I'd planned to travel with dave, a friend from London, during the may holiday. Dave, however, couldn't get the time off work, so I'll be venturing out alone, which scares other people more than it does me. I'm very brave, apparently. I booked the trip very late though, so it's tai gui le - too expensive... and short. I'll be leaving Beijing on the 3rd, flying south to a mysterious destination, hiking the next day, then, wait for it, staying in a four star hotel at the top of a mountain, and then walking down the next day, flying to Shanghai, staying three nights, and flying home. It's hardly ideal, but it'll be an incredible journey indeed. I doubt I'll have internet access much along the way, but I'll see if I can post something upon my arrival in Shanghai maybe. I considered taking the laptop, but given that everything that comes with me scales the mountain with me, I decided it could stay at home and rest for a week. the holiday comes at a cost (in addition to the already high cost of taking it in the first place). To get the seven days in a row off work, they shift a weekend. The Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are already a holiday, so we work the Saturday and Sunday (today), giving us two days in lieu. These are then taken on the Friday and Monday. Curious. Given the gorgeous weather, it's a favourable time for Chinese people to travel - most will return to their home town - which means that the travel network will be CHAOS. Woooooo, good times.
Oh, Mum, thanks for the chocolate!
Updates... the wall is doing well. My bike was stolen. The days are hot. People look at me funny when I wear shorts and jandals. I found some great new snacks at the supermarket. Two of my plants are in flower. Larry's parents are here, so the apartment has five of us living here. The day they leave, Kelly's parents arrive.
My Chinese teacher complained about me posting the photos in the previous post. She is upset that my family and friends in New Zealand, and anyone else who stumbles across my journal, will look at the photos and think that China has poor people, that China has sections of the Great Wall that are dilapidated, that China isn't the best. The fact that millions of Chinese people are living in villages and towns not dissimilar from the photos I took is irrelevant. The fact that there are people living in Beijing whose lives are worse than those shown in the photos is irrelevant. I'm supposed to put all that aside and show you glitzy pictures that make China look fabulous... and we can all pretend that the poor folk don't exist. The "real" China.
TiSP | April 22 2007, 17:23 Did you see Google's launch of TiSP at the beginning of this month? I almost forgot to tell you! click here to see what it's all about.
The Great Wall, quite by surprise. | April 21 2007, 22:45
We had an email arrive earlier in the week inviting us to partake in a Farm visit today. It seemed a peculiar invitation, especially for the fact that it was not only free to attend, but we were to be paid as well. Clearly there had to be a catch. I called the lady and discovered that really, she just needed some token white kids to hang out with her Chinese adult students for the day; there's nothing quite like learning English in context. It seemed sound, so I accepted the invitation and rocked on up this morning to Chaoyangmen subway station at 8:10am; I had to leave home before I normally get out of bed, yet the opportunity to escape the city had me in high spirits.
Plus, it's not everyday you get to see guys like this... Just, every second day. To be fair, life in the city isn't necessarily that far removed from life in the villages... Some families live in areas within the city, surviving locally without ever really traveling outside of their immediate community. Essentially, they're as isolated (though I suppose financially, rather than geographically) as the folks living out in the villages.
As soon as our bus pulled up, a crowd of locals started to gather. These kids were daring each other to say hello to us and just about died when I approached them to ask for a photo; it took no convincing to get them to gather for a photo. Later, they followed us up the hill and were asking me to take more photos. I guess it's not everyday they have foreigners come to town!
This was the first house I came across when I got off the bus. The chicken's name is Todd. (It was only after I gave the chicken a name that I realised that Todd is a boy's name. The chicken didn't seem to mind though.) The whole village looked pretty much the same as this - rocks strewn around, chickens being chickens and eating dirt, bundles of assorted sticks and stuff, derelict shacks filled with rocks, assorted bundles of sticks and stuff, and, chickens being... chickens. The houses were all alike, even down to the recent installation of identical solar heating tanks on every roof, seen here on the right. Aluminum joinery also made an appearance - I'm left wondering if some financial aid had been given to the town, buying water heaters for all the homes. But, you know, maybe they just sold a lot of corn and baskets.
These guys make baskets. There's a lady as well (Trish, if you were wondering). While we were off up in the hills, Frank made six bases. The guy in the photo, Malvin, makes the start of the sides of the baskets, then Trish does the tops. They don't believe in gloves - I'm glad I'm not the one holding their hand at the end of the day. Their baskets are ace, but I'm not sure really what they're good for - what, with having big holes in the sides.
Anyway, We arrived in the town and were ushered off to farmer's houses where we had a lunch of chicken necks, assorted meat product number seven, strange local plant, tofu, eggs, and other things - the food just kept on coming, including bing at the end - a fried dough that's a little like naan bread.
The farmer then took us on a walk to see the local reservoir, up the hill to see... the hill, and...the tree that had the leaves for the dish with the strange local plant in it, and... some more... hills. To be fair, the hills were cool, in a Chinese kind of way.
The highlight of the day, perhaps, was that Beizhuang is home to an old section of the Great Wall. None of us knew that until we arrived and saw it perched high up along the ridges of the neighbouring mountains. What do you do when you're at the bottom of a hill and you can see the Great Wall of China at the top? You climb the hill. Chinese girls climb really slowly. Some kiwi girls climb REALLY slowly. We eventually made it to the wall though and I have to admit to feeling just a wee bit special as I stepped upon it, a smile on my face stretching from ear to ear.
I'm putting some words in between these two photos to try and disguise the fact that they're quite similar pictures. You'll see some funky mountains in the one above, and a stretch of the wall, albeit a little small, in the one below. I mean, we've all seen pictures of the great wall, yeah? But if you are feeling a sense of frustration right now that I've posted less than adequate photos of the wall, and you'd like to see some better shots, leave a comment or email me and I'll amend the situation. Alternatively, google images has millions of pictures of the wall. I know that's not the same, but, you know... anyway, are you suitably distracted?
I'm tired of talking about the wall. I'll tell you a story instead. This is Billy. One day, Billy found a balloon. It was sitting on the floor. Billy wanted to blow it up. As Billy blew into the balloon... it got bigger... and bigger... and bigger... and bigger... and bigger... POP! Until it popped. Billy cried. Billy found a new balloon. It got bigger, and bigger and bigger, until it wa just right. Billy tied a string around the balloon. Billy was very happy. But along came a big wind, and blew the balloon away! The wind took it far, far, far away. It got smaller, and smaller and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until it was... gone. It went over a hill, behind a mountain, under the moon, and landed on the ground, beside a small stream. The balloon was very happy... until an alligator attacked! SNAP! The alligator snapped its jaws shut. But the alligator missed. The balloon landed in the small stream. The balloon was very happy, floating down the small stream... until a tiger attacked! Then the alligator attacked again! The alligator and the tiger both chased the balloon at the same time. But along came a big wind, and blew the balloon away! The tiger cried. But then, a strange thing happened; It started raining balloons! The tiger was happy. The alligator was happy. Billy was happy. And the balloon was happy. The end. Was that a good story? (the correct answer is yes). The ppt file is available, at 1.09mb, to anyone who wants to know what I've just been ranting on about.
I left off last time heading in to meet Geoff and David for dinner. It was neat to meet them, learn a little about them (given how little i knew), and spend some time with them. On the Thursday we went out to Feiteng Yuxiang - with the best shuizhu in town, apparently. It's a Sichuan restaurant - so, serving food from Sichuan province,in the South. The food is distinctive because it's so insanely hot, and simultaneously numbing. The heat comes from the chilli, while the Sichuan peppercorn (see wikipedia for more info, or this site for a slightly melodramatic description) numbs you down "subtly". Personally, I'd describe the experience as a mouthful of short-lasting local anesthetics. The plus side is that if you roll the peppers around your tongue for a bit, you can bravely eat a mouthful of chillies and look big and tough! We had so many dishes that they hardly fit on the table - ranging from little vegetable selections to jellyfish. We did our best to eat everything, but didn't really come close. They convinced me to join them for a drink in Sanlitun after, so we did so, at a bar I'd been meaning to check out for a while, having been told about it by a guy on the plane on the way into Beijing. Unfortunately, the last metro runs at 11:42 from Dongzhimen back to my place - so we arranged to meet again the following night. On Friday we opted for a vegetarian restaurant - Lotus in Moonlight. There are two branches in Beijing, though we went to the original venue in Liufang. Attached to the restaurant is a Buddhist bookstore - apparently monks frequent the place, though we can't vouch for that. We can vouch for the fact that the food is really pretty good though. Some of the dishes were... curious. The chefs are renowned for their ability to make faux meat dishes. We had sashimi, shrimps, some meatball thing, little tofu rolls with "ham" and "assorted meat" inside, and a range of other dishes. I could hardly tell that some of the items are not meat... it was a little perturbing. I can't say I really understand the practice, but all to their own. They're certainly talented, I'll give them that. I skipped the drink on Friday, opting instead to head home - I had work in the morning!
One of the local kindergartens had a recent food-poisoning incident, resulting in a number of children leaving and seeking a new kindergarten. Taking the opportunity, a little demo-day was organised in two different housing complexes to try and attract new families. I played the token white-kid again, dancing kiddy-aerobics, often alone, drawing crowds, for a couple of hours on two warm sunny spring mornings. As tedious as the idea sounded at first, it was fun. We even went out for lunch on the Saturday - though I did burn my mouth on a potato dish that I hadn't realised was coated in toffee - great taste, unfortunate consequences.
After lunch on the Saturday I went shopping with one of my teachers, Lily, in Wangjing - near to where she lives. I've been there before, but I was offered a ride, so thought I may as well go, to buys more DVDs if nothing else! Funnily enough, that's about all I bought - 19 films and series one to five of scrubs. I also stocked up on dried fruit, available there, but not here, for some reason. Included in this was a bag of sugar-coated dried carrot - which tastes, well, exactly like you'd imagine a small bag of sugar coated carrot to taste - weird. Exhausted, I went home, drank whiskey, and watched a DVD.
Sunday, I had great intentions to go out and do some more sightseeing, as opposed to more shopping. Lily opted to come with me again, this time, as it turned out, to Beihai Park. We'd planned to go shopping in Xidan, but, given the sunny weather, we, and four million, twelve hundred and seven other people, decided it was a great idea to go to Beihai Park. I exaggerate, of course, but it certainly was a busy park. Sited in the centre of the city, just West of the forbidden city, it's a large area of land, a lake, and an artificial, handmade hill. (My apologies for my prolific use of commas in these last sentences.) We had to pay to get in - but I got in as a student, which is rare here, given that I'm not a Chinese student. As we were winding our way up the hill, we heard peculiar sounds meandering their way along the trails. Rounding a corner, we came across a small pagoda, filled with retired Chinese folk playing an assortment of instruments. Two of them were allegedly singing. Check out the guy in the back playing the instrument that looks like a mini pipe organ... Most of the guys are playing a sort of violin. The woman who sang the opera for me, she's down the back in this photo, behind everyone else, holding a tambourine, jingling away to those fine beats. I asked Lily if this was Beijing Opera; the sounds matched the disturbing descriptions I'd been given. It wasn't. It was a Mongolian folk song. It was, um, beautiful. Anyway, Lily asked them to sing me some Beijing Opera, so they did. They invited me into their little musical space and played and sang to my little heart's content. I think I'll forgo a trip to a theatre to experience it; this was sufficient to last me several lifetimes. At the bottom of the hill and across a bridge we encountered this guy... We see guys like this all over the place, writing beautiful Chinese characters, with water, on the concrete - usually large tiles. Their style, apparently, is nearly flawless. It's a process not unlike my sand circles... they spend time creating intricate designs in a medium that will fade away. I had a go, first with some English - writing the word fly, in Times New Roman, size 4812. I was the only white-kid, again, so instantly drew a small crowd, with some children trying to guess the word, as I wrote it. To make the experience authentic, I wrote my Chinese name, in characters... with a little help from Lily. I can do it myself now, but I hadn't had the name long at this point! I've put the typed version up above, because it's a little difficult to read in the photo...It reads Jùn Jié.
Continuing on, we found a group of ladies playing Diabolo. I asked if I could have a go. They laughed. I said I was serious. They were utterly shocked that I could play. They were a little pissed off that I was better than them. They were not terribly impressed that everyone in the area stopped to watch me play and applauded loudly when I did tricks! I even had people filming me and asking to have their photo taken with me. No requests for an autograph... yet. Ha ha.
We consulted my special Beijing Book - The Insider's Guide to Beijing - to find a restaurant for dinner. Fortuantely, there were several options within a few minute's walk. Once again, we ended up with more food than we knew what to do with, for less than nz$10 each.
Teaching. Lately we've been learning about Spring, and Plants. I decided it would be fun to make kites. Because making stuff is fun and kites are fun. When I've made kites with CCC, we've had little kits, and the children were... older. Making kites with four year olds, after you've been up half the night preparing all the little bits because you didn't have the kits... well, that isn't exactly fun. We made them, we flew them, the children loved it. At the end of the day, that's what matters, yeah? It's just a pity they can't remember the word kite, or string, or... tail... or... anything kite related except for wind. Even then, wind is more often expressed with a wavey-hand gesture and a whistling noise... Planting beans was cooler. The kids like getting messy - just like when we finger-painted eggs for easter! Each of them had a yoghurt pottle, into which they put some soil and a bean or three, or a piece of potato. I put a little of everything, choosing the beans that had already sprouted, of course. So my plants are the biggest now - all the teachers are jealous. I make a point of showing them my plant, several times a day, so they too can enjoy seeing how great it is. We're also doing the old 'make the plant grow towards the light source' trick. However, they didn't quite understand the concept when they set it up, so I had to ammend it with a large black plastic bag and some rubber bands to shield the light from the plants, ensuring that they're grow out the side of the bottle and out the little yoghurt pottle chute that had been constructed on the side. (ni dong le ma? (you understand?) I hope so. I realise that I've just written a very poor description of all that. I'm sure you'll manage. I'm also sure that, if you don't understand, your life will go on merrily.)
I went shopping at Yaxiu - aka YASHOW. It's where the tourists go to buy jia de stuff - label ripoffs. Clearly some tourists pay far too much for items. Most of the sellers will attempt to sell you things for anything up to ten times what they're prepared to sell it for (or in one case, 30 times! silly lady.) I got a bit tired with being treated like a rich, ignorant tourist, so I walked away with just a pair of jeans really, which I'm really not all that fond of, to be honest. Oh well. I dropped my stuff off at a mate's place nearby and went out dancing with them. We ended up, briefly, at an eighties party that made me want to cry. We didn't stay there long. In fact, none of the clubs were great - small, smoky, average sound systems, average music... But, still, we had a good time.
In the ground floor of our building there is a hair salon. My hair was getting a little shaggy. On at least three occasions over the years, I've attempted to cut my own hair. I've had various university students cut my hair, some were drunk at the time. I probably was too. Surely a salon would do a better job? Indeed they did. After waiting a few minutes, I was put to the front of the line, given a great cut, had my hair washed, then dried and styled. I sat there while it was being styled, trying to guess how much it would cost me. Of course, I was way off, it cost me just shi kuai - a little under $2. I'm pretty sure I'll be back there before long.
I don't always get treated quite so well though. My bike really isn't all that wonderful, so I've been trying to buy a second hand one. I asked about buying a bike at one of the local repairs spots on the side of the road. "Leave your bike here," they told me. "Go with this guy and he'll take you to buy a bicycle." I thought maybe he'd take me to a shop or, some place where there were a range of bikes available. Instead, he drove me, on the back of his three-wheeler electric cycle, around several of the local repair guys, offering them cycle parts, and asking them if they had a bike to sell. Eventually he found a guy riding a bike along a little road in a town past the outskirts of the city. Long story, short, the bike had been stolen and he was offering it to me at a price deemed to be about three times what it should be. I drew a crowd. I didn't buy the bicycle. It was decided, though, that I'd go with our school maintenance guy, later that day, to see the bicycle and bargain for a more realistic price. I was told to take a rickshaw home. I didn't really like the idea. The rickshaw drivers also decided they'd exploit the fact that I was a foreigner and in the middle of nowhere. I gave them a dirty look and started to walk in the direction of our apartment. A motorbike pulled up beside me and tried to charge me some stupid amount. I laughed and kept walking. I offered him a fair price, to which he added his you're-a-foreigner tax of double my price, to which I laughed and kept walking. Angry that I was a foreigner, but not a stupid foreigner, he pulled up beside me and motioned for me to get on. This went on for a while, until I finally relented and rode home on a motorbike... good times. Anyway, we went to see the guy later, but he was adamant that his price was fair, because I was a foreigner and I could afford it. Once again, I did not buy the bicycle. Today I cycled with the maintenance guy to some other little town outside the city, only to find that the bikes he'd seen for sale in the morning were... gone. I did get to meet his four year old son, and see one of the other chefs from work cycling home. It's a surreal experience out there in these little towns - they're so close to the city, yet, it's like you've stumbled into a third-world town, with run-down houses, and public water supplies.
Life in Beijing really does have something new to offer, every day. I'm sure you could come and live here in one of the western estates, shop at the international stores, eat at the western restaurants, and hardly even know you weren't still living back home. Despite being a little disappointed, at first, about living so far from the central city, I've really come to love it out here, realising that we're so much better off for it...
Oh - so I know it's been a while since I last posted, but how busy I've been!
This post is simply to give you a sneak preview of the upcoming post MONSTER... (I have this one boy who, every morning when we're acting out animals, wants me to turn every animal into a MONSTER... it can't be just an alligator - it has to be an alligator MONSTER! or a giraffe MONSTER or a monkey MONSTER... subsequently, this upcoming post will be a post MONSTER!)
Dinners with Geoff and David Weekend KiddyAerobics Shopping in Wangjing Beihai Park Making Kites Planting beans Shopping at Yaxiu Clubbing in Sanlitun Shopping in Zhongguancun and Wudaokou The haircut experience And other assorted snippets of goodness - like the time I was taken away on the back of an electric three-wheeled cycle to buy a bicycle... that had been stolen.
Ah field trips... my favourite. This wasn't quite like any field trip i've seen before though! Last Tuesday I found out that on the Wednesday morning, my two classes were going to the "museum of water economising". Thus, it was so. Wednesday morning, we jumped into the school vehicles and set off across the city. Traffic in Beijing can be pretty mad, as I think I've said before. There is no such thing as red lights for bicycles... if you see a gap in the traffic - you just peddle on through it, otherwise you may end up just chilling in the middle of the road for a while. The middle of a Chinese road is not my idea of a good place to chill. Anyway, i digress. We drove for, oh, I don't know, a little over an hour I guess, around one of the ring roads, through a traffic jam, past zhongguancun (remember the huge electrical market I went to one other time?) and the universities in the area, and rocked on up to the museum.
This is the traffic jam. yes, that's right, that is a horse and cart you see. nice old chap... just out chilling on a wednesday morning, taking Francesca (I named the horse Francesca, for that is a nice name for a horse) for some exercise.
Inside the museum, it was a little like science alive, if you've ever been there. There was a range of displays, each illustrating a different point about water conservation. I was a little confused by the relevance of some of them, but allegedly they made sense when you considered the chinese information panels. The exhibit pictured illustrates the amount of water consumed by a range of ordinary household things, such as a washing machine, or toilet. I like the way that it shows this using the bottles of mineral water - this is more tangible for children than telling them the number of litres, as I've seen happen in other such displays. (Oh, while I'm on the subject of things that most of my readers probably don't care about... The wall, for anyone interested, is doing well. Each day it looks more and more like it's been there for years, except for the fact that it's not corroded, smashed, vandalised, or,,, ok, so it still looks a little new. But it's nice... ah, nevermind.)
Here is us at the museum... awww, aren't they just the cutest? so, the museum was... tiny. It took us about twenty minutes to see it all, before we went back, got in the vehicles and set off back to the kindergarten. Coming back was a little faster, taking only forty-five minutes maybe - just in time for lunch.
Last weekend was a bit of a quiet one. We all got together at a kindergarten in wangjing and spent the morning reciprocal teaching with some young chinese teachers. We did some dance stuff, and some songs and generally had a good time. Following that, Selina took us on the metro, about four hundred and twelve stops, to golden five stars market. It's a market in haidian district that sells pretty much everything. Of course, it doesn't sell nuclear submarines, or anything silly like that, but I did find a nice pair of converse style shoes there for fifty quai - about an nz tenner. They're possibly the ugliest shoes in the world, but that was my intention when I set out looking for shoes. I also got two puppets, a turtle and a hedgehog. I think I'm going to need a truck to being all my stuff home in.
Today in China, it's tomb sweeping day. I was a little confused this morning to see a man sitting by the side of the road with a small fire burning away, fed solely by paper. It's not uncommon to see people with small bbq type things cooking kebabs, but, I'd not seen this before. I found out later that he was probably burning money. It might have been jia de - fake. the general idea is that you burn things in ofference to your dead relatives, because they need material items and such in the afterlife. It's called tomb sweeping day because traditionally, this is the day that people clean the tombs of their ancestors. There are a few other things that ought to be going on... so i gather. check out this page for more info. I was going to find someone else burning papers, and take a photo to post on here... but then I thought that maybe it wasn't appropriate, so you just have to imagine it, alright? good.
Two nights ago, I was back in haidian district (which is an hour or so on the lightrail) having dinner with a friend. Most of the food was, average, but we had a dish called pineapple rice which I think is worth mentioning. A whole fresh pineapple had been hollowed out, filled with glutinous rice, blended with some of the pineapple flesh, and topped with the lid again. It has to be the second best rice dish I've ever had - closely following the astoundingly indulgent white chocolate rice pudding I had at CH once. I did have glutinous rice in vancouver, wrapped in bamboo leaves... that was pretty good, but, chuck some pineapple in there and you've got yourself a winner. Last night I went out for dinner again, but a little closer to home - the complex next door. I met a woman, Christina, at the local mall a few weeks ago - we've been chatting a bit and decided we'd have some food. She lives with her husband in a beautiful apartment on the 15th floor. We had a very pleasant evening cooking and drinking red wine and chatting about China and the world. Tonight, the social engagements continue... I'm meeting Geoff, my cousin, and his partner, David, for dinner. They've been living in Hong Kong for some years now, and I don't recall ever having met Geoff (though, perhaps I did when I was an oblivious child.) We're going to sichuan restaurant, which is super spicy from what I understand... *insert slight concern*.
Now it's time to construct my third batch of Glen's wok-toasted muesli. Find yourself in China with no oven? Have no fear, anything is possible if you have a wok! My toasted muesli, albeit fried, not toasted, tastes very nearly like the real thing. The last batch was not quite right, with the sunflower seeds being slightly overdone, so I've great intentions of getting it right this time...
Oh, one more thing about tomb sweeping day - its timing is based on the lunar calendar, and legend, and anecdotal evidence, has it that it is always cloudy on tomb sweeping day... However, it marks the beginning of warmer weather and sunnier days. Could you ask for much more in a holiday? A chance to burn money AND promise of warmer days ahead... good times. Hope all is well in the land of xin xilan -
ps. Dan *almost* has a baby... are you excited? I know i am.
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