Taking Beijing by Storm

A week spent with Clare and I’m energized again, and into the joys of Chinese learnings. She left on a Tuesday, and since then I’ve had a solid amount of Chinese classes in the mornings, followed by puzzled an unproductive study afterwards. There was a bit of a dilemma when I took my ‘placement test’because the lady said I had high level speaking but a very poor level reading. So she said I could choose what class I went into. I chose the harder one out of curiosity and now sit there bewildered by squiggly things on my page.

Anyhow it was uber (the Dutch student in my class has apparently revived this word) good having Clare about, and we took Beijing by storm. She arrived on a Wednesday, and we began by visiting the local bars around Beijing’s hutong areas – historic residential alleys surrounding the Forbidden City that have been around since anyone can remember (actually I think since the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century), and which have taken on new identities as upmarket touristy boutiquey alternative shopping and bar spots. As development of the city happens at a pace it’s these hutongs that are being cleared out to make way for apartment blocks – unfortunate, but I think the government does realise the value of the historic elements but is trying to balance this with demand for housing in the city.

Anyhow around these parts the bar scene is bizarre, and attempts to emulate America with neon‘Budweiser’ signs on every corner. Something’s not quite right though, and it’s as if the whole area is dedicated to catering for a taste that was observed once somewhere overseas. Upon stumbling across a delightful ‘reggae’ bar, we entered to find out what it was all about. Ironically mass‐produced red, green and yellow cushions adorned with Bob Marley’s face covered the comfortable looking couches, while Bob Marley’s ‘Legend’ played on in the background. On inspection it was found this was pretty much the only album they had, and that it was just the right length so that customers probably wouldn’t stick around long enough to hear it repeated.

That’s one thing that disappoints me I guess, as on another occasion this evidence of expression preened for the purpose of selling came in the form of ‘Pocky’. Pocky invited me and Clare to get our names written as a gift after a meal at a restaurant. Clare was reluctant as she had come across it before in her travels but I was curious so we had a look at his gallery. There we had our names written in Chinese by a calligrapher while Clare got shown piece of silk painting after piece of silk painting, with promises of a good tourist price. In the meantime I looked around the gallery and saw amazing paintings! They were what I thought were innovative and interesting modern Chinese art pieces. My impression was shattered after we left though, when I was told by Clare that she’d seen the exact same ones in Shanghai and Hong Kong, mass produced to my tastes. Anyhow apparently the 798 art district in Beijing (full of galleries that were once electronics factories) which I’m yet to visit, is something else and will not disappoint.



While sightseeing in China we hired some bikes to get around – by far the easiest way to travel if you’re in the city. You can easily get to a destination quicker by bike than by car because of the immense amounts of traffic. It’s becoming popular with locals to have a car, and a big imitation American car at that, but completely impractical as it often takes far less time by train or bike. Rode to Tiananmen, and JingShan Park overlooking the Forbidden City, and the historic but refurbished Qianmen area. Pretty much just lots of walking and cycling and eating and drinking Tsingtao beer (it’s actually cheaper to buy in restaurants than tea, and water sometimes).

Saturday was my birthday! 23 years old. It’s fairly aged. What better way to spend it than walking 8 km on the Great Wall of China? The most beautiful spot if you ever come here is to walk from JingShanLing to Simatai, crossing 30 watchtowers and going continually up and down crumbling stairs. The older part of this section has not been restored for 450 years and so the fallen bricks on the path make good stepping stones for weaving your way up and down the snow covered slopes. They warned us that it would be freezing, but after 5 minutes of the 4.5 hr hike we were sweating through our polar fleeces.



The walk passes from the Hebei province over into Beijing area. The people in the surrounding villages have no work, and the land is arid so they can only grow corn at the best of times. As a result they rely heavily on deliveries from outside the area for food, and a lot on tourists for their income. Our guide Fu An, lived about 2km from Simatai. Every morning at about 7.30 he would start to walk to Simatai, and then would make the 8km trek over the wall to meet tourist groups at about 10am (evidently it only took him 2 hours to complete a 4.5 hour hike). From then on it would take until 2.30 to walk us back to Simatai, when he’d then walk home and look after his kids and crops.

Similarly some old ladies relied on the Wall for their income. From the outset, a couple of ladies started following us on our walk out of JingShanLing. We were really confused, and didn’t know what they were doing, but soon figured out that the only way they made money was to follow us up the wall and try to sell us Great Wall souvenirs up the top. A particularly direct lady told me I looked like ‘nongming’ (a rural person in China, which I should probably take as an insult but I think was her form of complement) then proceeded to demand us to buy her souvenirs. We said no and a large bulk of sellers left us after about 10 minutes of walking. A nice old lady called Liang Bai Zhen kept following us though, and told us stories about the history in each tower and place that we passed. Where the Chinese had thrown stones at oncoming Mongolians, where the new ‘superhighways’ were being built to allow more and more tourists to come. She told us where the Hebei (her home) province ended and where she would have to leave us for fear of authorities checking her documents, and so after she’d diligently led us over 4km of wall we did buy some things from her. She was amazing though‐ I told her she should enter the next Olympics for long distance walking.



After returning home going out was a good and bad idea as we were knackered, but it was Saturday night after all. Being my birthday and with Clare looking exotically foreign, we soon made friends with the bar manager at an interesting bar in the Sanlitun area, where he provided glorious birthday beverages in a bucket with…fireworks. Only in China. An interesting night was spent mingling with local
Chinese girls who are still the most wholesome girls that I’ve seen in a bar since, and who were partial to Chivas regal mixed with green tea.

Ok so Sunday was spent with a headache while trying to appreciate ancient cultural relics with Ming Hua in the Capital Museum as well as Tiantan (the Temple of Heaven) but mainly the best sightseeing times I’ve had thus far have been in getting to places and seeing what you see along the way.

A week of class has blown my mind, and I’m in love with my Chinese teachers for all the new found knowledge they’re giving me. It’s all ridiculously hard though, and there are two very distinct groups of students. One group is people like me, who have been exposed to spoken Chinese and are sweet at listening and speaking but find reading horrifically hard. The others are Japanese and Korean students who are ace at reading because it’s in their language in some form already anyway, but who can’t listen and speak. I think I’d rather be in my situation, but it makes our class extremely diverse. Oh and I have class on Christmas day. Not cool.

Today is Saturday night and I’m recovering from a cold so hanging out by my lonesome eating leftovers and going to watch some cartoons on TV and hopefully understand.

Beijing Week 1- Wandering around

It’s the end of my first week here, and I feel myself becoming used to things. It’s a common syndrome that when you live in a city you don’t do any of the touristy things unless there is a guest as an impetus for going, and this is much the case for me in NZ where I had scarcely been around the country until Josie and Paul inspired a couple of road trips last year. Anyhow I feel like after only a week here, I’m starting to feel myself get live‐in‐city fatigue already. Not that Beijing doesn’t have endless things to do! It’s just that I can always do them later.

On Friday I met up with Simon, a long lost friend from NZ who’s living here now teaching English to Koreans and highschoolers. His Chinese is better than mine, as is the Chinese of his Korean, Japanese, English and Danish friends. I’m coming to grips with this, but still feel pangs of jealousy when they understand the locals without fail. Most of them are here studying as a part of their international relations courses back home, or are completing post‐grad in something similar. They stay in small, old dormitories stacked on top of each other and form an international in‐crowd. It’s quite different to the counter‐atmosphere felt in Western countries towards international students however, as here foreigners are more of a rarity and so are held up as more of an interest piece.

In fact Simon and his friend Sam were merely looking as they do in a restaurant somewhere the other day, when they got invited to do a screen test for a TV language series. Foreigners who can speak Chinese well are certainly held in high esteem, and today I was by chance watching a comedy show on TV featuring a tall white guy assisting in a skit (Chinese comedy is really hard to pull off ‐ and he had a perfect Beijing accent!) , and then minutes later I switched channel to watch the same white guy advertising school materials for Chinese children. He evidently had really good Chinese.

I’ve made a habit of leaving the TV on when I’m about the house, in the hope that I’ll subconsciously absorb some Chinese. It hasn’t worked all that well yet, but has made me realize just how different Beijing Chinese is from any other Chinese I’ve heard before. There are heaps of ‘R’ sounds everywhere where I’d never expect R sounds, so that the simplest sentence become incomprehensible to me. I wish I could say: “Can you please say that again without the Rs?” .



Anyway back to what I’ve been doing – hung out with Simon’s gang a bit over the weekend and came across a giant group of New Zealand political studies students from Victoria that Simon was showing around, and joined them on their end‐of‐study (they’d been taking a 3 week summer course in Beijing aspart of their degree) karaoke party in some extravagant Karaoke bar. Also on the weekend met up with Oddo’s good friend from school, Ming Hua, who took me on a tour of some amazing places and things to eat on Xinjiekou street. We went to see the museum of Xu Bei Hong, a famous Chinese artist who was pivotal to the integration of modern and Western art techniques with traditional Chinese style paintings. He has some awesome land and town‐scapes as well as specializing in stylized horses. We met up with
her friend Jing Yi, and the both of them are hilariously cool, knowing all the best places to eat – yum!

I reckon you can tell a lot about where a person is from by the way they move their mouth. Chinese people are a perfect example and when eating have the amazing ability to make all food look delicious. Chinese men and women move their mouths extremely differently when they talk and eat though. Most men open their mouths a lot and move their lips back and forth heaps. It’s hard to describe, but basically gives an air of ravaging hunger and self‐assuredness. The bowl is often tilted far towards the mouth, head close to the table, and big scoops go in. Most women on the other hand take thoughtful, tentative bites at their food, and their mouths don’t open with as much gusto but they still manage to make food look delicious.



Mm tangents. Back on track, yesterday I went to visit the Summer Palace with Mr. and Mrs. Wu. This is the perfect Beijing retreat, and is remarkably stunning and natural. The only thing to spoil the perfect garden was a giant LCD screen showcasing sport in the middle path on the lake’s eastern side. You could pretty much see it from anywhere in the vast park. The lake is frozen over now so people were skating and riding bicycles all across it – bizarre. The park has palaces built to the north of the central lake, as the whole park is where the imperial court would reside during summer. The current Summer Palace can be attributed to the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi, who rose to power by being Emperor Xianfeng’s favourite concubine during the mid 1800’s, and then ruling in the place of her young son when the Emperor passed away in 1861. She then suppressed the powers of her son and when he died
from syphillus, she named her nephew as regent, but imprisoned him then later murdered him. In the meantime she spent Chinese naval funds to extravagantly do up the Summer Palace (her living quarters) and even rebuilt a boat completely made out of marble on which to host guests. This was at the expense of the Chinese naval fleet however, which perhaps by her doing, then lost against the Japanese in the Sino‐Japanese war of the late 1800’s.



Alright so that’s my update, last couple of days have been quiet days where I took care of some chores and took strolls to try and find things that I need. I still haven’t found a good electronic dictionary though. Claire Milfordbear is arriving in Beijing tomorrow for a few days of her world tour and so will inject some tourist energy into me again!

The first blog is the deepest

Ok used to use Myspace....evidently this has become somewhat passe. Old people are adverse to facebook so we'll settle on blogspot. Wrote this post a few days ago after arriving in China, and the other one just now. Will update with some photo action soon!
___________________________

Thursday 4 Dec 2008

It’s been 3 days since arriving in China and only now am I beginning not to get scared of going outside. It’s a strange feeling to be in a country where you look normal but don’t sound normal. I’ll start from the beginning, as most diaries do – and apologies in advance if I bore you because you are the both the intended audience, and the unintended audience of my attempt to document my life for future‐Kai, who might be interested in what I did and ate, on a winters day long ago.

I arrived on an 11 hour flight from Sydney, where I rather coincidentally was seated next to an academic from NSW who had sharpened his teeth with a PhD in hydro scheduling in electricity systems (with some NZ folk by his side), and was now involved in research surrounding climate change mitigation strategies and was heading to Beijing to discuss the intricacies of this topic at a conference there. On arrival I took a train in the airport, that took me to….the same airport. Beijing’s new airport is huge. Mr and Mrs Wu were at the airport to greet me with a signcard with my name written across the top in Chinese and just‐in‐case in English down the bottom.

On the way home we drove past the Olympic area with the bird’s nest and all that jazz and after a while were at my new home for the next couple of months. It’s a beautiful little apartment in Hai Dian, and was filled with new furnishings for my arrival. I couldn’t believe that every detail had been thought of – from all the utensils I would need, to bacon and eggs in the fridge for my breakfast! Mr and Mrs Wu meticulously showed me how each of the plugs worked then left me on my way for the night.



The next day I joined them for lunch, and was shown the local supermarket and shops. I’ve never seen so much packaging on food before in my life. Everything that can be covered in glad wrap is, and everything that can be put in a plastic bag is put in two plastic bags. I find myself constantly staring at a maze of plastic and indistinguishable characters.

Ok so once not long ago I discovered I’m a very visual learner. So if I think of a word in English, I see it flash before my eyes in letters. This becomes a problem in Chinese because all of the words look really similar when written in English letters. I find myself often switching words around backwards or replacing consonants or vowel sounds just enough so I don’t make any sense. I think the only remedy for this is when I one day associate each character with a sound, which might or might not happen.

The second day I was shown a department store, and how to get to the nearest train station. I think I might invest in some Chinese clothes so I can blend more –my sneakers and baggy pants were decidedly casual compared to all the other girls and I felt I looked like a boy. Pretty much my strategy will be to do my hair nicer and wear boots and jackets with furry things on them. The furry things must be good for
breaking the icy wind too.

Today, with my new found knowledge of how to catch the train I ventured to Tiananmen square. When I first arrived in China I was gutted I look Chinese because then everyone doesn’t understand when I grin like an idiot and can’t speak. But today I realized it’s not actually that bad. The other alternative I realized is for everyone to stare at you as you walk past, and whisper “foreigner” under their breath. I was actually pretty stoked at my camouflage, and managed to help some lost looking Americans from Portland with my Chinese prowess.

Ok so I wandered around this grandest of grand areas that is eerily concrete and large, and am saving the inside of Forbidden City for when I have a friend to appreciate it with. So instead I went somewhere I was strangely drawn to, which is the Beijing Urban Planning Museum. Inside I was blown away by the huge scale of their miniature city model, which shows every last detail of Beijing’s cityscape across an entire floor of the museum. There were displays outlining the development of the city over time, as well as the developments that had led to the Beijing Olympics. I ended my stay with a “4D” (it’s like a motion master) movie, of what Beijing’s transportation network is going to be like in 2069.

Everyone here is immensely proud of the Olympics, and every self‐respecting street seller has little keyrings of the mascots to thrust at passers by. In shops I keep getting confronted by life‐size mascot soft toys, that cost about 500NZD each. I wonder who will be the last to stop selling these toys, or if they’ll just keep going forever.



Ok I’m about to go outside to visit the Wu’s. It’s freezing yet the street vendors near my home still keep open their stores and sit outside at 9pm, with not many people passing by. The whole day today I couldn’t stand still for very long because parts of my body would feel like they were hardening.