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!