Closed Weekend

This weekend is was a closed weekend for me, which means that we are not allowed to interact with other SYA students and that we spend the time with our host families. This week was also the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is a celebration of the end of the harvesting season. Typically people reconnect with family members and eat lots of moon cakes. My parents showed me around Beijing, so I got to finally got to play tourist and go visit all of the cool landmarks in Beijing. Here is a day by day breakdown.

Saturday

Early this morning my host father and I got on our bikes and rode to the Olympic Park, which is host to the Birds Nest and the National Aquatic Center (aka the Water Cube). Now if you have had a pulse for the last two months you have probably seen pictures of both of these, so I don’t need to describe what they look like, but I do want to emphasize how big they are. They are HUGE! The Birds Nest looks like the mother ship of some alien empire landed in downtown Beijing, and the water cube is just this huge blue…thing. They are situated right next to each other, and since we didn’t have tickets we couldn’t go inside either, but both are very visible from the street. Since the Paralympics are still running security outside was tight. There is a huge fence running around the entire Olympic park that keeps people without tickets a good half mile away from the stadiums and there are guards stationed everywhere keeping watch on the place. Since we went in the morning you couldn’t see the lights, but I am looking forward to visiting at night to see everything, especially the water cube.

Leading up the stadiums is a large park that goes on for about a mile. Inside there are sculptures and pictures made out of large pieces of translucent colored stone. We biked through the park and then back home. On the way home my host dad brought me to a back alley market that I would have never found on by myself. I waited in an alley while he bought some noodles for lunch. While waiting I was greeted by a fish salesman trying to say “hello” (except it came out more like “halloo”). I had my camera out and we started talking about it. I couldn’t really understand what he was saying but I took a picture of him and he seemed happy. My host dad came out and we went home and ate a delicious lunch.

After lunch my host mom and I went out. Now at the time I had no idea where we were going (she had told me but I had never heard of the place), so I just followed her onto the bus and got off when she did. We got off at another bus stop and waited there for two of her friends who were going to come with us. They took a while to arrive so I had some time to kill sitting at a bus stop. Out of boredom I decided to take pictures of people’s shoes because I could do it inconspicuously and it was entertaining. So what follows is essentially a photo essay of the shoes in Beijing – minus the essay.

Finally my host mom’s friend arrived and we got on a bus to wherever we were going (I still didn’t know). The bus ride took us about 45 minutes and we arrived in an area with a ton of other busses. I didn’t see anything astounding so I was still completely confused about what we were doing. I followed my host mom and her friends into a plaza where there were a bunch of people and tour groups. She pointed me towards the ticket booth to but a ticket to—ooooohhhh, the Summer Palace. Right. I had never heard the Chinese name which explains why I was so confused. So once I figured out that we were going to be touring the Summer Palace everything suddenly made sense. The Summer Palace, as the name suggests, is the place where the Chinese royalty went to cool off in the summer. It is also huge. Huger than the Olympic stadiums. The entire thing is 2 square kilometers, 75% of which is taken up by water. It is impressive. Unfortunately these 2 square kilometers weren’t enough to spread out the ridiculous amount of tourists that visit the place. You would have to walk for a long time in this place to escape the tour groups, which are loud and obnoxious. The palace would be awesome if you had it all to yourself. We walked along The Long Corridor, which is a long building with paintings on the ceiling depicting ancient times.

In the Summer Palace I was fortunate enough to participate in and ancient Chinese tradition – taking gratuitous amount of posed pictures in front of random landmarks! My host mom and her friends stopped at every opportunity and took turns striking poses for the camera. They got a kick out of taking pictures with me so I obliged and did the “飞机” (airplane) with them. Hilarity ensued. I think this position must be common in Tai Chi or something because my host mom nailed it while I wobbled and made a fool of myself. Take a look

This went on for the rest of the trip, so I played along and posed in some of their photos (although I drew the line when they wanted me to put on an orange scarf). After about two hours the whole thing was getting pretty worn out (for me, they were still having a blast). When we finally got back to the beginning we caught a bus back home and they put the camera to rest for a while.

Sunday

Today my host Dad and I left early again, this time for the historical hutong in the HouHai neighborhood. Hutongs are essentially old neighborhoods built in the Yuan dynasty which are defined by their narrow alleyways. They have become a big tourist attraction in Beijing, despite the fact that many of them are being demolished to make way for sky rises.

Unfortunately even the ones that are still standing have been heavily commercialized. Visa signs droop from every storefront and the stores mostly cater to tourists. Legions of chariots pulled by bikes wait around, hunting for tourists to show around the hutong (for a nominal fee). My host father and I were on bikes so we gave ourselves a tour.

The HouHai area is known for its vibrant night life. So much so, in fact, that it is the only place we are forbidden to go at night because according to Resident Director Jeff Bissell “The only thing to do at night in HouHai is get drunk”. This accusation probably had some merit, as my host dad and I biked around HouHai lake (which is surrounded by hutong), I would say about 75% of the buildings were bars. With this many bars one of them was bound to be named after me.

On the way back home we stopped twice, once in a little alley to pick up something for dinner and once at a fish superstore. This alley was jam packed with people, mostly on bikes. On either side of the alley were stores. Here is what my host dad picked out for dinner.

From Closed weekend blog post

Yes, those are pig feet, I thought we would eat them that night for dinner, but I actually haven’t seen them since we bought them. I have no idea where they went.

We also stopped at a huge fish mall. What I mean is that there were tons of different stores, all selling different types of live fish. They had koi, goldfish, manta rays, and tons of fish that I had never seen before. My dad bought a few fish (we have a fish tank in the apartment), and we biked home. What was interesting about both of these places to me was that they were so hidden. The fish store, which I thought was an art gallery at first because the entrance had tons of paintings for sale in it (don’t ask me why), and then opened up into this fish emporium. The front of the fish market was small and discrete, and you would never guess that there were more stores inside it. I guess what I am trying to get at here is that local knowledge means a lot in a city of 15 million people and where is seems like every district is a shopping district.

At home my host parents made dumplings (jiao zi) for lunch. The process was really fun to watch. First the dough was made the day before and let sit overnight (I’m not sure if this was a necessary step or was just done out of convenience). My host dad would cut a strip of dough and roll it into a big snake shape, where he would cut it into little pieces. Then he would flatten the dough like a pancake with the palm of his hand. After that he took a rolling pin and rolled the thick circles into thin little circles. From there my host mom would put filling in (ours had vegetables and some meat, but I can be anything really) and would pinch the dough shut. I tried to make one and they just laughed. Apparently I didn’t close up the dough correctly. Once properly closed they are boiled for about 10 minutes and served. They made like 200 so I think I am going to be eating dumplings for a while.

Monday

I guess Chinese people don’t sleep in much, because for the third day in a row my Dad and I left the house at 8:00 AM. Today we went to Tiananmen Square, probably the most iconic place in Beijing, if not all of China. We biked to the subway and then took the subway the rest of the way. If I may go on a little tangent here, I would just like to note how good the Beijing public transportation is. Bikes are literally everywhere and each road has a dedicated bike lane, usually separated by a barrier from car traffic. Bikes are cheap (as I noted in my earlier post, I bought mine for around 70 US dollars) and can be taken anywhere. Public busses are also ubiquitous and cheap (it costs 40 Mao, about half a cent, for me to take the bus to school). The subway is the least developed system, but two new lines were added for the Olympics and coupled with the stellar bus system you would be hard pressed to find somewhere inaccessible by public transportation. Unlike in the US both the subway and the buses use one unified card with RFID technology (I’m not 100% sure it’s RFID, but I’m not sure what it would be if it’s not) so instead of putting the card in a machine you can just press it against a pad. This might seem like a small difference, especially because the ticket system we use in the Bay Area (I can’t speak for the rest of the US) seems fast enough, but when you are trying to load 30 people on a bus while another 30 get off the few seconds is saved helps a lot. Back to the subway, we got on and rode it for a while until we arrived at the Tiananmen station.

The station lets you out right out at Tiananmen Square so we walked around the square for a bit. In honor of the Olympics, huge flower arrangements and signs have been put up with Olympic slogans and logos on them. The square was relatively empty, which is to say that there were probably 1,000 tourists there. There is not much to say about the square itself, except that it is really big. Next to Tiananmen is Qiananmen, which from what I can tell was two temples and a street. We walked down Qiananmen street, which had just been built before the Olympics. There architecture was cool and everything but there were no stores and the alleyways had been cover with wallpaper to make them look better. The street ended and we took the subway back home. On the way my host Dad showed me a store near our apartment. The store was another one with a deceiving entrance. Take a look.

Okay, it could be a small fruit market, let’s go take a look inside. Just go down a quick flight of stairs and...

Ops, wrong again. It’s a full-fledged grocery store underground.

More pictures here.

I’m having a great time so far. It feels like I have been here way longer than 10 days and I am starting to get into a rhythm with school. The best way to contact me now is probably by email, or by leaving a comment on a blog post. I think we visit the Great Wall next week so I will post pictures and comments when we get back.