An appointment with the sky

An entry about Thursday 18 October. Some photos by me, some by D.

The end of D’s visit was fast approaching, and it was busy enough at work that anything very far away was out of the question, so we opted for Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven. It’s one of Beijing’s major attractions, but I’d never been there, and the new subway line has a stop right at the east entrance, so it was a perfect choice. And aside from a stiff breeze, it was a perfect day for sightseeing. As at the Summer Palace, you can buy either a simple entrance ticket or a “through ticket” which includes admission to the special areas that require their own paid admission. With two through tickets in hand, we went in. Maybe it’s always mellower here, or maybe it’s just past the peak tourist season, but we were happy to find very few hucksters offering postcards, Mao watches, guidebooks and the like.
There’s a long covered walkway that goes from the east gate to the main temple. Lots of locals seem to hang out there, playing cards or mahjong.
This old guy was stomping rhythmically and chanting, kind of an old school Chinese rap, I guess.
The obvious thing about this temple compared to all the other Chinese temples I’ve seen is that it’s round. Cool.
But seriously, some of my American coworkers had told me they didn’t much care for visiting Tian Tan, but I rather liked it. While it was far from empty, it was incredibly quiet within the gates, and very peaceful feeling. The buildings are impressive, and don’t resemble anything at the Summer Palace of Forbidden City.
Okay, I take that back. The standard elements of traditional Chinese design are all here. I guess I’ve seen enough of them that I’m now noticing very subtle differences.
The terraces leading to the main temple are decorated with dragons (representing the emperor) and phoenixes (representing the empress) in alternating layers.
It’s hard to get a good shot inside the big round building, especially with the crowd always gathered at the small openings you’re allowed to look through.
This is the circular altar where the emperors made sacrifices to ensure good harvests.
The central stone serves a more secular function now.
To the west of the temple complex is the Institute of Divine Music, where musicians were trained to participate in the ceremonies.
The first interesting thing about these buildings is that they are actually less than ten years old. The original music school went through some very hard times after the last dynasty fell, having served as medical facilities and barracks for troops, various government offices, and finally as raw materials for people to cart away and use for other buildings. In the 1990s, it was decided that the Institute was an important cultural site and should be restored, so old drawings, paintings, documents, and plans were consulted and the whole things was rebuilt. It houses a museum devoted to Chinese music as well as a concert hall for performances. Most of the explanations are available in English. Some ancient instruments are represented by real pieces, while others are just photographs. The variety of drums in particular is impressive and unusual. We respected the no photo sign, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

After leaving the music museum, we were about done for the day, so we headed back across the park to the subway.
And speaking of music, we encountered several groups of people making some around the place.
Here’s another in the series of pictures to cute to avoid posting.

There was a KFC across the street from the park gate, so we grabbed a late lunch before leaving that part of town. On the subway, D and I parted ways. She headed back to Wangfujing to pick up some gifts for people back home, and I headed for the office to catch up on developments and attend Chinese class, where we learned about expressing durations of time for actions.

Of acquisition and loss

Now on to the events of Saturday, 29 September. Pictures (some by D some by me) and more events added 10 November. How could I have forgotten the fireworks?

For the first time, I ended up taking a taxi to the Beijing Airport. All my previous trips the company driver was available to provide transportation. Not much to report here. The ride cost about $10, which included the toll for the expressway. Unlike my previous Shanghai trip, we got to board through a jetway directly onto the plane instead of having to take a shuttle out to the plane. And instead of going to Shanghai’s new Pudong Airport, we flew to the old one, which is called Hongqiao and is situated right in the midst of the city. It was very strange flying below the tops of buildings on the approach.

We had read about the taxi queue, so we followed the signs (no checked bags) and got into a big long line. There were about four lanes of taxis, with a uniformed person directing people to the next available one. There was also a guy who had a big car (not a standard taxi) who was trying to entice people to ride with him instead. I managed to tell our driver where we were going – it was pretty easy since our hotel was on a well-known street right across the street from a major park, and I knew the names of both in Chinese.
We stayed at the Radisson Hotel, a five-star tower that showed up in my pictures from Shanghai in August. It’s the one that looks like a UFO is landing on its roof.
There was some sort of confusion upon check-in. They seemed to think I work for Google. My reservation, which I made online a few days in advance, had got jumbled up with someone else’s. We ended getting upgraded from a standard king room to a deluxe king.
It was really nice, actually a small suite. We were on floor 18 facing towards the river, though other buildings mostly blocked the view. We could see a bit of the Pearl Tower and several other noteworthy buildings.
After getting settled, we went out to explore Nanjing Road, a famous shopping district I visited last time. We mostly just browsed, though we did see a few interesting things.
We were pestered almost constantly by people trying to sell us watches, bags, and whatnot, some of whom were very persistent. Like a store called Baleno that specialized in jeans and other casual wear for young people, but had a big display of items related to Doraemon and Astro Boy in the window, so like moths to a flame, we entered.
By the time we left, we had a sweatshirt and a T-shirt, and only a supreme exercise of will power kept the damage down to that.

Around the time it was starting to get dark, we met a friend for dinner. She took us to a nice Shanghai-style restaurant. It was on the way to dinner that D realized something was missing. She had been carrying her Zen MP3 player in her backpack, and someone had unzipped it and got away with the player. This put quite a damper on the enjoyment of the food.

Upon reflection, we have our own stupidity (or naiveté) to blame. First, there was no reason to have the Zen with us – we should have left it back at the hotel. Second, a backpack is like an invitation to a thief – easy to get into without being noticed, especially in a crowded place where there are jostling people. We’ve noticed many people who use backpacks actually sling them around the front. These are smart people. We can take some small comfort in the fact that Zen players are pretty uncommon here, so the lucky acquirer might have trouble finding accessories like a charger and USB adapter for it. They’re sure to find an odd selection of music on it.

Anyway, back to dinner. Our friend wanted to give us a good sample of Shanghai cuisine, and took us to a place called Shun Feng. It was huge, with well over a hundred tables, taking up what seemed to be an entire floor of a downtown building near the Marriott tower. Our waitress was a tiny little woman who was shorter than us even when we were sitting down, but she seemed to be in charge of that part of the place, ordering others around. Shanghai food is known for being sweet and rich, and we certainly found that to be true. We had a wide sampling of foods, meat, veggies and fish. The fish was a little spicy, and was our favorite. For dessert we had an amazing concoction of sweet black beans, glutinous rice and coconut milk which was ridiculously rich. It was either will power or sheer overstuffing that kept us from finishing it all.

Originally we had sort of planned on going to a pub or something after dinner for drinks, but after the theft, we weren’t in the mood for it, and wanted to call it an evening. But it was Saturday night in Shanghai, and it would be a shame to miss the lights along the Bund and across the Huangpu, so we made a quick little trip to the river.
Several things set this visit apart from my previous one. First, there was this:
It’s a big tourist boat with a water dragon theme, full of people cruising the river. Note the water gushing from the dragons’ mouths. Then we started hearing the sounds of explosions.
The Saturday night before a major holiday – fireworks! We hung around for the whole show, which lasted 20 minutes or so. Combined with the lights of the buildings, it was quite something.

After that, we said goodnight to our friend and took a quick taxi ride back to the hotel.
It was here that we discovered the addictive attraction of the National Geographic Channel. For China Day, they were doing a marathon of documentaries about this country. I watched one which I think must have been made at about the time when Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon came out. It was about one of the prominent wushu (martial arts) schools in China, and profiled several students from the ages of 8-18 or so. As far as I could tell from the credits, it was not an actual NG production, and while the subject matter was fascinating, I was constantly annoyed by the narrator’s consistent mispronunciation of virtually every Chinese name and word. It seems like a matter of simple respect to say people’s names right.

That was a pretty full day.

All aboard the Shanghai Express

Written 2 October and posted only much later. I have pictures to add as well, but will get to them later.

Update: Pictures added 6 November.

In the standard irony of my blog-life, the more I have to write about, the less time I have to write about it. So over the next few entries I’ll probably be tackling a wide variety of events in no particular order.

The quick recap, for those who don’t have my schedule memorized, includes:

• The end of my Japan trip to the World Science Fiction Convention.
• Various non-convention events and observations regarding the city of Yokohama.
• The arrival of D for an extended visit in Beijing.
• A quick trip to Tianjin to see the FIFA Women’s World Cup game in which the US beat England.
• Some sight-seeing, shopping, and going out with D around Beijing.
• A trip to Shanghai for the FIFA Women’s World Cup final game between Germany and Brazil, along with some sight-seeing, shopping, and going out in Shanghai.

For no reason other than it’s fresh in my mind, I’m going to start with yesterday, which was an amusing day in many respects.

October 1 is National Day in China, so most people had the day off. After a late night involving football matches, crazy taxi rides, and drinks in a UFO, we got up kind of late, and in spite of constant distraction from the National Geographic Channel Asia, managed to make it to the breakfast buffet before it closed at 10:30. Like the one at the Kuntai in Beijing all those months ago, it featured a wide variety of English, American, Chinese, and Japanese breakfast items, but all in all the quality was not very good (maybe because nothing was fresh by that point). Certainly not worth the $25 each it cost. We checked out just before noon and left our bags with the concierge, who, given our flight’s departure time, advised leaving the hotel at 7pm.
We started out by going to the multi-story shopping center next door. D was thinking of shoes. The streets were rather crowded with people out for the day off, and there was a magician performing on a stage set up along the sidewalk. Inside the shopping center was crowded as well, but at least you could usually walk without running into people. There was a sale going on, so D ended up buying two pairs of shoes at the Arnold Palmer booth. I didn’t even know Arnold made women’s shoes, especially cute non-sporting styles. With the discount, they came to around $75 for the both of them, and paying was a small adventure. In many of these Chinese shopping centers, purchasing works like this: the little shop gives you a slip or invoice that has the item number on it along with the price; you go to a cashier and pay for it; the cashier fills out a three-part duplicating form and stamps all three copies; the cashier keeps one, you keep one, and you take the other back to the shop; the shop takes the stamped form and gives you your purchase. As a further complication, only certain cashiers can take credit cards, so I had to traipse all around to find a place to use my American Visa card.
After finishing with Arnold, we strolled around some more, and I ended up buying a pair of shoes from someone named Alain Delon. I tried on a bunch of nice looking Jackie Chan shoes, but they didn’t feel right on my foot.
We eventually tired of that shopping center, took our bags to the hotel for safekeeping, and went outside. It was even more crowded out than before. When we came up from the pedestrian underpass to the Nanjing Street mall, it was a sea of people as far as you could see. Lots of them stopped at the top of the steps to take pictures, further adding to the lack of room to move.

We made our way to another shopping center just to get out of the heat and have room to move without bumping into people. We stopped at a Japanese style place for lunch, and then did some more wandering. We came across the FIFA Women’s World Cup Official Merchandise Store, where everything was half price. I bought a cool T-shirt. A bit later we came across a shop called Miiow where the sportswear has cat-oriented graphics. D bought a jacket there.

In spite of what you may be thinking, neither of us is really a shopaholic, and we were getting pretty tired of the endless stream of booths for oddly named brands. We decided to make our way back to the hotel and have some drinks in the lobby lounge while we waited until it was time to go to the airport. The crowds in the street had lessened somewhat by this time. It was nice to just chill for a while and sip a Manhattan, even if it was kind of a strange tasting Manhattan.
This is one of the decorations in the hotel lobby.

At a few minutes to seven, we went over to the concierge desk and retrieved our bags. He waved a taxi up, and when we said we were going to Hongqiao Airport, he asked what time our flight was. I said it was at 9, and he said with the street so busy for the holiday, it might take almost two hours to get there. Nothing to be done about that, so we hopped in and off we went. He took a lot of back streets, since the main ones were all clogged, and the first expressway onramp was blocked off, leading us right back into the surface streets. The second ramp was open, and we found the freeway to be only lightly inhabited, so we actually ended up getting to the airport in only ten minutes or so.

Check-in was simple with no bags to check, and we got to our gate with more than an hour to wait. We amused ourselves with people-watching and fashion commentary, standing the whole time because the waiting area didn’t have enough seats for a whole plane’s complement of passengers.

Just as a Fashion Police aside: The Number One Fashion Faux Pas all over the world seems to be the same. Over-tweezing of eyebrows. I don't think I've ever seen a natural pair of eyebrows that didn't look better than thin lines drawn on with a pen.

To return to the Hongqiao waiting area... There was a big Samsung TV showing a series of ads and movie trailers, but without sound it was pretty hard to tell what was being advertised sometimes. About a half-hour before boarding time, people started lining up at the gate. We all had reserved seats, so I don’t know why they felt the need. We took advantage of some vacated seats and got a little leg rest after standing so long.

We walked on easily at the end of the line, and managed to find space in the overhead bins for all our shoe boxes. We could tell it was going to be an interesting flight. Unlike the trip to Shanghai (where half the passengers were asleep before we left the gate), this cabin was full of very talkative people, including a number who seemed to be on their first air journey. The flight attendant had to keep coming back to one woman who was always speaking loudly and doing odd things like putting her tray table down as we taxied. We were sitting next to a couple of British guys from Beijing who had also gone to Shanghai for the football matches. As it was a late night flight, we only got peanuts and beverages.

A while into the flight they started a movie from Hong Kong called My Name is Fame. In between reading chapters of my book, I kind of watched it, reading the subtitles without listening. When they made the announcement to put up trays and return to seats for the descent into Beijing, the movie was still going, and the screen went blank before it ended. It seemed like a pretty good movie, so it’s going on the Netflix list.

In typical Chinese air travel fashion, the second the plane touched the ground, you could hear the clicking of seatbelts being undone and the noises of mobile phones being turned on while the announcement told us to remain in our seats and keep electronic devices off. The newbie flyer lady next to us stood up and opened the overhead bin to take out a package. A flight attendant came running, abruptly shut the bin door, and spoke harshly to the woman.

So all in all, an amusing day. I suppose some people would be annoyed by some of the things that happened, but part of surviving in China is learning to take such things in stride. You don't ask why, you just smile and accept.

I'll try to catch up on all those other events as soon as I can. I know the world is holding its breath, and I wouldn't want anyone to fall over from lack of oxygen.