Dear friends and family,
We've been in Beijing for a week now, and we're definitely getting the hang of the place. We've got the subway system completely figured out, and have been using it daily (it's excellent). We've visited the Forbidden City, the Lama Temple, the Beijing Art Gallery, and various grand hotels and department stores.
I really enjoyed the Lama Temple. We'd gotten up early that day to catch a bus to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. But it was snowing that morning, and the bus driver told us he was cancelling the trip (making vigorous hand gestures demonstrating how the wheels would skid in the snow). So we went to the Lama Temple instead. (Tip for Beijing novices: Take the subway to the "Lama Temple" stop.)
The temple grounds were beautiful in the morning light with the snow falling. Hordes of workers swept the snow as it fell, using long straw brooms. In various chambers we saw many impressively large Buddha statues. People lined up in front of them to burn incense sticks and pray. The largest of the statues is 26 metres tall and is carved from a single tree! (That must be true, since there is a Guiness Book of World Records plaque on the wall.) The only fly in the ointment was that all three of us rented recording machines to explain the areas within the temple, and all three machines failed before we'd gotten halfway through our tour. (They gave us a partial refund.)
One of my favourite parts of Beijing so far is Wangfujing, an enormous, crowded, modern shopping complex complete with a Dairy Queen and a Paleolithic Museum. There are some huge bookstores there, including the best foreign language bookstore in Beijing (with the snappy name "Foreign Languages Bookshop"). It's well stocked with English books, including most of an entire floor dedicated to language study guides. I leafed through one called "Chinese for Economics and Trade", containing phrases and dialogues to help Westerners understand how to do business in China. It contained the following hilarious exerpt from a job interview:
Lin Yuwan : The last question, why have you answered our ad?
Wen Mengyun : I want to make money and fulfil my personal goals.
Lin Yuwan : What are your personal goals?
Wen Mengyun : I... I don't know.
Lin Yuwan : Thank you for answering our ad. You may go now.
Wen Mengyun : Am I accepted?
Lin Yuwan : Not at the moment. Goodbye.
We've been continuing to eat well. Today we had lunch at an excellent vegetarian restaurant run by Buddhists called the "Green Angel Restaurant" ("Lu Tianshi" in Mandarin, or as their business card says, "The Green Angle"). Their motto is "No smoking. No alcohol. No eggs. No meat." The food was excellent. We had a very realistic mock chicken dish made from tofu, eggplant with green peppers, and a spicy mapotofu with rice, spring rolls, and a very elegant tea made from lemon grass.
We also had a nice dinner yesterday evening, when we were taken to a Shanghaiese restaurant by a charming Canadian expatriate couple (thanks to an introduction from a good friend of ours in Ottawa).
A day or two before that we had a traditional Beijing lunch at a nice restaurant in the Jinglun Hotel called Sihexuan. The best part was the "eight treasures tea", which was an infusion of flowers, walnuts, sugar crystals, and I'm not certain what the other five treasures were. Sure tasted good though.
As you can probably sense, week one has been fantastic. We have no complaints, although there are some minor annoyances. We get regular phone calls to our room, late at night and early in the morning. If I answer the phone, a sexy voice says "Nihao! You want massage?" If Kim answers, they just hang up. Which is ironic, because Kim is the stiff one. Also, the pollution was really bad one day. I felt like I was getting a bad cold, wheezing, runny nose, etc.
But those are minor quibbles. We're having a great time here.
Chinglish example of the day (believe me, there's an infinite supply of these here): Seen on a giant sign at the construction site for a new subway station:
CHINA RAILWAY TUNNEL GROUP
Taking delication measures, exerting to construct delication
engineering and remarking new exploit for metro construction of the
capital!
Wonderful, isn't it? Signing off for now,
- Joe (and Kim)