those who appreciate tea being poured.
The Chinese, as usual, talked all the way through each and every section. They literally would stand up and chat to people across the room and then looked surprised when we asked them to move out of the way – as if they had no idea that by standing up, they would block people’s view. I don’t know how the poor people performing felt with the audience talking, taking phone calls and walking around the whole time while they were on stage – I guess they must be used to it. I don’t think it would go down very well in England.
Lizzie very much enjoyed the Kung Fu section but declared the rest of it as “shit”. She likened it to a show put on by the rejects from Britian’s got talent. It was however a great opportunity to be able to see, in condensed form, each of the various types of popular entertainment that is famous in China – without having to sit through a 2 hour version of each one.
After the performance we waited for over an hour trying to flag a taxi. Note to self, NEVER try and get a taxi near Tiannanmen Square. It is impossible. We walked in the direction I thought our hostel to be and a guy on a tuk tuk came riding past, we showed him the hostel’s card and he said he would take us. A westerner who spoke English came up to us and asked if he could borrow our driver for a minute to ask him a question – he spoke perfect Chinese. We aksed him to ask the driver how much our ride would be, we were told 18Y.
So off we went with our driver, who clearly had no idea where he was going. He drove for about 40 mins, up and down various hutongs asking everyone for directions, showing our hostel card in hope of clues. Even thought it should only take about 15 mins, we just laid back and relaxed, there was no way we could communicate with him, so we gave up in the knowledge he would find it at some point, even if it took him till morning. Finally he got us home, we got out we paid him and then things turned ugly.
He was not happy with his 18Y, not at all. He wrote on his hand to demonstrate the fee, he wanted 180Y! Which is about £18GBP. Now, we had an air-conditioned car take us to Tiananmen Square earlier for 12Y (about £1.20GBP) so there was no way in hell I was going to pay £18GBP for some idiot on a motorised bike to lose his way for 40 mins. As usual, China was trying to scam us. We gave him double to shut him up and walked off to our hostel ignoring his shouts of protest.
We went to our mini reception and spoke to the young girl manning the desk – who luckily had excellent English – explaining what had just happened to us. Next thing we know, there is banging on the door. The driver had come after us! The girl told us to stay in her office and she would deal with the driver. After a bit of shouting, she closed the door and came back to see us. She told us she had called him a bad man and a bad driver and told him that we had gone to bed and would not be paying any more money. We thanked her profusely and went to bed, fuming at the audacity of the mean driver.
It is frustrating that people can get ripped off so badly. It is only because we have travelled before that we know how much things should cost and that we have the courage to stand up for ourselves, otherwise we would be ripped off left right and centre. We went to sleep happy in the knowledge we had screwed him back. Come on China – stop doing this to us after such a brilliant day!
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