Someplace between Beijing and Yantai: June 28, 2008

This is going to be a long long entry A) because I’ve a lot of ground to cover and B) I have 13 hours to kill.

Currently I’m riding on an overnight train to Yantai and it’s about a 13 hour trip-just as long as my flight from New York to Beijing! But I’ll write more on that a little later.

Last Sunday Tao and I went to go meet his family at his dad’s apartment and then go out to lunch. I’m pretty sure I convinced them that I’d either make a great Chinese wife or am a complete idiot, mostly because I managed to only say hello and good bye despite having taken two years of Chinese. Slightly embarrassing. Though, I can say I understood most of what they were saying, whether about me or not. They think I’m very tall and were surprised at my ability to use chopsticks so thoroughly (I think I’ll buy a couple of pairs so I can keep using them when I return to the states. They’re entertaining and soothing to eat with, as well as slightly-more-than-occasionally frustrating). They also discovered that I won’t eat pork, the reason I gave being religious reasons-which is true- and now I wonder if they might think I’m either Jewish or Muslim. Maybe more the latter since Tao and I had dinner with one of his Aunts that night at a Xinjiang restaurant-the area with a population of Chinese Muslims (guaranteed no pork for dinner…).

That afternoon was a day at an indoor market, which is a lot of fun. I’m better at bargaining, though still make a few mistakes. I meant to tell one woman I’d pay 20 yuan for a carving and managed to say 20,000. We laughed a bit at that.

My gift shopping accomplished for my trip, I can now focus the rest of my money on buying food. I’ve decided that if I’ve renounced vegetarianism for these 2 months, I might as well do it completely (aside from pork) and enjoy myself. Beef is a newfound wonder, though I’m more interested in trying the stuff that’s a little more out there. Like donkey, rabbit, or BBQ squid. However, it might take a while to get to the sea slugs and chickens/ducks/geese with their heads and skin still on…

Tao and I also went to Tiantan on Sunday, a large Buddhist temple for that used to be used for praying for a bountiful harvest. It was a big place with a lot of grass and trees. It doubled as a park and there were people doing Tai Chi, some ribbon waving thing, and classical style music practice. There were some guys with s(z)itars, flutes, and other things I didn’t quite recognize practicing together in one of the corner squares. It was pretty cool. Buildings were impressive as always and there are some pictures of it.

I have to imagine that the Beijing area makes a lot of money off these historic monuments and areas. You have to pay to get onto the grounds and then pay something in addition to enter each main attraction. Still, buy American and European standards, its chicken scratch and I don’t feel bad about shelling out 20 or 30 yuan to see things (maybe 2 or 3 US dollars).

I have another observation and after discussing it with some students, we’re still confused on how things work. Babies don’t wear diapers here. I thought the first few toddlers I saw with large open holes in their pants/shorts were anomalies but apparently, it’s not. We haven’t figure out what exactly is the Chinese system for smaller toddlers but one of the students say the older babies just run away from their parents and do their business. You’d think it’d be unsanitary for an entire city to have un-diapered babies…I will ask one of our professors at some point and see if they can’t enlighten us a little.

Monday night I ate dinner with Tao and his dad at a hot pot place. Hot pot is basically the Chinese equivalent of Fondue. You drop vegetables, meat, and other things into boiling water and wait for it to cook. It’s fun to do with friends, though it can be almost like a James Bond mission to find the piece of something you’re looking for and then manage to pick it up. Beijing is big on hot pot during the winter and sheep is the meat of choice to eat in it. I had some…wasn’t too bad.

We each got to pile a plate of things to put in the hot pot and since I don’t know what most things are, I try to go with what looks familiar/good. Some things are innocuous enough-leafy greens and stuff. Looks can be deceiving however. For instance, I found some tofu and what looked like brown tofu. I figured, “Oh, they must use a different sort of bean curd, I’ll try this.” Turns out it wasn’t. It was actually congealed pig’s blood, cut into cubs that look a lot like tofu. Of course, I’m informed of this after I eat it. It’s almost useless to ask what things are so my questions on food have been more streamlined; “Is it meat? What kind? Does it taste good?”. I should have employed this method in this case, but it looked familiar. Note to self: don’t make assumptions…

Classes are going well I think. I’m learning stuff and practicing my ability to say things. My listening ability is much much better than my speaking ability. Probably because it gets used more often. We also get a little bit of fun trivia on Thursday since we officially ended class a little early. Mostly how the Simplified Character system isn’t really what people think it is or how it came to be. Apparently, the CCP at the time told everyone they designed/had it designed to make it easier for the common man to read and write, which might be true, but most of the simplified characters were taken from the Japanese. The Japanese borrowed the characters many many years prior and made them simpler, then the Chinese took them back. Lol. And out of about 60,000 character combinations, only 1500 were simplified. So, not what most people not-in-the-know think.

We also learned a few jokes. I heard and (hopefully) can say them in Chinese but roughly they would be,

“Why is the sea salty? Because fish swim and get sweaty in it.”

“Which mouse has two legs? Micky Mouse. Which duck has two legs? All of them.”

Friday we had a test, which didn’t go screamingly awful in my opinion, and then took a trip to the Summer Palace. It was really foggy/smoggy that day so the pictures of the scenery didn’t really come out that well, but meh. That was also the first time the air really got to me. If you get to watch the videos I’ve been taking, that particular part has me coughing a lung or two out. One of the other guys calls his long bouts of coughing “An Ode to Beijing”. It was a long day of walking. So much walking in this country. I’m probably losing weight.

The Summer Palace was built by Empress Dowager for her own personal summer play place using funds that were supposed to be used to upgrade the royal navy. Needless to say, she was less than the most popular ruler. However, today, it makes an impressive tourist destination.

Today I met the other students at the Hotel for check out and got on a bus that took us to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City (called the Palace Museum here on all tourist maps). Tiananmen Square was pretty uninteresting actually. A large space. The coolest part about it was that I was where I’d watched a documentary on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in my FSEM and History class. There was the monument to the student revolutionaries of the various revolutions China has had. I saw the Chinese building of Congress and Mao’s tomb. We didn’t go see him since we didn’t have time and honestly, I don’t want to. Who wants to see an entombed dead guy who created havoc for decades? Granted, he did a bunch of good things for China too, but was a classic case of megalomania. We did see that famous portrait of Mao hanging about the entrance to Tiananmen. He wasn’t all that attractive either.

[Update: The body might be a wax model because they messed up the real one trying to embalm it. Yay, even better…]

The Forbidden City was pretty cool. I think I found the building Disney based the scene in the movie Mulan where she runs up the stairs on Khan to meet and greet the Emperor. If I didn’t, I’m just going to pretend it is. It’s a little strange to see the flaring dragon and lion studded roofs and in the same horizon, see sky scrapers and cranes.

I got an answer to my questions about the stone lions that guard the entrances to some buildings. The one on the left is usually a female and under her right front paw is her baby. I always thought it looked like the big was crushing the smaller one to death, but apparently she’s playing with the cub. The one on the right is the male and he’s got a ball under his left front paw. My professor didn’t know why that was. Something about play again probably.

At the F.C there were giant iron cauldrons places everywhere. One of our professors told us that these were used to collect rainwater in case of a fire. If a fire were to break out, men with little buckets would draw water out of these much bigger iron buckets. Seems inefficient and not very effective… which might be why so many buildings had to be rebuilt after fires. Burning incense for the ancestors and invaders have a tendency to cause fires.

Speaking of rain, apparently the everyday rain we’ve been having in Beijing is man made. They’re shooting chemicals into the sky that condense water and create rain. Seems really sketchy to me…but they’ve already got enough crude in the sky, why not a little bit more? ….

We had lunch after the F.C at a little place where there was kitten and it was CUTE!!! It was like a Mountain coon cat or something. So fuzzy and friendly. Lunch saw the serving of a fish with it’s head and skin still on. I figure this is actually normal in most parts of the world, but I honestly have no idea how to eat it. And it every piece of fish here has tons of bones in it. Yick and choke!

Speaking again of food and not making assumptions, I bought my first ice cream in China while at the F.C. It was a green bar and so I assumed it was apple. No. It was actually green pea. While it tasted alright, the idea of eating sweetened and mushed frozen peas turned me off. I mean, green pea?!? (apparently, dried peas are also a favored snack)

After lunch we headed toward the train station to hop on a train that would take us from Beijing to Yantai in about 13 hours. Of course, when we got off the bus and had to walk four blocks it was just beginning to rain. It was also one of the most crowded places I’ve walked through (the winner of that miserable contest would be the Museum of Natural History’s Hope Diamond exhibit). It didn’t help that I also had to pull my luggage along behind/beside me. There’s also the unpleasant habit of funneling people through one person wide spaces. It just doesn’t work when there’s hundreds/thousands of people trying to get through a door and the entrance is narrowed single-file 10 yards ahead of it. Mass public transportation in China is something I would go through a lot of effort to avoid. Anyone who knows me would understand the significance of that statement (I’m lazy).

The actual train was a bit of a shock too. I prefer that sort of shock to that of the train station mess though. It was a sleeper car and there were six beds in a 5ft wide 7 ft long 13 foot tall alcove. Basically, stacking people on people in a very small space. Hopefully some of the pictures the others took will find their way to me and I can share them at a later date. It was a quaint and homey place. By quaint and homey I mean cramped and no privacy. However, it was fun. We were allowed to speak English while we were on the train so some other students joined the people in my cubby for cards and story sharing. We tried to have a women sitting in the hall (which was very very narrow) take a picture of us but there were complications. After a while, she took a picture of us on her camera and promised to email it to one of us. Then she just took random pictures of it. It was a little odd, but we had figured out (and she also confirmed) that she really liked taking pictures and was an amateur photographer (she’d have to be to go through nearly 10 minutes of tries for a single picture).

And so ends my first stay in Beijing. I have to say there were pleasant and enjoyable parts to the city and living there, but I’m not terribly fond of it. It’s too big for this village-living college student. I also like looking at the sky and whether it’s blocked by smog or fog doesn’t make a big difference in my book. I like the big blue over me. Perhaps my next place of residence will be somewhere like Hamilton…only in Montana.