Dear Friends and Family,
Hi again from Beijing! We hope this finds you all well!
We’re continuing to have a good time although my enjoyment has been diminished by virtue of having caught a hum-dinger of a sinus cold. (I think the pollution might have caused it). It’s reminded me how important the little things can be in determining whether you have a good time. So I’ve dedicated today’s update to the small daily aspects of our existence so far.
For instance, while recuperating the last few days I’ve gotten to know our hotel room pretty well. It’s non-descript - like a worn-out Days Inn hotel. Hotels are generally expensive and ours is comparatively cheap at $60/night. House keeping cleans once a day. A bellman pushes the elevator call button for you, although you have to actually push the button inside the elevator for your floor. I don’t know why they think you can push the button inside the elevator, but not the button to call the elevator - I can’t ask because no one speaks English. The bathroom is totally normal with lots of hot water for showers. You should not drink the tap water in Beijing, but the hotel provides both cold boiled water and boiling water in awesome thermos bottles. We brought Starbucks coffee with us, so every morning we make a cup of coffee in our room. Afternoons, we drink Eight Treasures Tea, which consists of Chrysanthemum, green tea, longan, red date, chinese wolfberry fruit, raisin, crystal sugar, sun-dried apricot and brake.
We have a television with about twenty channels but only one is in English and the government runs it. Most of the programming is stuff like "Great Chinese Philanthropists", "China Rediscovered" and "Great Chinese Inventions". I really like the "Learning the Chinese Language" course, which is hosted by a Canadian called Mark Rowswell! He’s been famous as a comedian in China for many years now. His Chinese name is Da Shan (Big Mountain). The Chinese love him because his Chinese is perfect and he perfectly understands even the most sophisticated forms of Chinese humor, even though he’s really tall and has red hair.
Generally, the restaurant food has been great. The prices vary enormously. You can eat your fill of delicious Chinese dumplings for under $2 per person (including a beer) or you can go to a hotel restaurant and have an amazing meal for $40 per person. You can also spend a several hundred bucks for Beijing Duck but we have not yet indulged in that. You can also find lousy food at any price here. Today we had dumplings from a street stall that tasted like warm lumpy glue, although the twelve dumplings only cost fifty cents. When I was done, I would have paid five dollars to have the dumplings removed from my stomach...
Kentucky Fried Chicken is huge in China, even bigger than McDonalds. We haven’t bothered to eat at either KFC or McDonalds. I had a Dairy Queen Strawberry Blizzard the other day. The DQ employee turned it upside down before giving it to me to demonstrate its thickness, just like at home!
We have been increasingly adventurous with respect to food and (knock on wood) none of us have had any gastric complaints yet! If we are able to sufficiently build up our resistance, we might even try KFC!
While I was recuperating a few days ago, Joe and Madeleine went to a beautiful park for a walk and then visited Snack Street where vendors sell all kinds of snack foods, like scallion pancakes, sausage on a stick, or skewers of meat. In fact, one guy was selling skewers with roasted cicadas, sea horses and scorpions! Joe took a photo, so if you don’t believe him (I didn’t at first either!) check it out on the web site.
On another but probably related subject, Beijing has been upgrading their public toilets. The older ones are wicked yucky. The new ones are sparkling clean, smell minty fresh and may even have an attendant. Most of them are squat toilets but that’s ok with me. A squat toilet is essentially a porcelain basin embedded in the floor with porcelain foot treads on either side of the basin. It has a drain in the bottom and a flush mechanism. Usually, they are in individual stalls with doors, but unfortunately not always. Assuming privacy and cleanliness, I actually prefer them to normal toilets (sitting on porcelain in winter is chilly). Generally, finding good bathrooms has been straightforward and we’ve been relieved! (har har - pun intended)
Another small thing that I’ve found interesting is the issue of waste. Rather than throw stuff away, people repair and patch things. You see lots of watch repair shops, shoe repair shops, and tailors. The most obvious example is bicycles, which are far more prevalent here. There are so many old patched bikes. The fact that I find it strange to see old bikes says something about our disposable habits in North America. Similarly, in the traditional markets food is sold with very little packaging. But Beijing is rapidly modernizing and apparently this changes things. The other day we bought six moon cakes (like cup cakes) from a modern bakery. When opened, the box revealed six individually packaged moon cakes, each in its own plastic container, sealed in plastic wrap with a packet of desiccant in each sub package! Even to my urban Canadian standards, this was remarkably over packaged. Does modernization necessarily imply garbage?
We did manage a few "big" things in the last few days that I should touch on. We visited the Forbidden Palace for the first time and it was awesome. See the photos on the web site, but it’s amazing how grand it is. Vast courtyards give on to amazing ornate buildings. What a strange life the Emperor must have led -- just one guy born by chance to be the Supreme Being. The gardens were our favorite part but we caught those at the end when we were tired and so we definitely need to go back. We also visited a small paleolithic museum (slightly lame), a Science museum that was not too bad and a surprisingly good natural history (dinosaur) museum.
The dinosaur museum had great computer games for kids - my personal favorite, called "Can you outrun the dinosaur?" involved having the child sit on a stationary bicycle facing a computer screen. The child peddles the bike and an animated-child on the computer screen starts running; the faster the child peddles, the faster the e-kid runs. A T-Rex starts chasing the e-kid and the child needs to peddle fast enough so that the e-kid doesn’t get caught and eaten by the T-Rex. I thought this was hilariously nightmarish. However, I believe the e-kid inevitably escapes and never gets eaten even if the child stops peddling which is probably not very realistic or educational.
We also visited the Chinese Art and Folklore Gallery, which turned out to be a store-type gallery though prices ranged from $20,000 to $100,000. We were definitely "just looking". The items were gorgeous and it’s always good to know what the "real thing" is supposed to look like when I shop for cheap knock offs later.
Anyways, I’ve gone on long enough! Again, I hope you are all well. Feel free to respond to us directly if you’d like to pass along any news from home.
Love,
- Kim (and Joe)
p.s. I almost forgot the Chinglish Example of the Day -- taken from a poster advertising the construction of a new complex to house China’s government mass-media news agency:
News and Publishing City
The major shocking internationalized works
Of Beijing’s Landed Estate
The glorious commercial ceremony
Of International Mess Media
I don’t know what it means either, but I did think the reference to "mess media" quite suggestive.