This weekend was quiet.
7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.
7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.
7/28
Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.
Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.
It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.
After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.
My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.
When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.
7/29
Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Less than objective cultural observations
I've been making a list of things I wanted to write about at some point, and I suppose there's no better option than to just go through it.
Superfluous employees
I've been amazed at some of the jobs that people hold in China. Besides the full-time driver, guard, and cleaning person at my work, most of whom put in a couple of hours a day and then chat and check their stock prices for hours, China seems to be about half populated with people holding make-work jobs.
Some examples:
-The crossing guards at every corner of every major intersection that are universally ignored as they wave their red flags around.
-The guy who's paid to stand at the bus stop and wave to the bus drivers telling them that there are people to get on their particular bus, despite the fact that all buses stop at all of their stops without exception.
-Almost every non-family business has a guard or six. Grocery stores, cell phone shops, book stores, the seediest of apartment buildings, large restaurants, etc. Here's a free suggestion to the grocery stores: make the guards man a register and do something about your interminable checkout lines.
-Most apartment buildings, including Scot and Catlin's and my own, which are far from elegant, have elevator attendants. My elevator attendant is a nice girl, but she works 12 hour days 6 days a week and doesn't really seem to do much besides take up space in the elevator. We can't push the button for our own floor? I understand that maybe the idea is to increase elevator efficiency, but maybe they should just start using the usually-deactivated second elevator instead.
-There are the 4 person construction crews where 3 guys are watching 1 work, but I guess those are pretty universal. They manage to do it here even without unions, though- a tribute to Chinese innovation.
-Waiters don't give you a menu and walk away to let you think, they stand there while you look through it and wait for you to order. That's taken me a while to get used to; I had been rushing to order because I felt bad about them standing, pad and pencil in hand, waiting for me to slowly parse the Chinese. You can say, "Oh, let me look at it first and come back", but that only buys you maybe 30 seconds. I've gotten over feeling bad, though; if they weren't waiting for me they'd be standing in a clump with several other idle waiters.
-That's another thing, there are these groups of people just standing around. The businesses simply over-employ people. People are cheap, and I guess having lots of employees makes you look successful or up-scale. I went to one mall, admittedly selling only designer brands, that had service desks absolutely everywhere, and three, count them three, dedicated, traditionally clothed, beautiful greeter/bowers at every entrance. You know how cosmetics sections in the states have a lot of people standing and waiting to sell you expensive soap? Now imagine each one of them having a partner.
Things I do in Beijing that I didn't do in the US
I read one of those "You know you're..." lists for expats in Beijing, and it of course listed a number of things that were applicable. Some examples:
-Going on umbrella bashing missions on sunny days. Women here are very particular about their skin. I'm not sure if it's the traditional view that pale is beautiful or a more modern skin disease phobia, but you regularly see women with full skin protection. They'll ride around on bikes wearing face shields; reflective, skin-tight arm covers, wide brimmed hats, and long pants. I'll try to get a picture at some point, because it's really a sight. Anyway, the umbrellas come out en masse on sunny days, often for both men and women, and people seem oblivious to the fact that they're wielding them like weapons as they make their way through a packed sidewalk. I was originally polite, but I've started just batting them away when they come near my face, and because of my 'imposing' western height that's pretty often.
-On the similar lines, there's what I've termed Combat Walking, also referred to as 'sidewalks at rush hour'. The comment on the list I read was, "In NYC people are seen as objects best avoided, in Beijing they're seen as objects best nudged out of the way." Also, I've concluded that if you want to hold your place in line (mob) you'd better be prepared to throw some elbows, and I mean that literally. Well, not literally hurl elbows, but project them forcefully.
-I glare at people a lot now. Street hawkers don't bug you as much if you're scowling. I've gotta get better at switching it off when I realize that the person staring at me is an attractive girl, maybe crack a smile or wink or something charming and disarming. As it is I've been automatically locking on my death stare before my brain processes.
-Along similar lines, I now often ignore people who talk to me without the slightest bit of remorse. "Herro, sir! Rickshaw sir!" or, "Herro, sir! Happy hour!" don't get any response as I walk on and stare straight ahead. One 'happy hour' guy actually jumped in front of me, for which he got my now-practised Combat Walking shoulder. On the other hand if someone random on the street smiles, waves, and says hello I'll return the greeting (in Chinese). But I'll also keep walking deliberately and quickly to avoid becoming someone's English practice dummy. I've started lying about my english ability. I like using, "Il ne sprechen pas russke?" with a southern accent.
-Drinking at lunchtime. I just have a bottle of beer, but I swear that some of these guys with stacks of bottles are going to leave the restaurant and get into their cabs for the rest of their shift.
Some of these sound like criticisms of China, and I guess some of them are. I go into these things trying to be open minded and non-judgmental, but on some counts I don't see how they can possibly be 'good' cultural traits. I don't really mind Combat Walking, it's just different and deserved comment, I thought. And I guess I don't have a better option than these make-work jobs. They're the result of a free market which I believe in, so barring any radical changes in Chinese industry or population restructuring they're here to stay and probably belong. I understand that people want to practice English, and that doesn't bother me, I just don't want to be their victim. The grasping hawkers, on the other hand, seriously piss me off. People who respond to me in English when I speak to them in Chinese also bother me, but to a much lesser extent. They're both connected to me being white, but the militancy and sense of entitlement from the hawkers gets to me.
I have more cultural quirks to write about, including some rather complimentary observations, but I'll save them for another post.
Superfluous employees
I've been amazed at some of the jobs that people hold in China. Besides the full-time driver, guard, and cleaning person at my work, most of whom put in a couple of hours a day and then chat and check their stock prices for hours, China seems to be about half populated with people holding make-work jobs.
Some examples:
-The crossing guards at every corner of every major intersection that are universally ignored as they wave their red flags around.
-The guy who's paid to stand at the bus stop and wave to the bus drivers telling them that there are people to get on their particular bus, despite the fact that all buses stop at all of their stops without exception.
-Almost every non-family business has a guard or six. Grocery stores, cell phone shops, book stores, the seediest of apartment buildings, large restaurants, etc. Here's a free suggestion to the grocery stores: make the guards man a register and do something about your interminable checkout lines.
-Most apartment buildings, including Scot and Catlin's and my own, which are far from elegant, have elevator attendants. My elevator attendant is a nice girl, but she works 12 hour days 6 days a week and doesn't really seem to do much besides take up space in the elevator. We can't push the button for our own floor? I understand that maybe the idea is to increase elevator efficiency, but maybe they should just start using the usually-deactivated second elevator instead.
-There are the 4 person construction crews where 3 guys are watching 1 work, but I guess those are pretty universal. They manage to do it here even without unions, though- a tribute to Chinese innovation.
-Waiters don't give you a menu and walk away to let you think, they stand there while you look through it and wait for you to order. That's taken me a while to get used to; I had been rushing to order because I felt bad about them standing, pad and pencil in hand, waiting for me to slowly parse the Chinese. You can say, "Oh, let me look at it first and come back", but that only buys you maybe 30 seconds. I've gotten over feeling bad, though; if they weren't waiting for me they'd be standing in a clump with several other idle waiters.
-That's another thing, there are these groups of people just standing around. The businesses simply over-employ people. People are cheap, and I guess having lots of employees makes you look successful or up-scale. I went to one mall, admittedly selling only designer brands, that had service desks absolutely everywhere, and three, count them three, dedicated, traditionally clothed, beautiful greeter/bowers at every entrance. You know how cosmetics sections in the states have a lot of people standing and waiting to sell you expensive soap? Now imagine each one of them having a partner.
Things I do in Beijing that I didn't do in the US
I read one of those "You know you're..." lists for expats in Beijing, and it of course listed a number of things that were applicable. Some examples:
-Going on umbrella bashing missions on sunny days. Women here are very particular about their skin. I'm not sure if it's the traditional view that pale is beautiful or a more modern skin disease phobia, but you regularly see women with full skin protection. They'll ride around on bikes wearing face shields; reflective, skin-tight arm covers, wide brimmed hats, and long pants. I'll try to get a picture at some point, because it's really a sight. Anyway, the umbrellas come out en masse on sunny days, often for both men and women, and people seem oblivious to the fact that they're wielding them like weapons as they make their way through a packed sidewalk. I was originally polite, but I've started just batting them away when they come near my face, and because of my 'imposing' western height that's pretty often.
-On the similar lines, there's what I've termed Combat Walking, also referred to as 'sidewalks at rush hour'. The comment on the list I read was, "In NYC people are seen as objects best avoided, in Beijing they're seen as objects best nudged out of the way." Also, I've concluded that if you want to hold your place in line (mob) you'd better be prepared to throw some elbows, and I mean that literally. Well, not literally hurl elbows, but project them forcefully.
-I glare at people a lot now. Street hawkers don't bug you as much if you're scowling. I've gotta get better at switching it off when I realize that the person staring at me is an attractive girl, maybe crack a smile or wink or something charming and disarming. As it is I've been automatically locking on my death stare before my brain processes.
-Along similar lines, I now often ignore people who talk to me without the slightest bit of remorse. "Herro, sir! Rickshaw sir!" or, "Herro, sir! Happy hour!" don't get any response as I walk on and stare straight ahead. One 'happy hour' guy actually jumped in front of me, for which he got my now-practised Combat Walking shoulder. On the other hand if someone random on the street smiles, waves, and says hello I'll return the greeting (in Chinese). But I'll also keep walking deliberately and quickly to avoid becoming someone's English practice dummy. I've started lying about my english ability. I like using, "Il ne sprechen pas russke?" with a southern accent.
-Drinking at lunchtime. I just have a bottle of beer, but I swear that some of these guys with stacks of bottles are going to leave the restaurant and get into their cabs for the rest of their shift.
Some of these sound like criticisms of China, and I guess some of them are. I go into these things trying to be open minded and non-judgmental, but on some counts I don't see how they can possibly be 'good' cultural traits. I don't really mind Combat Walking, it's just different and deserved comment, I thought. And I guess I don't have a better option than these make-work jobs. They're the result of a free market which I believe in, so barring any radical changes in Chinese industry or population restructuring they're here to stay and probably belong. I understand that people want to practice English, and that doesn't bother me, I just don't want to be their victim. The grasping hawkers, on the other hand, seriously piss me off. People who respond to me in English when I speak to them in Chinese also bother me, but to a much lesser extent. They're both connected to me being white, but the militancy and sense of entitlement from the hawkers gets to me.
I have more cultural quirks to write about, including some rather complimentary observations, but I'll save them for another post.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The laowai riding the road bike in a shirt, tie, and helmet probably looks weird.
7/25
So I committed to going bike shopping after work. I'd been trying to find a second-hand store, but the best I'd managed was a few battered old bikes at the new places. I went to one store that sold all high-end mountain bikes, either imports of international brands or counterfeits, but I decided to keep looking. Electric bikes are definitely the thing, and it seems that not pedaling them at all and sitting side-saddle is the accepted mode. Bonus points if you talk on your cell phone or smoke a cigarette.
I was really going to buy a Beijing clunker, a nice, new, $25 Flying Pigeon or Red Flag cruiser bike, but after testing a couple I couldn't get used to sitting back that high and the position of my hands; it was too easy to oversteer and I felt off balance. The Flying Pigeon seemed indestructible; instead of cables for the brakes it had solid metal bars. The frame was big, thick steel tubing that weighed a ton. Gears? Who needs them? I tried a 'Giant' (Taiwanese ripoff of the US brand) cruiser that was ok for 450RMB ($55) new, and I was about to pick that one up when I saw the Battle.
I'll post pictures soon, but it's great. I got it new, plus a 'free' lock (apparently they took pity on my bargaining skills) for $70. It's a 15 speed road bike (with indexed gears!), probably much nicer than my beloved, antique Raleigh I left in Boston. The Battle isn't super light, but it handles well and feels like what I think a bike should. My gears have been leaving the locals in the dust. I don't think the mopeds 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis like being passed by a biker. I don't have a helmet yet, which is making me uncomfortable in the crazy traffic, and I didn't bring my lights with me, which made me just as invisible as every other biker on the road on the ride home. Tomorrow I'll go to the 'Giant' outlet near my work; they have a wider selection of helmets than the place I went today, which had exactly one. Not one model, one helmet. I'm also going to buy a second lock, and maybe keep my bike on my floor of the building rather than the bike lot outside.
So I committed to going bike shopping after work. I'd been trying to find a second-hand store, but the best I'd managed was a few battered old bikes at the new places. I went to one store that sold all high-end mountain bikes, either imports of international brands or counterfeits, but I decided to keep looking. Electric bikes are definitely the thing, and it seems that not pedaling them at all and sitting side-saddle is the accepted mode. Bonus points if you talk on your cell phone or smoke a cigarette.
I was really going to buy a Beijing clunker, a nice, new, $25 Flying Pigeon or Red Flag cruiser bike, but after testing a couple I couldn't get used to sitting back that high and the position of my hands; it was too easy to oversteer and I felt off balance. The Flying Pigeon seemed indestructible; instead of cables for the brakes it had solid metal bars. The frame was big, thick steel tubing that weighed a ton. Gears? Who needs them? I tried a 'Giant' (Taiwanese ripoff of the US brand) cruiser that was ok for 450RMB ($55) new, and I was about to pick that one up when I saw the Battle.
I'll post pictures soon, but it's great. I got it new, plus a 'free' lock (apparently they took pity on my bargaining skills) for $70. It's a 15 speed road bike (with indexed gears!), probably much nicer than my beloved, antique Raleigh I left in Boston. The Battle isn't super light, but it handles well and feels like what I think a bike should. My gears have been leaving the locals in the dust. I don't think the mopeds 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis like being passed by a biker. I don't have a helmet yet, which is making me uncomfortable in the crazy traffic, and I didn't bring my lights with me, which made me just as invisible as every other biker on the road on the ride home. Tomorrow I'll go to the 'Giant' outlet near my work; they have a wider selection of helmets than the place I went today, which had exactly one. Not one model, one helmet. I'm also going to buy a second lock, and maybe keep my bike on my floor of the building rather than the bike lot outside.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In which literary style is abandoned with the idea that a bad post is better than none
7/16
I played poker at the Syrian embassy. We played some of the more complicated games I can imagine, one of which had a full 10 rounds of betting, involved buying cards to replace those in your hand, and was high-low. We were playing limit games, which made bluffing impractical, so I tried to stick to hands with high probabilities of winning.
The embassy itself was pretty nice. China has a deal in which they give a reciprocal amount of property to countries for their embassies, so if Syria gives China an acre they get that in return. We played in the dining hall, where there were crystal chandeliers and leather couches and lots of marble.
Besides a couple of my coworkers, one of whom knew the Syrian ambassador's son and so was our in, there were a couple of Syrian embassy people (including the son), a coworker's mom, and another coworker's boyfriend. I only made about 20% profit on my buy in (which amounts to $14.40 on $12), partly due to one disastrous hand which I played perfectly, if I do say so myself, except for the losing bit. I think I'll end up going back soon.
7/17-7/19
I finally got more project guidance from Sergio in Vienna, so after meeting with Mr. Ajmal, the UNIDO representative here, I started to work on that. It's a very big project, I think. I've gone from not having anything to do to having so much on my plate I don't know where to begin. I made a list of things I know I want to look at and began with items on it at random. Hopefully that'll give me some momentum.
7/20
Linda's last day at the UNIDO office, so now I'm the youngest person here.
I was adopted for the evening by Rose, now the only person in the office close to my age, and her roommates. I met them at their place, about a 5 minute walk door to door from mine, and we caught a cab.
We went to Rickshaw for dinner, which is a hub of expats. They serve wings and quesadillas and draft beer, all for a hefty markup. It was fun, but I was glad when we left for the next place, which happened to be the other Black Sun.
This Black sun is much more of a dive bar, which is cool, but the gin and tonic I had was weak and not very good. The place was packed, also all with expats, but instead of seats and tables everyone was standing around mingling, and the group spilled out into the street, which was more interesting. It was a going away party for one of Rose's friends, but I wasn't the only random there. My cocktail conversations get more interesting after a few drinks. After my gin and tonic I started going to the convenience store next door to buy bottles of beer. At a bar, a western-sized bottle of Tsingtao might be 10-15RMB, but at the convenience stores a 600mL bottle is usually 2-3. My first beer was 3, but after that I told the shop owner that I'd be back for many more and would only be paying 2 a bottle, which actually worked. I found out he was charging other people 4 a bottle, so I became the beer runner.
I've gotten a little better at flirting with people in bars, but I missed years of practice in college that I now have to make up for.
7/21
Chinese beer gives me a nasty hangover. God knows what they put in the stuff, or fail to filter out.
I went out with my apartment mate to a late lunch at a Korean place nearby. I originally objected to the Korean idea, as I'd done barbecue for lunch twice during the week, but it turned out to be fantastic. We ordered fried rice and stir-fried potato strips with peppers, but the highlight of the meal was a spicy beef soup that I never would have ordered on my own, not being much of a soup person. The broth was rich and the beef was very tender, and the whole thing was so spicy that the back of my head started sweating. In China you commonly mix rice into your bowl of soup, which worked perfectly in this case to tame some of the capsaicin. I think I'll go back to this place frequently, especially as it gets colder. The restaurant itself is as simple as they get, there's free barley tea, it's nearby, and they have the soup.
After lunch I bought my first pirated DVDs on the street- Letters From Iwo Jima and a Zhang Yimou film, The Road Home. I spent the rest of the day watching them and finishing reading Confederacy of Dunces. I planned on going to sleep early and waking up to be a tourist on Sunday.
7/22
I woke up early, but when I looked out the window it was too hazy to go sightseeing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, since the tourist site and my lead on used bikes were close together that also meant delaying my bike purchase.
I woke up later and went to Panjiayuan, Beijing's huge open-air market selling just about everything antiqueish and craftsy that you can imagine. I didn't buy anything, just wandered for a couple of hours. I'll probably go back at some point later in the year and buy myself a statue or some paintings; they had some similar to paintings I'd liked at 798.
I played poker at the Syrian embassy. We played some of the more complicated games I can imagine, one of which had a full 10 rounds of betting, involved buying cards to replace those in your hand, and was high-low. We were playing limit games, which made bluffing impractical, so I tried to stick to hands with high probabilities of winning.
The embassy itself was pretty nice. China has a deal in which they give a reciprocal amount of property to countries for their embassies, so if Syria gives China an acre they get that in return. We played in the dining hall, where there were crystal chandeliers and leather couches and lots of marble.
Besides a couple of my coworkers, one of whom knew the Syrian ambassador's son and so was our in, there were a couple of Syrian embassy people (including the son), a coworker's mom, and another coworker's boyfriend. I only made about 20% profit on my buy in (which amounts to $14.40 on $12), partly due to one disastrous hand which I played perfectly, if I do say so myself, except for the losing bit. I think I'll end up going back soon.
7/17-7/19
I finally got more project guidance from Sergio in Vienna, so after meeting with Mr. Ajmal, the UNIDO representative here, I started to work on that. It's a very big project, I think. I've gone from not having anything to do to having so much on my plate I don't know where to begin. I made a list of things I know I want to look at and began with items on it at random. Hopefully that'll give me some momentum.
7/20
Linda's last day at the UNIDO office, so now I'm the youngest person here.
I was adopted for the evening by Rose, now the only person in the office close to my age, and her roommates. I met them at their place, about a 5 minute walk door to door from mine, and we caught a cab.
We went to Rickshaw for dinner, which is a hub of expats. They serve wings and quesadillas and draft beer, all for a hefty markup. It was fun, but I was glad when we left for the next place, which happened to be the other Black Sun.
This Black sun is much more of a dive bar, which is cool, but the gin and tonic I had was weak and not very good. The place was packed, also all with expats, but instead of seats and tables everyone was standing around mingling, and the group spilled out into the street, which was more interesting. It was a going away party for one of Rose's friends, but I wasn't the only random there. My cocktail conversations get more interesting after a few drinks. After my gin and tonic I started going to the convenience store next door to buy bottles of beer. At a bar, a western-sized bottle of Tsingtao might be 10-15RMB, but at the convenience stores a 600mL bottle is usually 2-3. My first beer was 3, but after that I told the shop owner that I'd be back for many more and would only be paying 2 a bottle, which actually worked. I found out he was charging other people 4 a bottle, so I became the beer runner.
I've gotten a little better at flirting with people in bars, but I missed years of practice in college that I now have to make up for.
7/21
Chinese beer gives me a nasty hangover. God knows what they put in the stuff, or fail to filter out.
I went out with my apartment mate to a late lunch at a Korean place nearby. I originally objected to the Korean idea, as I'd done barbecue for lunch twice during the week, but it turned out to be fantastic. We ordered fried rice and stir-fried potato strips with peppers, but the highlight of the meal was a spicy beef soup that I never would have ordered on my own, not being much of a soup person. The broth was rich and the beef was very tender, and the whole thing was so spicy that the back of my head started sweating. In China you commonly mix rice into your bowl of soup, which worked perfectly in this case to tame some of the capsaicin. I think I'll go back to this place frequently, especially as it gets colder. The restaurant itself is as simple as they get, there's free barley tea, it's nearby, and they have the soup.
After lunch I bought my first pirated DVDs on the street- Letters From Iwo Jima and a Zhang Yimou film, The Road Home. I spent the rest of the day watching them and finishing reading Confederacy of Dunces. I planned on going to sleep early and waking up to be a tourist on Sunday.
7/22
I woke up early, but when I looked out the window it was too hazy to go sightseeing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, since the tourist site and my lead on used bikes were close together that also meant delaying my bike purchase.
I woke up later and went to Panjiayuan, Beijing's huge open-air market selling just about everything antiqueish and craftsy that you can imagine. I didn't buy anything, just wandered for a couple of hours. I'll probably go back at some point later in the year and buy myself a statue or some paintings; they had some similar to paintings I'd liked at 798.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
More about 798
(From an email to my brother. This is more here as a journal entry for me than for anyone else, but feel free to read about it)
Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.
The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.
Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.
There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.
Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.
The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.
Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.
There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Beijing: city of art, restaurants, and copycat bars
7/13
After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.
After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.
7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.
There were a number of paintings I really liked.
There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.
There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.
This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.
After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.
After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.
7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.
There were a number of paintings I really liked.
There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.
There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.
This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
I must have left my invading army at home.
Ok, if I don't try to catch up now I'm never going to be able to.
Here are some pictures from Shanhaiguan and from Ghost Street last week.
7/8
So The Johnson City people and I woke up at 7 to head out to Laolongtou, Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall comes out of the sea. We talked to a cab driver before realizing that we could pay half as much if we took the sanlunche, the 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis with covered seating areas in the back. The drive was interesting; we tried to get the two cycles to race and they obliged us to some extent. There's a strange coexistence of bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and buses on the roads in China. In the US I feel like car drivers get very frustrated by bicyclists on the road. Maybe because here they're more ubiquitous that doesn't seem to happen. Horns are constantly honking, but I don't think I've seen anyone get angry, besides that one cab driver who took us to Sanlitun. There's a sort of acceptance of delays and illogical, selfish behavior from those around you. It's actually a fairly sane way of approaching chaos.
The sanlunche dropped us off at the beach, rolling right up to the sand, and we started wandering. The wall runs right next to the beach for a ways before cutting out to shore, and we could see the famous pagoda-like guard tower in the distance. The beach was filled with people, tourists (all Chinese) and hawkers. There were motorboat rides, horse rides, God knows what else. There were also people fishing, clamming, and gathering seawood. Because the quantities involved were so small I assume they were for personal use. We had one tout start following us around. It's hard not to acknowledge that I speak some Chinese, so when people follow me I avoid eye contact and act frosty, giving one-word answers as much as possible. He never did really leave, despite my asking him to, so he probably wasted an hour and a half following us as we walked. I split up from the others (and the tout) and climbed up the embankment to the wooded area next to the wall to wander around a bit. It was barb-wired; the other side of the wall is a museum type site and they don't want people going over the top, despite the fact that I could have climbed from a couple of spots where the dirt came right up to the edge of the wall.
We met up with Scot and Catlin and decided to try to go around the wall as much as we could, but on the advice of Lonely Planet we declined to pay the $7 entrance fee to the museum. So we had breakfast of baozi, a lamb intestine soup that we mostly picked around, and soy milk. We decided to head from there to Jiao Shan, the first peak that the wall climbs, maybe 5 kilometers from town. So we started to ask cab drivers about the fare. Everyone's running a scam in China. The first cab driver wanted to sell us tickets in advance, and put me on the phone with his buddy. I guess the buddy was supposed to convince me that this was on the level, that he really worked with the official ticket sellers, but he was speaking to me in Russian, so it's hard to know. So we told the cab driver that we just wanted a ride, that we wanted to buy tickets at the site, and he quoted us 100RMB ($12.50) as his cab driver friends watched. I laughed, rather loudly, told him he was talking nonsense, and started walking away. He called out that he meant for two cars, but we kept going. I hope he lost some face. We passed this pond area with a giant crocodile statue, but what caught our attention was the two kids in human-sized hamster balls rolling around on the pond's surface. They zip them in, then inflate the ball using a vacuum tube. Tethers are attached to the balls, allowing them to be reigned in by the operators on shore. It looked like fun. We ended up asking a cop for directions; he told us we could take a bus to Jiao Shan, so we caught the bus and went to the end of the line, which wasn't actually all the way. So we then caught cabs for 8 each, bringing the transportation grand total to 22RMB. 100RMB my ass, and I've only been here a week.
So we bought the student tickets into the park, which were like 20 or 30RMB, and started climbing. The wall was restored pretty heavily, so who knows how authentic it was, but it felt neat walking up. It was very steep in places, sometimes ramped and sometimes in stairs of varying extremes of rise and run. Along the way were people selling things, of course; cool cast bronze lions that had open mouths and acted as garbage cans; and sheep munching grass on the slope up to the wall. After climbing a ways there started to be guard towers every so often. Nowadays they act as bottlenecks; you have to climb up and down ladders one at a time to get to the other side. The ladders had cages to prevent you from falling backwards, I guess, so for those of us wearing backpacks they were pretty irritating. Actually they were probably irritating for everyone... No one likes to wait in line (mob) for old Chinese grandmothers and young children to climb a ladder. As we went farther up, the wall crumbled more and more. Most of the other tourists (again, almost all Chinese) climbed stairs down to take the side path that had switchbacks and so wasn't nearly as steep. We powered on up the wall itself. At one point there was no way to go farther without climbing over a vertical wall, so that we did. After the barrier the stones were looser and there weren't any guard rails. We climbed until we hit a steel wall with the big 'No Entrance' in 4 languages, where we rested a bit, but after we saw a couple of people farther up we grabbed hold of the support beams and swung around the sign to continue to climb to the first summit. The view was only ok. It was really hazy, but you could see the wall snaking down to the bottom, dotted with towers along the way. It was a better experience of the wall than I'd gotten earlier in the day, and it left me hungry for more, maybe the Simatai segment (a world heritage site, but 100 miles from anything and so still not too touristy) or far out west in the desert where the wall crumbles into dust. I'd really like to hike the length of the wall, camping along the way, but I don't think that's in my immediate future.
Scot and Catlin had bailed a ways before the top (they had all of their camping gear in backpacks and had a harder time getting up), so we hurried down to meet them. The 3 of us had a train to catch, and we all wanted lunch. So I washed up a bit in the public restroom and we started negotiating with taxi drivers again. Almost everyone we asked wanted to charge a flat rate of 15RMB per cab to the train station, but we finally found one cab that agreed to use the meter and a little while another who offered to take us for 10. We all got lunch, typical family style, at a place near the train station. None of the dishes were great, but they were all ok. I had agreed to help one of the Johnson City kids try to get a ticket on our train (he needed to get back to Beijing), so I did that while Scot and Catlin shopped for snacks. We got him a ticket and hung out at the station eating dried squid and peaches. Our train was delayed, so Scot and I went back out for more dried seafood and fruit. When we got back and got in line we were told our train had already left, despite the fact that the sign over the gate still had our train number with the delayed departure time. So we ended up on a slower, more expensive, and later train, getting back at 10PM instead of 6 and paying an extra 15RMB each. Ah well. So I bought one of those folding train seats for $2 and we just hung out and waited.
The train ride back was long. We chatted up fellow passengers again, including one college English major who couldn't put together sentences or pronounce words. There was a group of very rich, spoiled Beijing kids playing the Chinese equivalent of Mafia, which was sort of fun to watch. We took turns sitting again, but this train was more crowded and there was more competition for the temporarily opened seats. So it was a long trip, and we were very tired by the time we rolled into Beijing at 10. When we left the station I was amazed to see so many people sleeping in the plaza. I assume some were waiting for trains, but others seemed to be homeless and trying to blend into the crowd. Maybe safety in numbers? Catlin and Scot raced off to try to meet up late with a couchsurfer they were supposed to host that night, the Johnson City kid caught his subway and I caught mine to as close to home as I could get before grabbing a cab. Public transport's pretty good in Beijing, but much spottier late at night.
7/9
Worked. Well, sort of. I'm not really being very productive right now. I'll get there. I met up with Patrick Rhine for dinner, who I hadn't seen in about a decade. We talked about life in general and walked around Ghost Street a bit, which was fun.
7/10
I had decided to get a harmonica, and after a lot of research online I'd tracked down a big music store on the other end of town. So after work I caught a bus to the subway and headed West. It was rush hour and the public transportation was packed; that made everything more interesting. I'd never been in the area around Jishuitan, so just walking around was fun. At first I stopped at a department store trying to find brown socks, but after looking around a bit I was put off by the astronomical prices (probably a fair bit higher than the States for things like clothes irons and pillowcases, which I was actively looking for, and ties, which I always look at idly. So I ditched the department store. The first of two addresses I'd found online was vacant, and I started to get worried that the trip was in vain, but I passed a small music store and went in to ask about harmonicas. They had 2 types, both big and Chinese style and not what I was looking for, so I kept walking towards my second address. Then, as I walked, all of a sudden every store on either side was music stores, maybe 20-30 at least. Some had all violins, others had these big, horizontal harp instruments, others had traditional Chinese flutes, some had electric guitars... everything you can imagine. I checked 3 stores, finding harmonicas at each one, before finally buying a 10 hole diatonic in C for $5. I probably could have bargained, but I didn't.
After that I was on a roll. I bought a lightbulb to replace the one that burnt out in my room, bought the wrong fluorescent tube to replace the one in the bathroom that was dim, found pillowcases, got a voltage converter, had lunch/dinner of tofu in sauce over rice, bought a couple of baozi and an eggplant pancake for later, found a honey-peach popsicle to eat as I walked... it was a shopping frenzy. I probably spent $22 in all; the only thing I couldn't find was some damn brown socks. So I went home, did apartment maintenance like cleaning my AC filters, replacing bulbs, and dusting surfaces (I wake up with a sneeze every morning, I've never had anything resembling allergies before and I'm on a campaign no minimize it). Then I sat down and found some youtube videos with harmonica lessons and started to play. I sort of wish that I'd bought a bluesier B flat harmonica at the same time since they were cheap, but ah well. I had planned on studying some Chinese and going to bed early, but neither of those things happened.
Here are some pictures from Shanhaiguan and from Ghost Street last week.
7/8
So The Johnson City people and I woke up at 7 to head out to Laolongtou, Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall comes out of the sea. We talked to a cab driver before realizing that we could pay half as much if we took the sanlunche, the 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis with covered seating areas in the back. The drive was interesting; we tried to get the two cycles to race and they obliged us to some extent. There's a strange coexistence of bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and buses on the roads in China. In the US I feel like car drivers get very frustrated by bicyclists on the road. Maybe because here they're more ubiquitous that doesn't seem to happen. Horns are constantly honking, but I don't think I've seen anyone get angry, besides that one cab driver who took us to Sanlitun. There's a sort of acceptance of delays and illogical, selfish behavior from those around you. It's actually a fairly sane way of approaching chaos.
The sanlunche dropped us off at the beach, rolling right up to the sand, and we started wandering. The wall runs right next to the beach for a ways before cutting out to shore, and we could see the famous pagoda-like guard tower in the distance. The beach was filled with people, tourists (all Chinese) and hawkers. There were motorboat rides, horse rides, God knows what else. There were also people fishing, clamming, and gathering seawood. Because the quantities involved were so small I assume they were for personal use. We had one tout start following us around. It's hard not to acknowledge that I speak some Chinese, so when people follow me I avoid eye contact and act frosty, giving one-word answers as much as possible. He never did really leave, despite my asking him to, so he probably wasted an hour and a half following us as we walked. I split up from the others (and the tout) and climbed up the embankment to the wooded area next to the wall to wander around a bit. It was barb-wired; the other side of the wall is a museum type site and they don't want people going over the top, despite the fact that I could have climbed from a couple of spots where the dirt came right up to the edge of the wall.
We met up with Scot and Catlin and decided to try to go around the wall as much as we could, but on the advice of Lonely Planet we declined to pay the $7 entrance fee to the museum. So we had breakfast of baozi, a lamb intestine soup that we mostly picked around, and soy milk. We decided to head from there to Jiao Shan, the first peak that the wall climbs, maybe 5 kilometers from town. So we started to ask cab drivers about the fare. Everyone's running a scam in China. The first cab driver wanted to sell us tickets in advance, and put me on the phone with his buddy. I guess the buddy was supposed to convince me that this was on the level, that he really worked with the official ticket sellers, but he was speaking to me in Russian, so it's hard to know. So we told the cab driver that we just wanted a ride, that we wanted to buy tickets at the site, and he quoted us 100RMB ($12.50) as his cab driver friends watched. I laughed, rather loudly, told him he was talking nonsense, and started walking away. He called out that he meant for two cars, but we kept going. I hope he lost some face. We passed this pond area with a giant crocodile statue, but what caught our attention was the two kids in human-sized hamster balls rolling around on the pond's surface. They zip them in, then inflate the ball using a vacuum tube. Tethers are attached to the balls, allowing them to be reigned in by the operators on shore. It looked like fun. We ended up asking a cop for directions; he told us we could take a bus to Jiao Shan, so we caught the bus and went to the end of the line, which wasn't actually all the way. So we then caught cabs for 8 each, bringing the transportation grand total to 22RMB. 100RMB my ass, and I've only been here a week.
So we bought the student tickets into the park, which were like 20 or 30RMB, and started climbing. The wall was restored pretty heavily, so who knows how authentic it was, but it felt neat walking up. It was very steep in places, sometimes ramped and sometimes in stairs of varying extremes of rise and run. Along the way were people selling things, of course; cool cast bronze lions that had open mouths and acted as garbage cans; and sheep munching grass on the slope up to the wall. After climbing a ways there started to be guard towers every so often. Nowadays they act as bottlenecks; you have to climb up and down ladders one at a time to get to the other side. The ladders had cages to prevent you from falling backwards, I guess, so for those of us wearing backpacks they were pretty irritating. Actually they were probably irritating for everyone... No one likes to wait in line (mob) for old Chinese grandmothers and young children to climb a ladder. As we went farther up, the wall crumbled more and more. Most of the other tourists (again, almost all Chinese) climbed stairs down to take the side path that had switchbacks and so wasn't nearly as steep. We powered on up the wall itself. At one point there was no way to go farther without climbing over a vertical wall, so that we did. After the barrier the stones were looser and there weren't any guard rails. We climbed until we hit a steel wall with the big 'No Entrance' in 4 languages, where we rested a bit, but after we saw a couple of people farther up we grabbed hold of the support beams and swung around the sign to continue to climb to the first summit. The view was only ok. It was really hazy, but you could see the wall snaking down to the bottom, dotted with towers along the way. It was a better experience of the wall than I'd gotten earlier in the day, and it left me hungry for more, maybe the Simatai segment (a world heritage site, but 100 miles from anything and so still not too touristy) or far out west in the desert where the wall crumbles into dust. I'd really like to hike the length of the wall, camping along the way, but I don't think that's in my immediate future.
Scot and Catlin had bailed a ways before the top (they had all of their camping gear in backpacks and had a harder time getting up), so we hurried down to meet them. The 3 of us had a train to catch, and we all wanted lunch. So I washed up a bit in the public restroom and we started negotiating with taxi drivers again. Almost everyone we asked wanted to charge a flat rate of 15RMB per cab to the train station, but we finally found one cab that agreed to use the meter and a little while another who offered to take us for 10. We all got lunch, typical family style, at a place near the train station. None of the dishes were great, but they were all ok. I had agreed to help one of the Johnson City kids try to get a ticket on our train (he needed to get back to Beijing), so I did that while Scot and Catlin shopped for snacks. We got him a ticket and hung out at the station eating dried squid and peaches. Our train was delayed, so Scot and I went back out for more dried seafood and fruit. When we got back and got in line we were told our train had already left, despite the fact that the sign over the gate still had our train number with the delayed departure time. So we ended up on a slower, more expensive, and later train, getting back at 10PM instead of 6 and paying an extra 15RMB each. Ah well. So I bought one of those folding train seats for $2 and we just hung out and waited.
The train ride back was long. We chatted up fellow passengers again, including one college English major who couldn't put together sentences or pronounce words. There was a group of very rich, spoiled Beijing kids playing the Chinese equivalent of Mafia, which was sort of fun to watch. We took turns sitting again, but this train was more crowded and there was more competition for the temporarily opened seats. So it was a long trip, and we were very tired by the time we rolled into Beijing at 10. When we left the station I was amazed to see so many people sleeping in the plaza. I assume some were waiting for trains, but others seemed to be homeless and trying to blend into the crowd. Maybe safety in numbers? Catlin and Scot raced off to try to meet up late with a couchsurfer they were supposed to host that night, the Johnson City kid caught his subway and I caught mine to as close to home as I could get before grabbing a cab. Public transport's pretty good in Beijing, but much spottier late at night.
7/9
Worked. Well, sort of. I'm not really being very productive right now. I'll get there. I met up with Patrick Rhine for dinner, who I hadn't seen in about a decade. We talked about life in general and walked around Ghost Street a bit, which was fun.
7/10
I had decided to get a harmonica, and after a lot of research online I'd tracked down a big music store on the other end of town. So after work I caught a bus to the subway and headed West. It was rush hour and the public transportation was packed; that made everything more interesting. I'd never been in the area around Jishuitan, so just walking around was fun. At first I stopped at a department store trying to find brown socks, but after looking around a bit I was put off by the astronomical prices (probably a fair bit higher than the States for things like clothes irons and pillowcases, which I was actively looking for, and ties, which I always look at idly. So I ditched the department store. The first of two addresses I'd found online was vacant, and I started to get worried that the trip was in vain, but I passed a small music store and went in to ask about harmonicas. They had 2 types, both big and Chinese style and not what I was looking for, so I kept walking towards my second address. Then, as I walked, all of a sudden every store on either side was music stores, maybe 20-30 at least. Some had all violins, others had these big, horizontal harp instruments, others had traditional Chinese flutes, some had electric guitars... everything you can imagine. I checked 3 stores, finding harmonicas at each one, before finally buying a 10 hole diatonic in C for $5. I probably could have bargained, but I didn't.
After that I was on a roll. I bought a lightbulb to replace the one that burnt out in my room, bought the wrong fluorescent tube to replace the one in the bathroom that was dim, found pillowcases, got a voltage converter, had lunch/dinner of tofu in sauce over rice, bought a couple of baozi and an eggplant pancake for later, found a honey-peach popsicle to eat as I walked... it was a shopping frenzy. I probably spent $22 in all; the only thing I couldn't find was some damn brown socks. So I went home, did apartment maintenance like cleaning my AC filters, replacing bulbs, and dusting surfaces (I wake up with a sneeze every morning, I've never had anything resembling allergies before and I'm on a campaign no minimize it). Then I sat down and found some youtube videos with harmonica lessons and started to play. I sort of wish that I'd bought a bluesier B flat harmonica at the same time since they were cheap, but ah well. I had planned on studying some Chinese and going to bed early, but neither of those things happened.
Monday, July 9, 2007
These days I spend a lot of time eating.
7/5
Thursday night I went home after work, showered, then headed right back out the door to meet people at Guijie, or Ghost Street. The area is famous for its food, everything from high-end restaurants to people frying things on the street. There are some specialties, like spicy crayfish, and the whole place is lit up with red lanterns. I met Linda from work, who I'd invited, and then we joined up with Scot, Catlin, and a number of people they'd invited from couchsurfing.com. There was Ru Shyan, who's a visual arts major working for the Chinese Olympic Committee and helped with the torch; Spring, a sophomore from Harvard doing... something; Matt, engineering major from Cornell working for GE; Bill Bowles, who quit his job and is traveling the world with a video camera and a satellite modem keeping a video blog; and Aaron, a Chinese national who works as an editor for the People's Daily. In a huge coincidence, we all (minus Aaron) had ties to Massachusetts. Catlin's from Wellesley, Scot and I from MIT, Matt had gone to high school there, Spring and Linda were from Harvard (and knew each other, but didn't know the other was going to be around), Ru Shyan's from Wheaton, and I can't remember Bill went to... Amherst, maybe? But it was strange to pick a sample of westerners in Beijing and come up with all MA types.
We picked a big hot pot place. They have two kinds of broth to cook in, sort of like fondue. One was garlickly and almost like a chicken broth, the other was oily and spicy. We ordered trays of raw lamb, beef, bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, etc. and started cooking. The hard part is to either hold the thing you're cooking in a boiling pot filled with flavor-adding... chunks, or to drop it and try to find it and fish it out later. The other difficulty was trying to fit cups, plates, trays of food, bottles of beer, etc. all on a table with a big hole in the middle for cooking. Dinner was great, and I had fun talking with the others; there were a lot of shared interests, but fairly different backgrounds.
Afterwards we started walking. We found some good hutongr, Beijing's narrow, winding alleys, filled with courtyard houses and small businesses. We bought popsicles (yogurt flavored for me again... I'll branch out soon) and explored the area in the dark. I don't know how safe I would have felt doing it alone, at least carrying valuables, but we were rolling like 10 deep, so it wasn't an issue. We bought a couple of bottles of beer to drink as we walked, one of the few liberties I feel like the Chinese can enjoy that we in the land of the free are denied.
I had broken my nail clippers, so when we found what looked like a closet with the contents of Wal-Mart jammed in I asked and managed to buy some for 40 cents. How, you may ask, did I break my nail clippers? I broke them trying to trim my beard. Sort of. See, the beard trimmer I brought was new, specially bought from Kohls for the extravagant price of $15, chosen for its portability. It has these different attachments for trimming different lengths, as such devices do, but I seem to have left certain parts necessary for their use back at home. So I decided I'd just whittle the large attachment, which I could use, down to size. Rather than hack at the outside, which would have meant pushing the jagged bit against my face, I cut the underside where the attachment locks into another plastic bit on the trimmer. This process took, over the course of 3 days, at least 2 hours, a different nail clippers, 2 different steak knives (ineffective), a pair of scissors (absolutely useless), and finally a box cutter I bought at a 7-11 on Ghost Street. The box cutter did the trick, resulting in an intricate sort of terraced piece of plastic, and now I've finally trimmed my beard. Of course, the charger for the damn thing is 110 volts, so I still need to buy a voltage converter, but I've saved myself from buying a new trimmer.
Anyway. Nail clippers at the closet Wal-Mart, then since the buses had stopped for the night I caught a cab home.
7/6
Friday I skipped work. I wasn't feeling in peak form, maybe in part because of the food the night before, but I think it was mostly the result of a long week and not really having felt rested in a while. So I slept until noon, then I woke up and went out to find some lunch. I went to a Chinese fast-food place near my apartment, which was probably the first truly bad meal I've had here, then I got some corn flavored yogurt at the grocery store to wash it down. Corn flavored yogurt's very tasty, and fits well into my campaign to try to eat the weird stuff. I bought some fairly expensive grapes on the way home, which a few days later as I write this are mostly uneaten. I should get on that.
I studied some Chinese, watched Lord of War, and hung out a bit waiting for Scot and Catlin to come over. They got lost trying to get there, so I went downstairs and walked a couple blocks to meet them. We got dinner at a restaurant near where I'd had lunch, the highlight of which was the catfish soup. The wisdom of eating bottom-feeders while in China is questionable, but I think that I'm probably going to poison myself to some extent no matter what I do, and we didn't really think about it until after we'd ordered.
We went back to my place and had some beer and baijiu, but at that point everyone was exhausted. We had decided to go to Shanhaiguan on Saturday to see the spot where the Great Wall comes out of the sea, so we were trying to arrange that trip on my slow and feeble pirated internet while endeavoring to not falling asleep. Well, Scot passed out sitting on the floor and leaning forward with his head on my couch, Catlin and I wrestled with the intertubes. At the end we didn't really have a plan, we just knew we were meeting at the train station at noon. Bobby, my flatmate, came back just as we were finishing and told us that they'd shut down the elevators for the night, which was unwelcome news. Apparently they do that at a certain hour, which I wasn't aware of. Since it's a little bit hard to get to the street from my apartment I walked Scot and Catlin down the 14 flights of plaster-covered and crumbling stairs (currently undergoing renovation), then, of course, had to climb back up the 14 flights. There are no floor numbers, so I tried to count as I went. It didn't work very well, so starting on maybe the 11th floor I was leaving the staircase to try to find apartment numbers on the doors. Most apartments aren't numbered, either, so that was a bit hard.
Anyway, I made it back, showered, and crashed. Showering is rough right now because the fluorescent tube in the bathroom is dying and not so much a light as a dim. It's a weird shape and we haven't found a replacement yet. So I've been showering and shaving with my bike headlamp sitting on the shelf for a little bit of extra light. I've been showering a lot, too, since it's hot and humid and I walk around in dress clothes all day. Because of the weekend trip I still don't have a bike. I have to get on that, too.
7/7
on Saturday I got up at maybe 9:30 to get to the bank for cash to pay some of my rent before I left town. I'm still finding my way around the neighborhood, so the errand took maybe an hour of walking around looking for a bank and getting back. I packed, then caught the subway to the Beijing train station. Scot and Catlin got off the same train from a different car, so we met up immediately and went to find tickets. There are about 5 different places to buy tickets, depending on where you're going, but after some searching we found our counter. Fortunately Scot had checked the railway website to get our train's number, otherwise we might have been in trouble. Tickets to Shanhaiguan on the T11 (T for Tebie kuai, or extra fast) were 47RMB, or about 6 dollars. They were standing tickets, though. To get a seat you generally have to buy in advance. We had time to kill, so we found lunch in the alley next to the station: a big bowl of noodles with meat and hot peppers.
We made it to our gate, running to make the departure time, but it turned out that the train was delayed and we ended up sitting around for about an hour. The train station is massive and crawling with people. There's nowhere near enough seating, so we sort of found a corner and squatted to avoid sitting on the filthy floor. I checked out the bookstore (Esquire in Chinese and a magazine about Chinese military hardware), saw the huge internet bar, and tried unsuccessfully to find a deck of playing cards for sale.
When we finally got onto the train it wasn't too full; we had plenty of room to stand. When people get up to use the restrooms and such the standing people sit down to rest their legs for a moment. We chatted with some other passengers and as a result ended up sitting maybe a quarter of the time. The main problem with standing is squeezing to the side to let people pass, and people do pass. They go to the area between the cars to smoke, they use the squat toilet restrooms that empty onto the tracks, they wander around, who knows, but there are constantly people coming and going. The train workers come through with carts of as wide as the aisle, which are hard to dodge, they bring brooms and sweep up trash on the floor, they adjust baggage on the overhead bins, and they sometimes checked tickets. A few standing passengers had tiny collapsible seats that they'd unfold and sit on in the aisles, which after a while seemed like a great idea.
It took probably 3 hours to get to Shanhaiguan. We left the station to look around and were immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to get us to take cabs or go to certain hotels or eat at the touristy restaurants. We remembered to go back into the station to buy our return tickets, and when we got out we heard, "Look, white people!' and were approached by the only other caucasians around, who didn't speak Chinese. It turns out, believe it or not, that they were from Johnson City, Tennessee. Small world, folks. So we took taxis with them to go check out the cheap Lida hostel we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. In Beijing they use a meter to determine your cab fare. In Shanhaiguan we negotiated a price with the cabdrivers ahead of time. The base flag drop price in Beijing is 10RMB, we did the trip to the hostel for 5 per cab. Small town living, I guess. The hostel had acceptable beds for $2.50 each, so the 5 Johnson City folks and I got two triple rooms. Catlin and Scot had brought camping supplies and were going to try to camp on the Wall. I didn't have camping gear, but I was game for roughing it with them until it started to rain just as we arrived at the hotel.
After dropping off bags we all headed out to get food nearby. Scot and Catlin and I have gotten into the habit of checking menus before sitting down at restaurants. We have a couple of criteria, a sort of basket or index like you'd assemble to measure cost of living or inflation. Our basket includes Gongbao Jiding (Kungpao chicken), eggplant strips, and a 600ml bottle of local beer. I'd like those 3 items to be under 30RMB combined, or about $3.75. So we turned down a couple of restaurants (one proprietor scoffed, "But where are you going to eat?" when we told her it was too expensive) before finding an acceptable place. We ordered a few dishes off of the menu, then Scot and I headed over to the seafood chill chest to point out things we'd like but didn't know the name for. So we ended up with mediocre squid, strange sea cucumber (which we're glad we tried but probably won't get again), and exceptionally good scallops in addition to our land-based food. Restaurants also don't seem to like to bring you rice early, the philosophy here being that you eat the good stuff before filling up on rice at the end, so we've also had to ask them to bring the rice early so that we get to eat it with our food. I haven't decided whether I should try to get used to the Chinese way or keep my portable America in this situation. I don't think it's a particularly important philosophy, as no one's really thought the rice request strange, so I might keep eating it throughout the meal. I talk about food a lot, sorry.
After dinner Catlin and Scot headed off towards the coast to find a spot to hide and camp, which we presume is illegal. The Johnson City people and I bought some beer at a corner store and, since the rain had stopped, decided to try to get on top of the wall somewhere in town just to hang out and drink. We got distracted, however, walking by a park where they were playing music and there were a ton of people dancing. There were also these multicolor lights in rows across the plaza, changing colors and blinking. It looked sort of like a runway. We decided to walk across their dance floor and check it out. We were immediately approached by a couple of people who wanted to dance with use, and then once we got through the crowd and sat down on some benches we were still attracting attention. I had a bottle opener, but I decided to be social and approach a couple of older people nearby and ask to borrow theirs. I chatted with them for a bit, then tried to make my apologies and rejoin the group, but they suggested I bring the others over instead. So I did, and after a few minutes the 6 of us were surrounded by maybe 30 Chinese all trying to talk to us. I was the only one who spoke both Chinese and English (besides on 16 year old kid who claimed to be 28 and spoke a bit), so I ended up running around and translating. The rockstar effect is apparently pretty common in China, but since I live in Beijing, I'm dressed like I'm not a tourist, I probably walk around scowling, and I'm not blond I haven't really gotten any of it, yet. So it was fun for a while, and my sense of humor does apparently translate, at least to some extent, but I can't imagine living like that. I think I might really like to try to live somewhere farther west at some point, so I might have to learn to deal with it. We bailed after a bit to make it back to the hostel before they closed the doors for the night, and just hung out in the room for a bit.
Ok, so the next day was much more exciting, but I'm really sick of typing right now and I'll leave it to post sometime tomorrow.
Thursday night I went home after work, showered, then headed right back out the door to meet people at Guijie, or Ghost Street. The area is famous for its food, everything from high-end restaurants to people frying things on the street. There are some specialties, like spicy crayfish, and the whole place is lit up with red lanterns. I met Linda from work, who I'd invited, and then we joined up with Scot, Catlin, and a number of people they'd invited from couchsurfing.com. There was Ru Shyan, who's a visual arts major working for the Chinese Olympic Committee and helped with the torch; Spring, a sophomore from Harvard doing... something; Matt, engineering major from Cornell working for GE; Bill Bowles, who quit his job and is traveling the world with a video camera and a satellite modem keeping a video blog; and Aaron, a Chinese national who works as an editor for the People's Daily. In a huge coincidence, we all (minus Aaron) had ties to Massachusetts. Catlin's from Wellesley, Scot and I from MIT, Matt had gone to high school there, Spring and Linda were from Harvard (and knew each other, but didn't know the other was going to be around), Ru Shyan's from Wheaton, and I can't remember Bill went to... Amherst, maybe? But it was strange to pick a sample of westerners in Beijing and come up with all MA types.
We picked a big hot pot place. They have two kinds of broth to cook in, sort of like fondue. One was garlickly and almost like a chicken broth, the other was oily and spicy. We ordered trays of raw lamb, beef, bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, etc. and started cooking. The hard part is to either hold the thing you're cooking in a boiling pot filled with flavor-adding... chunks, or to drop it and try to find it and fish it out later. The other difficulty was trying to fit cups, plates, trays of food, bottles of beer, etc. all on a table with a big hole in the middle for cooking. Dinner was great, and I had fun talking with the others; there were a lot of shared interests, but fairly different backgrounds.
Afterwards we started walking. We found some good hutongr, Beijing's narrow, winding alleys, filled with courtyard houses and small businesses. We bought popsicles (yogurt flavored for me again... I'll branch out soon) and explored the area in the dark. I don't know how safe I would have felt doing it alone, at least carrying valuables, but we were rolling like 10 deep, so it wasn't an issue. We bought a couple of bottles of beer to drink as we walked, one of the few liberties I feel like the Chinese can enjoy that we in the land of the free are denied.
I had broken my nail clippers, so when we found what looked like a closet with the contents of Wal-Mart jammed in I asked and managed to buy some for 40 cents. How, you may ask, did I break my nail clippers? I broke them trying to trim my beard. Sort of. See, the beard trimmer I brought was new, specially bought from Kohls for the extravagant price of $15, chosen for its portability. It has these different attachments for trimming different lengths, as such devices do, but I seem to have left certain parts necessary for their use back at home. So I decided I'd just whittle the large attachment, which I could use, down to size. Rather than hack at the outside, which would have meant pushing the jagged bit against my face, I cut the underside where the attachment locks into another plastic bit on the trimmer. This process took, over the course of 3 days, at least 2 hours, a different nail clippers, 2 different steak knives (ineffective), a pair of scissors (absolutely useless), and finally a box cutter I bought at a 7-11 on Ghost Street. The box cutter did the trick, resulting in an intricate sort of terraced piece of plastic, and now I've finally trimmed my beard. Of course, the charger for the damn thing is 110 volts, so I still need to buy a voltage converter, but I've saved myself from buying a new trimmer.
Anyway. Nail clippers at the closet Wal-Mart, then since the buses had stopped for the night I caught a cab home.
7/6
Friday I skipped work. I wasn't feeling in peak form, maybe in part because of the food the night before, but I think it was mostly the result of a long week and not really having felt rested in a while. So I slept until noon, then I woke up and went out to find some lunch. I went to a Chinese fast-food place near my apartment, which was probably the first truly bad meal I've had here, then I got some corn flavored yogurt at the grocery store to wash it down. Corn flavored yogurt's very tasty, and fits well into my campaign to try to eat the weird stuff. I bought some fairly expensive grapes on the way home, which a few days later as I write this are mostly uneaten. I should get on that.
I studied some Chinese, watched Lord of War, and hung out a bit waiting for Scot and Catlin to come over. They got lost trying to get there, so I went downstairs and walked a couple blocks to meet them. We got dinner at a restaurant near where I'd had lunch, the highlight of which was the catfish soup. The wisdom of eating bottom-feeders while in China is questionable, but I think that I'm probably going to poison myself to some extent no matter what I do, and we didn't really think about it until after we'd ordered.
We went back to my place and had some beer and baijiu, but at that point everyone was exhausted. We had decided to go to Shanhaiguan on Saturday to see the spot where the Great Wall comes out of the sea, so we were trying to arrange that trip on my slow and feeble pirated internet while endeavoring to not falling asleep. Well, Scot passed out sitting on the floor and leaning forward with his head on my couch, Catlin and I wrestled with the intertubes. At the end we didn't really have a plan, we just knew we were meeting at the train station at noon. Bobby, my flatmate, came back just as we were finishing and told us that they'd shut down the elevators for the night, which was unwelcome news. Apparently they do that at a certain hour, which I wasn't aware of. Since it's a little bit hard to get to the street from my apartment I walked Scot and Catlin down the 14 flights of plaster-covered and crumbling stairs (currently undergoing renovation), then, of course, had to climb back up the 14 flights. There are no floor numbers, so I tried to count as I went. It didn't work very well, so starting on maybe the 11th floor I was leaving the staircase to try to find apartment numbers on the doors. Most apartments aren't numbered, either, so that was a bit hard.
Anyway, I made it back, showered, and crashed. Showering is rough right now because the fluorescent tube in the bathroom is dying and not so much a light as a dim. It's a weird shape and we haven't found a replacement yet. So I've been showering and shaving with my bike headlamp sitting on the shelf for a little bit of extra light. I've been showering a lot, too, since it's hot and humid and I walk around in dress clothes all day. Because of the weekend trip I still don't have a bike. I have to get on that, too.
7/7
on Saturday I got up at maybe 9:30 to get to the bank for cash to pay some of my rent before I left town. I'm still finding my way around the neighborhood, so the errand took maybe an hour of walking around looking for a bank and getting back. I packed, then caught the subway to the Beijing train station. Scot and Catlin got off the same train from a different car, so we met up immediately and went to find tickets. There are about 5 different places to buy tickets, depending on where you're going, but after some searching we found our counter. Fortunately Scot had checked the railway website to get our train's number, otherwise we might have been in trouble. Tickets to Shanhaiguan on the T11 (T for Tebie kuai, or extra fast) were 47RMB, or about 6 dollars. They were standing tickets, though. To get a seat you generally have to buy in advance. We had time to kill, so we found lunch in the alley next to the station: a big bowl of noodles with meat and hot peppers.
We made it to our gate, running to make the departure time, but it turned out that the train was delayed and we ended up sitting around for about an hour. The train station is massive and crawling with people. There's nowhere near enough seating, so we sort of found a corner and squatted to avoid sitting on the filthy floor. I checked out the bookstore (Esquire in Chinese and a magazine about Chinese military hardware), saw the huge internet bar, and tried unsuccessfully to find a deck of playing cards for sale.
When we finally got onto the train it wasn't too full; we had plenty of room to stand. When people get up to use the restrooms and such the standing people sit down to rest their legs for a moment. We chatted with some other passengers and as a result ended up sitting maybe a quarter of the time. The main problem with standing is squeezing to the side to let people pass, and people do pass. They go to the area between the cars to smoke, they use the squat toilet restrooms that empty onto the tracks, they wander around, who knows, but there are constantly people coming and going. The train workers come through with carts of as wide as the aisle, which are hard to dodge, they bring brooms and sweep up trash on the floor, they adjust baggage on the overhead bins, and they sometimes checked tickets. A few standing passengers had tiny collapsible seats that they'd unfold and sit on in the aisles, which after a while seemed like a great idea.
It took probably 3 hours to get to Shanhaiguan. We left the station to look around and were immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to get us to take cabs or go to certain hotels or eat at the touristy restaurants. We remembered to go back into the station to buy our return tickets, and when we got out we heard, "Look, white people!' and were approached by the only other caucasians around, who didn't speak Chinese. It turns out, believe it or not, that they were from Johnson City, Tennessee. Small world, folks. So we took taxis with them to go check out the cheap Lida hostel we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. In Beijing they use a meter to determine your cab fare. In Shanhaiguan we negotiated a price with the cabdrivers ahead of time. The base flag drop price in Beijing is 10RMB, we did the trip to the hostel for 5 per cab. Small town living, I guess. The hostel had acceptable beds for $2.50 each, so the 5 Johnson City folks and I got two triple rooms. Catlin and Scot had brought camping supplies and were going to try to camp on the Wall. I didn't have camping gear, but I was game for roughing it with them until it started to rain just as we arrived at the hotel.
After dropping off bags we all headed out to get food nearby. Scot and Catlin and I have gotten into the habit of checking menus before sitting down at restaurants. We have a couple of criteria, a sort of basket or index like you'd assemble to measure cost of living or inflation. Our basket includes Gongbao Jiding (Kungpao chicken), eggplant strips, and a 600ml bottle of local beer. I'd like those 3 items to be under 30RMB combined, or about $3.75. So we turned down a couple of restaurants (one proprietor scoffed, "But where are you going to eat?" when we told her it was too expensive) before finding an acceptable place. We ordered a few dishes off of the menu, then Scot and I headed over to the seafood chill chest to point out things we'd like but didn't know the name for. So we ended up with mediocre squid, strange sea cucumber (which we're glad we tried but probably won't get again), and exceptionally good scallops in addition to our land-based food. Restaurants also don't seem to like to bring you rice early, the philosophy here being that you eat the good stuff before filling up on rice at the end, so we've also had to ask them to bring the rice early so that we get to eat it with our food. I haven't decided whether I should try to get used to the Chinese way or keep my portable America in this situation. I don't think it's a particularly important philosophy, as no one's really thought the rice request strange, so I might keep eating it throughout the meal. I talk about food a lot, sorry.
After dinner Catlin and Scot headed off towards the coast to find a spot to hide and camp, which we presume is illegal. The Johnson City people and I bought some beer at a corner store and, since the rain had stopped, decided to try to get on top of the wall somewhere in town just to hang out and drink. We got distracted, however, walking by a park where they were playing music and there were a ton of people dancing. There were also these multicolor lights in rows across the plaza, changing colors and blinking. It looked sort of like a runway. We decided to walk across their dance floor and check it out. We were immediately approached by a couple of people who wanted to dance with use, and then once we got through the crowd and sat down on some benches we were still attracting attention. I had a bottle opener, but I decided to be social and approach a couple of older people nearby and ask to borrow theirs. I chatted with them for a bit, then tried to make my apologies and rejoin the group, but they suggested I bring the others over instead. So I did, and after a few minutes the 6 of us were surrounded by maybe 30 Chinese all trying to talk to us. I was the only one who spoke both Chinese and English (besides on 16 year old kid who claimed to be 28 and spoke a bit), so I ended up running around and translating. The rockstar effect is apparently pretty common in China, but since I live in Beijing, I'm dressed like I'm not a tourist, I probably walk around scowling, and I'm not blond I haven't really gotten any of it, yet. So it was fun for a while, and my sense of humor does apparently translate, at least to some extent, but I can't imagine living like that. I think I might really like to try to live somewhere farther west at some point, so I might have to learn to deal with it. We bailed after a bit to make it back to the hostel before they closed the doors for the night, and just hung out in the room for a bit.
Ok, so the next day was much more exciting, but I'm really sick of typing right now and I'll leave it to post sometime tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
World in pictures
I haven't really been doing much, just sort of settling into the apartment and to work. I've watched 2 movies the last couple of evenings: Wang Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love and Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. I need English subtitles to get through them, but I think they're probably helping my Chinese at least a little bit. I wanted to try to watch some unsubtitled Chinese TV, but I can't seem to get the TV to work and my flatmate has been getting home late. Hopefully I'll get a bike this weekend and be able to get home before 7 or so.
Now that I'm beginning to get into a routine, the next priority on my list is learning some Chinese. I figure watching TV or movies can teach me to a certain extent, and I've been sorta fried after work each day, so it's been relaxing. I'm starting a campaign to learn words for food so that I have some clue what's in my dumplings. I might try to find a semi-formal language exchange partner or something.
I'm mainly posting now to put up a few pictures. I actually haven't taken too many yet. Maybe I'll get out this weekend and have some more adventures. Anyway, here are some from LA and others from Beijing.
Now that I'm beginning to get into a routine, the next priority on my list is learning some Chinese. I figure watching TV or movies can teach me to a certain extent, and I've been sorta fried after work each day, so it's been relaxing. I'm starting a campaign to learn words for food so that I have some clue what's in my dumplings. I might try to find a semi-formal language exchange partner or something.
I'm mainly posting now to put up a few pictures. I actually haven't taken too many yet. Maybe I'll get out this weekend and have some more adventures. Anyway, here are some from LA and others from Beijing.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Wearing a shirt and tie to work does NOT make me a grown up.
What have I been doing? Hell if I know, but it seems like I've been here a lot more than 4 days.
7/1
On Sunday Scot and Catlin and I went to the Zuzhi Park. We didn't really know what to expect, it was just a beautiful day following a day of torrential downpour. The rain got rid of some of the smog, which is nice, but I think the rain itself is pretty insidious. When my clothing from Saturday dried it had these white mineral-like deposits on it, and I don't really care to know what they were But Sunday was gorgeous and we were up early after our 8PM bedtime the previous night. We skipped the Great Wall because it was supposed to get really hot and we ruled out the Summer Palace because it takes an hour and a half to get to, so we picked a random park with a museum near it and went. When we got there we wandered around bamboo gardens for a little bit and went for a boat ride in a pond filled with lotuses, lilies, and dragonflies.
We left when we got hungry and the heat started to get to us and walked across the street to a really casual restaurant. When I say casual I mean there were guys sitting at a table shirtless and others ashing their cigarettes on the floor We got real kung pao chicken (gongbaojiding), which is nothing like its American bastardization, and green beans with hot peppers and bits of meat. Most of the meals I've had here are family style, with everyone eating off of plates in the middle, or at least moving food off of them onto individual rice bowls. After lunch we got yogurt and green tea flavored popsicles next door to the restaurant and sat in the shade on a wall by the river while we planned our next move. (As I read that sentence it sounds very picturesque, but the river is stagnant and filled with algal blooms and it runs parallel to a 10 lane road maybe 100 yards away. It was still nice, but let's be clear that this was a very urban river.)
We decided to go to an art museum behind the park, so we started walking. We tried to get off of the main road and out of the sun, so we took a shortcut through some back roads. That was the end of the art museum plan, because soon we were lost and having loads of fun exploring residential streets and commercial alleys. There were, among hundreds of other vendors, people selling street food like melon slices on sticks or rows of quail eggs fried in little compartments that line them up on sticks (which I'll forever think of as quailsicles). There was a pet dealer with bunnies in cages no bigger than the animal itself and turtles trying to crawl up the sides of rice bowls. I'm pretty sure that was a prostitute that smiled and waved at me and not an actual nail stylist, but I'm not sure. We felt (and were) very conspicuous carrying around high end cameras and wearing relatively nice clothing, but the only place I think we were really unwelcome was one side street where an old shirtless lady smoking a long pipe wordlessly waved us off. That was the first alley we tried to turn onto, so I'm glad we tried again or we would have missed an adventure.
We eventually made it back to the subway to meet up with a second group of 3 MISTI students who were in town for a couple of days. We were going to a dumpling place near Tian'anmen, so I got my first glimpse of the square as we walked over.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, the car market here is pretty strange. There's one brand, which I'm pretty sure is called Honde and rips of Honda models, with a logo that looks like a Star Trek communicator. Buick's are very popular and seem to be an upper-middle range car. Nissan's are higher end, and have great names like Bluebird and Sunny. The upper reaches of the market seem to be dominated by Audi. I see 10 black Audi A6s for every BMW or Mercedes, so I think that someone at Audi bribed a government official a while back or something, and once the government started using them they became the car to have for business types. I had been told that Beijing is decreasingly a bike city, and I think that's probably true, but they're still everywhere in swarms.
Anyway, Tian'anmen. It was big. There's a huge street running out front. Those were my first impressions. Scot and Catlin and I met up with the other 3, we had dinner at the jiaozi place, then wandered back through the gardens to the square. By that point it was dark and they'd lit the buildings up with little bulbs around the trim, giving the whole place a sort or circus or Broadway feel. That and the CCTV cameras that bristled off the lamp posts were my second round of impressions. We didn't stay for long; after a bit of walking and a lot of waving we finally got cabs to take us to Sanlitun, a bar district.
I was exhausted at that point, but we got a couple of drinks at a place off a side street called Butterfly. It ended up being less than half the price of the main drag joints even though it was only 100 yards away. Despite the fact that at that point my head hurt too much from the sun and dehydration and the long day to deal with haggling I was determined to try some baijiu (Chinese liquor), so Scot handled the negotiation and we drank out of the bottle on the side of the street while we waited for a cab. I did end up chatting with the cabbie, who confirmed that drinking on the street is completely legal, which is cool to find out. We got back and went to sleep. Well, we were about to go to sleep when Scot remembered he'd thrown out the air conditioning filters in the morning, thinking they were disposable, so he went downstairs to dig through the trash for them, then we went to sleep.
7/2
I started work. Catlin and Scot and I got rice porridge, wonton soup, and soy milk for breakfast, then we went our separate ways. I took a cab to work, or at least most of the way. My directions weren't very good, so I still ended up walking like 15 minutes after the cabbie dropped me off. I toured the office, scored zero in the introduction lightning round, then got set up at a desk. I don't think I'm staying in this office very long or I'd post a picture. I didn't do any real or interesting work, just some background reading. It turns out there are some younger people here in the office, at least for now. There's a Harvard sophomore here for the month, a Korean Kennedy School girl here for a fellowship, and a girl who just finished her master's who I think is employed full time. The four of us plus Dimitri, one of the younger UNIDO officials, went out to lunch on the corner, so I got to chat with them a bit. Mercifully, there's a coffee machine in the office. I hate desk jobs; I think I'll probably have a 6 cup a day habit by the end of this.
I took the bus back to Scot and Catlin's after work. Well, actually I took two buses to a corner 10 minutes from their place over the course of about an hour, but I wanted to try out the bus system. It was crowded and hard to navigate, but I think once I figure out some routes I'll take them more often. The fare for each of the buses was 12 cents, and I might have even been able to get a transfer or something that I didn't know about.
Scot and Catlin's Chinese flatmates cooked dinner, which was very tasty, then I packed my bags and moved to my new apartment. I don't really feel like talking about the place now, so I'll put that in a later post. For now I'll just say that it's on Chaoyang Gongyuan Xilu, the Chinese equivalent of Central Park West.
7/1
On Sunday Scot and Catlin and I went to the Zuzhi Park. We didn't really know what to expect, it was just a beautiful day following a day of torrential downpour. The rain got rid of some of the smog, which is nice, but I think the rain itself is pretty insidious. When my clothing from Saturday dried it had these white mineral-like deposits on it, and I don't really care to know what they were But Sunday was gorgeous and we were up early after our 8PM bedtime the previous night. We skipped the Great Wall because it was supposed to get really hot and we ruled out the Summer Palace because it takes an hour and a half to get to, so we picked a random park with a museum near it and went. When we got there we wandered around bamboo gardens for a little bit and went for a boat ride in a pond filled with lotuses, lilies, and dragonflies.
We left when we got hungry and the heat started to get to us and walked across the street to a really casual restaurant. When I say casual I mean there were guys sitting at a table shirtless and others ashing their cigarettes on the floor We got real kung pao chicken (gongbaojiding), which is nothing like its American bastardization, and green beans with hot peppers and bits of meat. Most of the meals I've had here are family style, with everyone eating off of plates in the middle, or at least moving food off of them onto individual rice bowls. After lunch we got yogurt and green tea flavored popsicles next door to the restaurant and sat in the shade on a wall by the river while we planned our next move. (As I read that sentence it sounds very picturesque, but the river is stagnant and filled with algal blooms and it runs parallel to a 10 lane road maybe 100 yards away. It was still nice, but let's be clear that this was a very urban river.)
We decided to go to an art museum behind the park, so we started walking. We tried to get off of the main road and out of the sun, so we took a shortcut through some back roads. That was the end of the art museum plan, because soon we were lost and having loads of fun exploring residential streets and commercial alleys. There were, among hundreds of other vendors, people selling street food like melon slices on sticks or rows of quail eggs fried in little compartments that line them up on sticks (which I'll forever think of as quailsicles). There was a pet dealer with bunnies in cages no bigger than the animal itself and turtles trying to crawl up the sides of rice bowls. I'm pretty sure that was a prostitute that smiled and waved at me and not an actual nail stylist, but I'm not sure. We felt (and were) very conspicuous carrying around high end cameras and wearing relatively nice clothing, but the only place I think we were really unwelcome was one side street where an old shirtless lady smoking a long pipe wordlessly waved us off. That was the first alley we tried to turn onto, so I'm glad we tried again or we would have missed an adventure.
We eventually made it back to the subway to meet up with a second group of 3 MISTI students who were in town for a couple of days. We were going to a dumpling place near Tian'anmen, so I got my first glimpse of the square as we walked over.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, the car market here is pretty strange. There's one brand, which I'm pretty sure is called Honde and rips of Honda models, with a logo that looks like a Star Trek communicator. Buick's are very popular and seem to be an upper-middle range car. Nissan's are higher end, and have great names like Bluebird and Sunny. The upper reaches of the market seem to be dominated by Audi. I see 10 black Audi A6s for every BMW or Mercedes, so I think that someone at Audi bribed a government official a while back or something, and once the government started using them they became the car to have for business types. I had been told that Beijing is decreasingly a bike city, and I think that's probably true, but they're still everywhere in swarms.
Anyway, Tian'anmen. It was big. There's a huge street running out front. Those were my first impressions. Scot and Catlin and I met up with the other 3, we had dinner at the jiaozi place, then wandered back through the gardens to the square. By that point it was dark and they'd lit the buildings up with little bulbs around the trim, giving the whole place a sort or circus or Broadway feel. That and the CCTV cameras that bristled off the lamp posts were my second round of impressions. We didn't stay for long; after a bit of walking and a lot of waving we finally got cabs to take us to Sanlitun, a bar district.
I was exhausted at that point, but we got a couple of drinks at a place off a side street called Butterfly. It ended up being less than half the price of the main drag joints even though it was only 100 yards away. Despite the fact that at that point my head hurt too much from the sun and dehydration and the long day to deal with haggling I was determined to try some baijiu (Chinese liquor), so Scot handled the negotiation and we drank out of the bottle on the side of the street while we waited for a cab. I did end up chatting with the cabbie, who confirmed that drinking on the street is completely legal, which is cool to find out. We got back and went to sleep. Well, we were about to go to sleep when Scot remembered he'd thrown out the air conditioning filters in the morning, thinking they were disposable, so he went downstairs to dig through the trash for them, then we went to sleep.
7/2
I started work. Catlin and Scot and I got rice porridge, wonton soup, and soy milk for breakfast, then we went our separate ways. I took a cab to work, or at least most of the way. My directions weren't very good, so I still ended up walking like 15 minutes after the cabbie dropped me off. I toured the office, scored zero in the introduction lightning round, then got set up at a desk. I don't think I'm staying in this office very long or I'd post a picture. I didn't do any real or interesting work, just some background reading. It turns out there are some younger people here in the office, at least for now. There's a Harvard sophomore here for the month, a Korean Kennedy School girl here for a fellowship, and a girl who just finished her master's who I think is employed full time. The four of us plus Dimitri, one of the younger UNIDO officials, went out to lunch on the corner, so I got to chat with them a bit. Mercifully, there's a coffee machine in the office. I hate desk jobs; I think I'll probably have a 6 cup a day habit by the end of this.
I took the bus back to Scot and Catlin's after work. Well, actually I took two buses to a corner 10 minutes from their place over the course of about an hour, but I wanted to try out the bus system. It was crowded and hard to navigate, but I think once I figure out some routes I'll take them more often. The fare for each of the buses was 12 cents, and I might have even been able to get a transfer or something that I didn't know about.
Scot and Catlin's Chinese flatmates cooked dinner, which was very tasty, then I packed my bags and moved to my new apartment. I don't really feel like talking about the place now, so I'll put that in a later post. For now I'll just say that it's on Chaoyang Gongyuan Xilu, the Chinese equivalent of Central Park West.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Marco Polo
(Written starting on 6/30. I don't feel like going through and editing for style or grammar right now, and I wanted to get something up from China, so here's a start)
I'm in Beijing right now at my friend Scot's apartment. He's generously putting me up for a couple of nights while I look for my own place. I only found out afterwards that he has a roommate, his friend Catlin, who I'd never met, who's been generous and enthusiastic about me being here. They're in the bed, I'm on the couch, and last night a couple of the MISTI China people from one team crashed on the floor. The MISTI crew had bad luck with illness and getting all of their luggage stolen and such, so I get the sense that they're licking their wounds for a couple of days before heading off to their next city for teaching.
6/28
The flight over here was uneventful. Mike gave me a ride to the airport after a 5AM Civilization session. Traffic going the other way was crazy, but not too bad heading west to LAX. They have metro stations between the two sides of the highway, with a lane to pull over and drop people off. I wonder how much use they get. I was stunned by the line of people waiting at the United ticket counter at LAX, but it actually moved along at a decent clip. I was worried about the weight of my bags, which combined was exactly 100 pounds on the way to LA, but I'd redistributed it and figured one of the bags was probably over the max of 50 and the other under. The guy at the ticket counter didn't even bother to put my big duffel bag entirely on the scale, so it came up as thirty odd pounds and he slapped the sticker on it. That saved me from shifting things or carrying more on with me, so that was nice.
Going through security, one of the TSA staff yelled, "Code bravo!", which was then shouted by the rest of the screeners in unison. Everything shut down and they made all of the passengers freeze. I was next to the security control station, so I got to hear descriptions come in over the radio: "5 foot 9, caucasian, brown hair blue eyes, no warrant." Then we had to wait at our gate for maybe 15 minutes because a woman on the previous flight had a heart attack. They had paramedics come to take her off, and we finally started boarding. I was a bit nervous because I only had an hour to make my connection at SFO, but when we were airborne the captain said we'd only be about 10 minutes late, which was reassuring. However, as we started to land the pilot came onto the intercom and said that the entire SFO airport had been put on hold for 30 minutes, so we flew in circles over Santa Cruz. I didn't worry this time because the attendants said that since the whole airport was on hold they'd delay the outgoing flights. Of course when we did touch down I saw on the monitors that my flight was boarding, so I got to sprint a little bit. I was the last person they let onto the bus between terminals ("Pleasse? I have to make my connection to China.") and the last onto the elevator up to the international terminal, so by virtue of sheer luck I made my flight, and my luggage even made it along with me.
6/29
In Beijing I got cash at an ATM at the airport (which seems to have only cost me 50 cents on a $200 withdrawal) and caught a cab downtown to Guomao. I followed the guidebook and suggestions from forums and made sure to get an official cab from the official queue, but I still got ripped off. I didn't feel like arguing with the cabbie over $10 when all of my luggage was in his trunk, so I accepted the fact that I'd been used and got out at the subway stop where I'd asked to be dropped. I had spoken with Scot about meeting him nearby, so after lugging all of my stuff the wrong way down the street through thick crowds and over broken pavement in the sweltering heat and humidity I finally got my bearings and made it to the spot where I was supposed to wait for them. I didn't get up the nerve to ask a random stranger walking by to use their cell phone to say that I'd arrived early (I would have, but no one stopped in front of the building to smoke a cigarette or anything, they all just hurried by), so I just waited. The guard at the building didn't seem to happy that I was hanging out there, but he accepted that I was meeting a friend. He just wouldn't let me sit down.
After half an hour Catlin came and introduced herself, then rescued me from the heat and we caught a cab to their apartment. I showered and changed, then we met Scot at his job in the Soho district. We met up with the 3 MISTI students to get dinner at a Muslim style restaurant, which was my first exposure to real Chinese food. It was pretty good, and definitely more spicy than I was planning on. Scot and Catlin and I were thinking about going to a bar afterwards, but by the time we'd finished with dinner and seen the others on their way I was exhausted and we just went back to their place to sleep.
6/30
On Saturday morning we all woke up early (as in before 7), in part because their room gets a lot sunglight. We all sat around poking at our computers for a bit, then met up with the same 3 people for breakfast. We got steamed buns stuffed with meat, rice porridge, and soy milk all around in a little place just down the street from the apartment, with the bill for 6 people coming out to $2.80. While Catlin and I waited for Scot to chat with the MISTI kids (he's the student organizer for their program) I decided I needed caffeine and so we went to the Starbucks across the street. I don't go to Starbucks in the US, but the dearth of available coffee shops drove me into its insidious embrace. One small coffee? $1.50.
We all met back up at the apartment, and after the MIT-China folks worked out some logistics for their next stop we all went to Wangfujing, a shopping area near Tian'anmen, to buy cell phones and cell phone accessories and such. After much haggling in broken Chinese I managed to get my dream phone, a monochrome brick with almost no functions beyond an alarm, a phone book, and a phone. If the battery life is good I'll be in love. So it's of course difficult to haggle for a phone. There's the phone itself (which I got them down to $46 from $62), the SIM card, and the card you buy to put minutes on the phone. We probably drove them nuts, a bunch of us there trying to get the best price we could and understand what we were buying, all of which was conducted in deficient Chinese. Scot's pretty good, so he sort of had the rest of our backs as we talked.
I split up with them after getting my cell phone, taking the subway up to Dongzhimen to meet a prospective flatmate. It had been drizzling, but at this point it started pouring down rain, so between that and not knowing which direction was east I caught a cab. Fan Xie (Bobby) seems pretty cool. He speaks pretty good English, which is a blessing and a curse, and we have a lot in common along the lines of social preferences. He's also really into art, which is something I hope to take advantage of in my explorations of the city. We had a beer in his living room and I checked out the place, then I told him I'd get back to him and left to meet back up with Scot and Catlin for dinner, which was leftovers from Friday night in their kitchen. We'd already eaten the messy noodle leftovers while walking down the street, so that left chunks of chicken and potato, some eggplant, and flatbread. They also don't have any silverware or chopsticks yet, so I ate with a measuring spoon. We decided to go out to a bar after failing the previous night, but we were all tired so Catlin suggested we take a quick nap. So at 8ish we fell asleep. I woke up at 2AM and took out my contacts and brushed my teeth, then went back to bed. We were all up at 6:30 or 7, feeling pretty sheepish and old.
I'm in Beijing right now at my friend Scot's apartment. He's generously putting me up for a couple of nights while I look for my own place. I only found out afterwards that he has a roommate, his friend Catlin, who I'd never met, who's been generous and enthusiastic about me being here. They're in the bed, I'm on the couch, and last night a couple of the MISTI China people from one team crashed on the floor. The MISTI crew had bad luck with illness and getting all of their luggage stolen and such, so I get the sense that they're licking their wounds for a couple of days before heading off to their next city for teaching.
6/28
The flight over here was uneventful. Mike gave me a ride to the airport after a 5AM Civilization session. Traffic going the other way was crazy, but not too bad heading west to LAX. They have metro stations between the two sides of the highway, with a lane to pull over and drop people off. I wonder how much use they get. I was stunned by the line of people waiting at the United ticket counter at LAX, but it actually moved along at a decent clip. I was worried about the weight of my bags, which combined was exactly 100 pounds on the way to LA, but I'd redistributed it and figured one of the bags was probably over the max of 50 and the other under. The guy at the ticket counter didn't even bother to put my big duffel bag entirely on the scale, so it came up as thirty odd pounds and he slapped the sticker on it. That saved me from shifting things or carrying more on with me, so that was nice.
Going through security, one of the TSA staff yelled, "Code bravo!", which was then shouted by the rest of the screeners in unison. Everything shut down and they made all of the passengers freeze. I was next to the security control station, so I got to hear descriptions come in over the radio: "5 foot 9, caucasian, brown hair blue eyes, no warrant." Then we had to wait at our gate for maybe 15 minutes because a woman on the previous flight had a heart attack. They had paramedics come to take her off, and we finally started boarding. I was a bit nervous because I only had an hour to make my connection at SFO, but when we were airborne the captain said we'd only be about 10 minutes late, which was reassuring. However, as we started to land the pilot came onto the intercom and said that the entire SFO airport had been put on hold for 30 minutes, so we flew in circles over Santa Cruz. I didn't worry this time because the attendants said that since the whole airport was on hold they'd delay the outgoing flights. Of course when we did touch down I saw on the monitors that my flight was boarding, so I got to sprint a little bit. I was the last person they let onto the bus between terminals ("Pleasse? I have to make my connection to China.") and the last onto the elevator up to the international terminal, so by virtue of sheer luck I made my flight, and my luggage even made it along with me.
6/29
In Beijing I got cash at an ATM at the airport (which seems to have only cost me 50 cents on a $200 withdrawal) and caught a cab downtown to Guomao. I followed the guidebook and suggestions from forums and made sure to get an official cab from the official queue, but I still got ripped off. I didn't feel like arguing with the cabbie over $10 when all of my luggage was in his trunk, so I accepted the fact that I'd been used and got out at the subway stop where I'd asked to be dropped. I had spoken with Scot about meeting him nearby, so after lugging all of my stuff the wrong way down the street through thick crowds and over broken pavement in the sweltering heat and humidity I finally got my bearings and made it to the spot where I was supposed to wait for them. I didn't get up the nerve to ask a random stranger walking by to use their cell phone to say that I'd arrived early (I would have, but no one stopped in front of the building to smoke a cigarette or anything, they all just hurried by), so I just waited. The guard at the building didn't seem to happy that I was hanging out there, but he accepted that I was meeting a friend. He just wouldn't let me sit down.
After half an hour Catlin came and introduced herself, then rescued me from the heat and we caught a cab to their apartment. I showered and changed, then we met Scot at his job in the Soho district. We met up with the 3 MISTI students to get dinner at a Muslim style restaurant, which was my first exposure to real Chinese food. It was pretty good, and definitely more spicy than I was planning on. Scot and Catlin and I were thinking about going to a bar afterwards, but by the time we'd finished with dinner and seen the others on their way I was exhausted and we just went back to their place to sleep.
6/30
On Saturday morning we all woke up early (as in before 7), in part because their room gets a lot sunglight. We all sat around poking at our computers for a bit, then met up with the same 3 people for breakfast. We got steamed buns stuffed with meat, rice porridge, and soy milk all around in a little place just down the street from the apartment, with the bill for 6 people coming out to $2.80. While Catlin and I waited for Scot to chat with the MISTI kids (he's the student organizer for their program) I decided I needed caffeine and so we went to the Starbucks across the street. I don't go to Starbucks in the US, but the dearth of available coffee shops drove me into its insidious embrace. One small coffee? $1.50.
We all met back up at the apartment, and after the MIT-China folks worked out some logistics for their next stop we all went to Wangfujing, a shopping area near Tian'anmen, to buy cell phones and cell phone accessories and such. After much haggling in broken Chinese I managed to get my dream phone, a monochrome brick with almost no functions beyond an alarm, a phone book, and a phone. If the battery life is good I'll be in love. So it's of course difficult to haggle for a phone. There's the phone itself (which I got them down to $46 from $62), the SIM card, and the card you buy to put minutes on the phone. We probably drove them nuts, a bunch of us there trying to get the best price we could and understand what we were buying, all of which was conducted in deficient Chinese. Scot's pretty good, so he sort of had the rest of our backs as we talked.
I split up with them after getting my cell phone, taking the subway up to Dongzhimen to meet a prospective flatmate. It had been drizzling, but at this point it started pouring down rain, so between that and not knowing which direction was east I caught a cab. Fan Xie (Bobby) seems pretty cool. He speaks pretty good English, which is a blessing and a curse, and we have a lot in common along the lines of social preferences. He's also really into art, which is something I hope to take advantage of in my explorations of the city. We had a beer in his living room and I checked out the place, then I told him I'd get back to him and left to meet back up with Scot and Catlin for dinner, which was leftovers from Friday night in their kitchen. We'd already eaten the messy noodle leftovers while walking down the street, so that left chunks of chicken and potato, some eggplant, and flatbread. They also don't have any silverware or chopsticks yet, so I ate with a measuring spoon. We decided to go out to a bar after failing the previous night, but we were all tired so Catlin suggested we take a quick nap. So at 8ish we fell asleep. I woke up at 2AM and took out my contacts and brushed my teeth, then went back to bed. We were all up at 6:30 or 7, feeling pretty sheepish and old.
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