Home base

Very glad to be back and settled for a while. This is supposed to be the hottest part of the year, and we get rain showers almost every afternoon and it feels tropical. We can buy mitao ('honey' peaches) on the streets now, and white pomegranates. I found figs the other day too.

Caught in the rain at Tianfu Square:

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace is more like a park, very cool and pleasant compared to the heat of the city centre. I grab a bus from Qianmen, near where I am staying, which takes over an hour to arrive. The above, I believe, is the Garden of Harmonious Interests.

View of Kunming Lake from Longevity Hill:



View from the lake of the Tower of Offering Incense, with a temple behind it.



Lotus flowers on Kunming Lake:



Traditional musicians playing in the Hall of Eternal Ripples. (Who makes up/translates these names? Seriously, who?)



Lovely and peaceful place, my favourite spot in Beijing so far.

Wangfujing and Donghuamen

This is a night market and snack street area to the east of the Forbidden City. The snack street has some good things but is mainly for shock value – you can watch a grill guy putting live scorpions on skewers. You can get really good chuar there (triple the cost of chuar at home) as well as grilled corn, takoyaki, and a very good sandwich that was like a cross between shawarma and a guo kui. I got some shan xi dao shao mian (shanxi style knife-cut noodles) which just made me homesick for the Chengdu version.

The tourist requisite scorpion picture:



The foreigner gouging is rampant here, worse than India. The convenience stores and restaurants along the hostel street have English signs and most services charge outrageous prices: sixty kuai for a 40 minute foot massage, seven kuai per kg for laundry, two kuai to send a one page fax. When I ask at the hostel about a cab to the airport they want to charge 150 kuai to call me a taxi, a fifty percent markup. The girl suggests I walk a couple blocks to the main road to flag my own cab and offers to write ‘I would like to go to the airport’ in Chinese for me. (No, that's OK, thanks.) Next time I am going to find a hotel that Chinese people stay at.

Tian An Men Square by night

Monument to the People's Heroes



Beijing has several of these Olympic Countdown billboards. (Chengdu has at least one as well.) This one is in front of the Great Hall of the People.

Quanjude

The little area-specific tourist map I got at my hostel shows a ‘roast duck restaurant’. I was very happy to find it was a branch of Quanjude, the quintessential Beijing roast duck.

Quanjude is famous not only because of the food but because it was a favourite of Zhou Enlai. The second floor has a ‘history wall’ with pictures and autographs of famous people who have eaten there. (The ambassador who wrote, ‘Very good restoron! Many happy!’ should have used his or her own language.) I got there early and walked past a row of a dozen servers who each greeted me.


A carver slicing up my half duck. You could hear the skin crackle while he was doing it. I had to flap an arm to get him to give me the wing. He finished, with a flourish, by adding the head which I nibbled on but didn't eat much of. The duck came with the traditional accoutrements - hoisin (maybe tianmianjiang) and slivered scallions as well as ketchup, shredded lettuce, and a little dish of sliced peppers, garlic, and pickles. The garlic was an inspired addition, great with the skin. They bring a little bowl of nearly white duck broth at the end. Some things are so good you don't notice you are getting full and when I left I felt like I would never have to eat again.

Forbidden City

Beijing's 'Ancient Palace' (GuGong) is among the world's largest and most elaborate, and is about six hundred years old. The complex also houses the Palace Museum. Getting in is 60 rmb, which does not include admission to other museums in the vicinity. (The audio guides are 10 rmb for Chinese and 40 for other languages.) It also does not include admission, after you get inside, to the hall of jewellery and the hall of clocks and watches. Anyways, it is undoubtedly a magnificent place to visit both for the buildings and for the contents. I spent most of a day there and did not get through all the areas that are open to the public.

Meridian Gate, with its five stone bridges:



The largest and grandest buildings are in the Outer Court. I found the smaller palaces and living areas with their gardens in the inner court much more interesting. My audio guide was supposed to sense where I was and could tell stories associated with a location wherever I wandered. It worked more than half the time.




Right most dragon of the mosaic Nine Dragon Screen, one of three or four in China. A dragon is the Emperor's symbol.



The Hall of Clocks and Watches was among the most interesting of the museum exhibits. I love old machines and many of them had moving birds, flowers, and other figures. (They were not running when displayed, but there was a movie that showed some of the collection in motion.) The pottery was also really fascinating - I love how something so beautiful and delicate has survived for centuries. Some of the neatest stuff in that exhibit was the shards and pieces from kilns in different parts of China showing the different styles.

The tiled roofs and painted eaves are the most gorgeous features of the buildings. The number of gargoyles indicate the building's rank in the complex; the highest number is 11. The gargoyles also keep the tiles in place.



The Crystal Palace, unfinished when the Qing Dynasty fell. According to my audio guide it was supposed to have a moat and double glass walls filled with fish.

Tian An Men Square

Took a few days out of my trip home to visit the nation’s capital. I am staying at the Far East hostel, because it is close to Tian An Men and is supposedly the best in the city. It is five times the cost of Mix in my hometown. North Americans are fascinated with history, since we don't have much, and my Dujiangyan visit was the only real history I'd seen in China so far though I've been living here for six months. Beijing oozes history, both ancient and modern though it is hard to know how much of it is really old. Tian An Men was completely rebuilt in the 70s even though the original was over 500 years old.

Mao overlooking Tian An Men Square:



Mao's Tomb, like much of the Forbidden City, is under renos and is closed til later this fall. Outside are statues celebrating the revolution.



The most interesting thing about Tian An Men Square are the people. In the morning, it is full of mostly Chinese tour groups and people taking pictures with the monuments. They are wearing identical hats or scarves and are following flags. In the evening, people come with their families to relax. There are dozens of kites flying and the monuments are illuminated. There are lots of foreigners here too, almost as many as in Hong Kong. I saw a family with the father wearing the skullcap, the mother wearing hijab, and the little daughter wearing lighted devil horns.