back in Beijing
OK! Sorry about such a long wait for an up-date.
I wanted to thank everyone I saw while I was in Vancouver. You guys are the best. I really enjoyed watching my friend Lucas play with his band on Main street. You Vancouverites should go to his site (on the right) and check out when he's playing next because it's really worth checking out.
So I'm back in Beijing. I've been here with my Vancouver friend, Nicole, since Saturday, January 28th. I had told Nicole about how sunny Beijing is, but unfortunately when we arrived, there was a super thick hazy coat of smog covering the capital, making it totally uninviting.
We left all our stuff at my place, but had to go to my students' apartment because Nicole's not allowed to stay past 11 PM in the foreign experts' building - how inconvenient. My students' apartment is about a 5-minute walk away, still on campus, but six floors up, so we got our exercise every morning and evening last week.
We visited most of the big touristy sites - Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Qianmen markets (side streets), Hutongs (small alleyways), Wangfujing (foreign shopping avenue)...I think Nicole got a good sampling of what Beijing has to offer.
It was really cold though. Sometimes we just wanted to stay snuggled up in our warm beds. We figured it would be warmer if we went south and there wasn't much left to do in Beijing, so we decided to spend the week-end visiting our high-school friend, Josh, who's in Nanjing.
We spent most of our Thursday looking for train tickets to Nanjing. We ended up finding tickets around 5 PM for a train leaving at 9:55 PM. We arrived in Nanjing around 9 AM. Josh was there waiting for us and he took us to his place.
I like Nanjing. It's smaller and cozier and looks better than Beijing. By "looks better" I mean it's more modern, more "finished," less buildings half-broken down. The pace of life is much slower, more leisurely. There are many tea houses and KTV (kareeokee) bars and Nanjingers know how to relax and enjoy themselves.
We spent Friday morning looking for train tickets back to Beijing. Easier said than done. We (Josh & I for more than two hours, then just Josh) spent around 5 hours going from hotel to hotel searching for tickets. Hotels have their own phone numbers that they can call to get "secret" tickets. Josh finally found a hotel clerk who found a train that left from somewhere far away and went through both Nanjing and Beijing to end up somehwere far away in the opposite direction (Inner Mongolia - doesn't that sound far away?).
Luckily it was a sleeper, which means both Nicole and I had a bunk to sleep in. At one point we had the option of sharing a seat for fourteen hours - one person would be standing at all times. We saw some of those trains - crammed with people sitting and standing - while cozily bundled on our bunks, glad that we weren't the ones on it.
In Nanjing we walked around a lot - in the cold (it wasn't much warmer in Nanjing). Sunday it actually snowed. We tried to walk across one of the longest bridges in China - 4.5 km long - but didn't get very far. It was snowing heavily. I bought bookmarks with pictures of the bridge on them. It goes over the formidable Yangzi river.
We were also invited to an acquaintance's of Josh, who owns a tea shop. We were taken upstairs to his "tea den" and drank two special teas and learned a lot about tea. It was quite an interesting process - lots of hot water is involved, a lot more than I previously thought. He used a bamboo tray with a hole in a corner where the spilled water drained into a tube into a garbage can. It was all very pleasant and lovely, until our host hoarked (if this is a made-up word, it means getting ready to spit very, very loudly) and spat in the garbage can beside him. It's still a shock when we hear and see Chinese men (sometimes women) do this, wether it's in the street or on the train!
We're spending today at my place - warming up, cleaning and getting ready. Tomorrow our plane leaves for the south of China at 8:45 AM, which means we'll have to get up early. Oh well. We're going to Guangzhou (in Guangdong province), one of my students' hometowns (further south and by the water), and Hainan (a tropical island off the south of China). All those places have an average winter temperature that's higher than 20 degrees. Yay!
Hope it's not too cold where you are. I wish you all the best. This is, after all, the Chinese new year. We didn't see much - we mostly heard the people celebrating by firing fireworks and firecrackers.
I wanted to thank everyone I saw while I was in Vancouver. You guys are the best. I really enjoyed watching my friend Lucas play with his band on Main street. You Vancouverites should go to his site (on the right) and check out when he's playing next because it's really worth checking out.
So I'm back in Beijing. I've been here with my Vancouver friend, Nicole, since Saturday, January 28th. I had told Nicole about how sunny Beijing is, but unfortunately when we arrived, there was a super thick hazy coat of smog covering the capital, making it totally uninviting.
We left all our stuff at my place, but had to go to my students' apartment because Nicole's not allowed to stay past 11 PM in the foreign experts' building - how inconvenient. My students' apartment is about a 5-minute walk away, still on campus, but six floors up, so we got our exercise every morning and evening last week.
We visited most of the big touristy sites - Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Qianmen markets (side streets), Hutongs (small alleyways), Wangfujing (foreign shopping avenue)...I think Nicole got a good sampling of what Beijing has to offer.
It was really cold though. Sometimes we just wanted to stay snuggled up in our warm beds. We figured it would be warmer if we went south and there wasn't much left to do in Beijing, so we decided to spend the week-end visiting our high-school friend, Josh, who's in Nanjing.
We spent most of our Thursday looking for train tickets to Nanjing. We ended up finding tickets around 5 PM for a train leaving at 9:55 PM. We arrived in Nanjing around 9 AM. Josh was there waiting for us and he took us to his place.
I like Nanjing. It's smaller and cozier and looks better than Beijing. By "looks better" I mean it's more modern, more "finished," less buildings half-broken down. The pace of life is much slower, more leisurely. There are many tea houses and KTV (kareeokee) bars and Nanjingers know how to relax and enjoy themselves.
We spent Friday morning looking for train tickets back to Beijing. Easier said than done. We (Josh & I for more than two hours, then just Josh) spent around 5 hours going from hotel to hotel searching for tickets. Hotels have their own phone numbers that they can call to get "secret" tickets. Josh finally found a hotel clerk who found a train that left from somewhere far away and went through both Nanjing and Beijing to end up somehwere far away in the opposite direction (Inner Mongolia - doesn't that sound far away?).
Luckily it was a sleeper, which means both Nicole and I had a bunk to sleep in. At one point we had the option of sharing a seat for fourteen hours - one person would be standing at all times. We saw some of those trains - crammed with people sitting and standing - while cozily bundled on our bunks, glad that we weren't the ones on it.
In Nanjing we walked around a lot - in the cold (it wasn't much warmer in Nanjing). Sunday it actually snowed. We tried to walk across one of the longest bridges in China - 4.5 km long - but didn't get very far. It was snowing heavily. I bought bookmarks with pictures of the bridge on them. It goes over the formidable Yangzi river.
We were also invited to an acquaintance's of Josh, who owns a tea shop. We were taken upstairs to his "tea den" and drank two special teas and learned a lot about tea. It was quite an interesting process - lots of hot water is involved, a lot more than I previously thought. He used a bamboo tray with a hole in a corner where the spilled water drained into a tube into a garbage can. It was all very pleasant and lovely, until our host hoarked (if this is a made-up word, it means getting ready to spit very, very loudly) and spat in the garbage can beside him. It's still a shock when we hear and see Chinese men (sometimes women) do this, wether it's in the street or on the train!
We're spending today at my place - warming up, cleaning and getting ready. Tomorrow our plane leaves for the south of China at 8:45 AM, which means we'll have to get up early. Oh well. We're going to Guangzhou (in Guangdong province), one of my students' hometowns (further south and by the water), and Hainan (a tropical island off the south of China). All those places have an average winter temperature that's higher than 20 degrees. Yay!
Hope it's not too cold where you are. I wish you all the best. This is, after all, the Chinese new year. We didn't see much - we mostly heard the people celebrating by firing fireworks and firecrackers.
posted by Caro at 2:01 PM
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