Dear Friends and Family,
Ni Hao from Beijing! I hope this email finds you all doing well. Joe's last email covered our arrival in Beijing and our first day's visit to Tiananmen Square.
In the following two days, Madeleine, Joe and I have had a great time exploring our immediate neighbourhood and figuring out how things work. We visited the Hong Qiao market where hundreds of independent vendors have small stalls selling clothes, computers, appliances, Chinese carvings, art, fish and (most famously) pearls, all crammed into a five story building. You can buy a London Fog rain coat for $50 and Nike shoes for $15 (whether they are real Nike shoes is not certain).
We also wandered a traditional, Chinese street called Liulichang street - old, beautifully maintained buildings house wonderful stores that sell art, carvings, art supplies, antiques, coins. The street actually may be more of a dream of an old Chinese commercial center, maintained for tourists, than a reflection of what it really was like. But it is a beautiful place just the same.
We also wandered the traditional back alleys where many Beijing people live (called Hutong). Beautiful clay tiled sweeping rooflines top tiny cement brick, homes. The hutong seem to house working class folks, not the really poor. When you look through the doors lining the streets, you see a small courtyard or open air hallway leading to further buildings and rooms. Many generations live within. I don't think most people have running water and toilets (there are public toilets everywhere), and people heat with coal. Men sell honeycomb shaped coal bricks from carts piled high, which they pull along by bicycles. Streets are narrow and rutted and the houses are often toppling or very run down. The sense of community seems strong. While walking through the hutong, we feel conspicuous but not unsafe.
The Beijing government is demolishing whole hutong communities to make way for modern urban development - wide roads, modern shops and other buildings. I worry about what happens to the people displaced by this development. And yet, it's hard to imagine how Beijing could cope with the press of growing population without modern roads and plumbing. Everyone needs access to fresh food and clean water. We feel lucky to have walked through the hutong while they still exist.
We're getting more competent in this environment. We regularly use the subway (which really opens up the city for us). We have used an ATM. We've gotten a local cell phone number, and we have almost totally figured out Internet access. We have bought scotch tape, hair conditioner, a pair of shoes, a bottle of wine, 100g of nice green tea and a lot of restaurant meals. (By the way, we drank the Changchun wine last night and it was not bad!)
There have been lots of surprises. Beijing is loud but not as loud as I thought. It's polluted but it's lower on the "Black Booger Index" than Paris. Trash gets piled up behind buildings but the streets are quite clean. People aren't crammed together on the sidewalks. My expectations were way off about the number of tourists - we can literally count on two hands the number of non-Chinese tourists we've seen in the last two days (it's definitely tourist low-season now).
Only maybe one in ten people speak English. This is very good news for us because it means we practice Mandarin a lot. We are very glad we took our Mandarin courses before coming since otherwise getting around on our own would be more difficult.
Most main streets are really wide - at least four lanes, if not six, with another very wide lane set aside for bicycles. Crossing the street is an adventure. There are frequent traffic lights and crosswalks, but the cars don't reliably stop for either, so Madeleine has re-named "crosswalks" to "crossruns". If the cars don't get you, the bicycles might!
The bicycle is not only a common means of transport for people, but goods as well. People pile hundreds of pounds of products on their bicycles or on carts that they pull by bike. Bicycle-taxis are still common where you sit in a two-person cab behind the driver. I find this extremely neat, but I haven't dared it yet.
I should wind this up for now, but here is my example of Chinglish from a sachet of bathing salts in our room:
"Meifu Bathing Bag: Helping you to keep a jady skin Delicate and smooth Clean and comfortable (please see the back about the function explanation). UNCOMPLIMENTARY. Dear Guest, the consumption will be charged to your room bill."
We will try to write again soon!
-- Kim (and Joe)