day one

06-20-10

11:15 PM

Today was such an exhausting day! It was my first complete day in Beijing and also an utterly free and unscheduled day, meaning of course I packed it with so many sights and activities that I’m exhausted right now, albeit extremely happy.

My day started early- maybe 6 (hard to tell- I forgot the time) with a nice shower and a quick trip outside to explore, and to find a bank to exchange money as I had exactly 5 RMB to my name (7RMB=1 dollar). My morning stroll was extremely pleasant if longer than I expected (banks didn’t open until 9- but they were open on a Sunday!) and I found myself coveting the dan bing being fried up on the streets. I spotted my first Chingrish of the Day: a hipster was wearing a t-shirt with a stereo on it that said, “Turn dow the music please”

The foulness of the weather has been greatly exaggerated. It was way nicer than Boston in the summer, where when you step outside it’s like you’ve been licked all over by a dog. Today was way less humid although sunnier. I went fob native and carried a parasol, because it was darned hot. This was actually a great idea. Before carrying the parasol, people couldn’t tell whether I was Chinese or American… after I started carrying it everyone just assumed I was Chinese.

Also exaggerated: the pollution. Skies were fairly clear and the skyscrapers were clearly visible. They look pretty much like skyscrapers anywhere, only they have unusual decorative elements on top. They reminded me of mustaches. One of the buildings had a Hitler toothbrush balcony and another one was swoopy and flourished like a well-waxed curly mustache.

I went back and got Katherine and we set out to exploring/looking for a grocery store. First stop: Electronics City, because we couldn’t find the store. It’s huge! It’s like a Westfield shopping mall-sized space full of little kiosks that all sell the same thing. There are upstairs and downstairs floors with the same thing. Since it was painfully obvious that this wasn’t going to get us any closer to finding a grocery store, I went up to a random girl sitting on the steps outside and asked her where the nearest grocery was. She didn’t know, but the guy sitting with her decided to chat us up, tell us the name of one, point us there, and then start to take us there. He asked for my number, so I stammered something about not having a phone and left. His directions turned out to be pretty good, we ended up at a superstore selling everything and we bought a cartful of useful things and exotic fruits to share- colander, two fruit knives of different sizes, washcloths, Tupperware, plates, clothesline and clothespins, dragonfruit, lychee, mangosteen, unidentified muskmelon, and much more. The total price was 109 RMB. Win! Two noteworthy things: 1. You need to weigh each piece of fruit on an automated scale and print a label before you check out. We got yelled at. 2. The lady checking us out put everything we bought into a single, ginormous bag. Huge! It just kept expanding, and so we redistributed everything later since it would have been quite a pain to carry.

We then scurried home with our loot (eating almost all the tropical fruit on the way back) and then decided to go look for the night markets/wander. These required two transfers on the subway line, which I figured would be pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, we walked the wrong way… We went into a restaurant for late lunch… and ducked out when we realized that it was a communal hotpot restaurant and it would be an impossibly enormous lunch for four, let alone two. But it goes very high up on my to do list! It smelled amazing and the broth had tons of chilies and Sichuan peppercorn in it (mala).

Then we went to a dumpling restaurant, which was very injurious to my pride. See, I used to think if you dumped me in China I could make myself understood. Think again, because I made a total ass of myself in that restaurant. The menu was entirely in Simplified, so I ordered the only thing I could read- shao long bao. Then the server was like… well, what kind? And I was like… there are different kinds of shao long bao? And she was like, DUH, look at this long list here? (pointing to the list of words above the order for shao long bao). And then I made the mistake of just asking her to give us whatever she thought was good and we’d pay for it. Then I got yelled at about how just because she thought it was good didn’t mean we’d enjoy it. I ended up with pork buns somehow or other. They weren’t shao long bao, but they were delicious and you could mix your own sauce of garlic in vinegar, hot chili bits in oil, and soy sauce. The buns cost 6RMB (a light meal for two people= ~1$).

We kept walking in the wrong direction and found a grocery store where Katherine bought a pastry “so good I’ll be dreaming about it tonight”- a kind of Chinese cylinder-shaped takoyaki with red beans in it (1.3RMB).

We then realized we were not going to the right place, so decided to turn back, when I saw an alleyway and motioned for us to go in. It turned out to be a corridor of tiny stores and very untidy restaurants.

We finally made it back to the station and bought passes to the night market district, which required one transfer. The Beijing subway system is nice- much cleaner than the T, and faster to boot. Unfortunately the night market was kind of a rip- things were kind of fancy and there was a long line of food vendors selling weird things like lizards and frogs and scorpions and silkworm pupae, but it was very boring, the prices were standardized, they were all wearing the same uniform and were clearly employed by the same corporation. We didn’t buy anything. Plus, the flies were fierce and that seemed like a nice vector for oral-fecal disease transmission. (polio, typhoid fever, rotavirus...)

Soon after that, we headed home and bought a large and seeded watermelon, which we have attacked. And now I’m bushed. It feels like forever ago that I exchanged that money.

My second Chingrish of the Day was even better than the first: a store named Clio Coddle (“Crocodile”), selling Lacoste knockoffs.