Long Island Ice Teas in Beijing
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2007
1
42
44
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
Beijing,
China
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Since this was nearly my last stop I decided it was time I tried out what this dorm room thing was all about so I booked myself into a 4 person mixed dorm. It was actually really nice and a great way to meet people. Fortunately I never had any snorers in the room as I have a feeling that would ruin the experience altogether. It is weird sleeping with 3 people you don't know in the same room but at least some of them were girls. I was probably the worst behaved out of anyone in my dorm room anyway coming in late at night etc. The hostel Dave was staying in was right next to Tiananmen Square and a great little spot. It is kind of weird walking across the biggest square in the world every day back to your hostel. Also strange is that there are soldiers who search bags going onto the square. Basically you have to go under a subway to get onto the square so they stop and search bags of a lot of the Chinese people who go onto the square but never once did I see them searching the bag of a western person.
Beijing was never really going to be about site seeing for me as I had been here before and had seen most of the sights. I did think that Dave might have got a bit more involved...he is probably now the only man to have spent 3 months in China without seeing the great wall!! I went to see Mao as my token effort at tourism; apart from that I just went shopping in the day times. I didn't even take any real photos of note...
On my first night there we hooked up with Summer from the Nanjing hostel and a few of her friends and went for a big hotpot. The hotpot contained a whole fish which arrived live in the restaurant after we ordered it. After that we went to Nan Luo Gu Xiang which is a street of the old Hutons (the traditional areas that are now all nearly gone from Beijing) where the Long Island Ice Tea experiment began once again (especially as they were 70p each in the 10 Yuan bar). I have no idea what it is with Beijing and Long Island Ice Teas. Last time I was there we had the same thing and I had always thought that it was Damian who has started it all but it seems that the whole of Beijing just drinks Long Island Ice Teas when they go out. As it was Dave's last night he was keen to go out with a bang, and bang he did, we watched the sun rise from the taxi back to the hostel. The next day we went for tea with Dave and Jing before Dave went off to the airport. We were having a laugh about how Dave would cope without me there to sort everything out for him so it was well funny the next day when I got an email from Dave saying how was he to know that he should have had a visa for Australia!! He got in anyway but had to get one in Singapore while waiting for his transfer.
Beijing is a shoppers heaven as long as you can put up with the hassle. The best place for rip off gear is the Pearl Market. It is full of Diesel, North Face, Rolex's etc but it is a nightmare. If you show the slightest bit of interest in anything that's for sale you get dragged into the shop and then when you try and get out the little girls will actually physically hold onto your arms so you can't get out. Not a place to be when you are not in the happiest of moods. But there are some real good deals; I got an Omega watch for less than a tenner and my sis a Gore-Tex jacket for 13 quid amongst other things. I also went shopping to some more Chinese markets where I got jeans for a few quid and to some up market Chinese shops where I got nice shirts that were more expensive but really good looking.
Beijing itself hadn't changed much since the last time I was there. Its quite hard to see how they will finish all the subway system upgrades and stuff before the Olympics in a couple of months but I am sure they will...they certainly have enough people to throw at the problem. Since seeing Shanghai one has to wonder why they didn't hold the Olympics there...it really is light years ahead of Beijing. For a start they need to get rid of the bloody cars in Beijing, the subway fares were actually lower than they were 4 years ago when I was last here and apparently this is a result of them trying to get people out of their cars. The subway system does seem to be near capacity though; when you ride it at rush hour there are basically trains queued up at the stations such that one arrives every 45 seconds or so. I never had to wait more than 3 minutes for a train the whole time I was in Beijing.
After Dave left I went out one night with one of the Israeli girls and then at the weekend had a couple of great nights out with Dave and Jing. Dave and Jing stay in an amazing flat in the Beijing suburbs. They have a massive balcony, 2 bedrooms, big lounge etc. They also have an electric scooter which they bring up on the lift to their 20 something floor flat every time they use it!! It was really brilliant having them to go out with and make Beijing much more fun than it would have been. On the Friday we went out to a pizza place within the workers stadium complex. The pizza we had must have been 3 feet across. It was bloody massive. After that we went to Sanlitun, where the evening action is. Sanlitun is just full of bars and nightclubs; probably 50% of the people out there are Westerners who live and work in Beijing. I ended up spending most of the night with a Mongolian Israeli girl and her mate and a Russian girl; where else in the world can you do that... except London maybe...We went out the next night for some Chinese food and to show Dave where the 10 Yuan bar was, we stayed and played dice with some locals till 2am or so.
I also managed to meet up with Jenny Zhang who used to run GV China. We had an amazing lunch of Beijing Duck etc and reminisced about all the people we used to work with.
By the time I was ready to leave Beijing I was getting quite tired from all the going out action and it really was an effort dragging myself back to the Pearl Market on my last day to get a coat for my sis. In the end I was leaving Beijing 12 hours before my visa expired on route to Hong Kong for a few days. I was genuinely sad to leave China in the end and feel like I eve after 2 months I have only touched the surface of this amazing country. I had decided to fly from Beijing to Shenzhen (just across the water from Hong Kong but cheaper to get to as you don't have to pay the airport tax) as I didn't have time for 40 hour train journeys anymore. I tried in vain to book the flight on the internet but after filling in all your credit card details on line they then expect you to fax your details to them as well; but they don't tell you this till 5 hours later and then the flight you booked has gone as they weren't holding it while all this was going on. I wrote them a letter telling them there was no way they would be the world's next superpower with this kind of bureaucracy and booked it for the same price though the hostel. 70 quid for a 3 hour flight is not bad at all really.
