Leaving Beijing
Trip Start
Jul 08, 2008
1
10
25
Trip End
Aug 15, 2008
Beijing,
China
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Monday the 14th, I met Sabina at a bakery near her new apartment called France Bakery. No one mentioned Bastille Day. Sabina is a Swarthmore alum who has lived in Beijing for decades and had me over for dinner when I lived there. We caught up and talked a lot about the city and urban planning.
I had some free time later on in the afternoon, and I still hadn't gone to a good jiaoziguanr (hole in the wall dumpling shop) yet. I went over to Qianmen to wander around and find one because I remembered there used to be a lot of small alleys and shops around there. When I got there I found that like everywhere else most of it had been torn down. They built a disneyland/chinatown style shopping area along the main street heading south from the gate. It's not open yet, but tourists were crowded around the construction gate taking photos. I wondered how they could possibly have it full of shops and create a vibrant area by the time the Olympics start. It wouldn't be the first thing they'd f'd up in Beijing though.
I did manage to find a surviving hutong and even found a good jiaoziguanr. I created a good scene for everyone when I asked for a cold beer. Chinese often serve beer warm in 20 oz bottles. If you want it cold, you say "bing pijiu" which literally means ice beer. The waitress brought me a bottle that was almost completely frozen. I tried to explain that I wanted bing, but not that bing. They didn't see what was wrong with the beersicle, and I had trouble explaining it. The dozen or so people crammed into the sweltering little jiaoziguanr had a good laugh along with me, and I ended up with a warm bottle and paying for both.
Later that night, I went back to Alex's. Rose served an amazing meal, and I got to play with the kids some more. Jasmine still remembered, "Uncle! Trot, trot. Again, again!" One of their friends was also over for dinner. She was Chinese but spent much of her childhood in San Francisco. She was pissed off at the Olympics and all the new government rules that came along with them. Her husband was a Scot who'd been living in Beijing. They deported him when the visa rules changed last month. As a Chinese citizen, she couldn't get a visa to go with him without showing 50,000 yuan in a bank account for six months. You have to wonder why the government is continually pissing off foreigners and foreign governments in the run up to its coming out party.
Tuesday morning, Jen and I tried to get visas for Vietnam but they turned out to not offer same day service. We'll try again at the consulate in Kunming. After that, we met up with another of my future MIT classmates for lunch. Later on, I had coffee with one of my friends from the FACES conference who was in town researching emissions standards for her PhD thesis.
Song Shaowen, my Tai Chi teacher, insisted on bringing us to the train station. It is on the opposite side of the city from her home, and our hotel was in the middle. If I hadn't wanted to see her so badly, I'd have insisted that it was unnecessary. She brought us fruit for the ride, found us the nice waiting room, and waited with us until it was time to board. We traded stories, and she gave us advice/warnings about the trains and the cities we were going to. It was very hard to leave.
Comments
Hey
It sounds like a lot of what they're doing in Beijing is like the West End redevelopment on steroids. Not an aspect of Boston I would recommend emulating...Good luck in your travels Xi'an and beyond! Also, you should check your email -- Tim sent you a message about an important letter you got from MIT. Double also, if you haven't been following the news from here, there've been some interesting developments on nurse staffing and the gift ban.