Beijing Town (Slight Return)

Choosing to visit China during the first part of October has both advantages and disadvantages. It's a national holiday, so lots of people will be out and about, and everything possible is going to be open for business. However, the crowds can be large, so you have to be very patient.

After being away from China for more than a year, I returned to Beijing in October of 2010 for a two week visit. Mostly I planned to visit friends, with only vague plans to check out a few of the sights I missed during the time I lived there. There was also the MIDI Music Festival, which I've already written about on my Sina blog in four parts.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  
• Part 4
  

During most of my stay, I was at a little guest house in a Xicheng District hutong.


Strange as it may seem, I'm actually a little unclear what the name of the place was. When I found it on the internet and booked my room, it was called Hutong Courtyard Hotel, which is a ridiculously generic name. The sign over the door says 四和居招待所 (Siheju Zhaodaisuo, or Siheju Guest House), the yellow sign says G.D. Hotel in English and Siheju in Chinese, and the business card I picked up at the desk says Good Stone Hotel on it.


In any case, it's a cute, if a bit dilapidated, courtyard hotel with a half dozen or so rooms surrounding an open area where they dry laundry and grow gourds. All of the rooms are hand painted with flowers on the walls.


The beds are old-fashioned style with minimal padding (not soft at all, but I got used to it). There was a flat screen TV mounted on the wall above the desk. They advertised free wi-fi, but the signal was so weak in my room I could never connect; I had to take my laptop to reception to get online.

I had a room with a private bathroom, though some of the other rooms had to share a separate bath.


Those are butterfly stickers on the walls. You can see that the shower is not enclosed, but open to the bathroom at large, and it all drains in one corner. In theory, at least. As with much Chinese construction, the slope is not really sufficient for quick drainage, so the bathroom floor was often wet. You have to be careful where you hang your towel if you want it to be drier than you are when you finish showering.

The shared bathroom did not have a Western style toilet.

The staff consisted of a lady and her boyfriend (if I understood correctly, she is divorced and has been with this guy for many years, but they never bothered getting married) plus a young woman who came around a few times to clean up. None of them really spoke any English, but they were very friendly and quite willing to deal with my bad Chinese pronunciation, limited vocabulary, and frequent pauses to look up a word on my phone's Chinese dictionary app. It was a little awkward and frustrating at times, but in the long run I feel that it helped my language skills a lot being forced to rely on my Chinese. Several times, they shared breakfast with me and never charged me for the food, I even had a beer out of the cooler one night that they didn't bill me for; they also did some of my laundry for free.

The hotel was also fairly cheap. I won't go into the hassles I had getting them to take my American Express card for payment - that's a story for another day.

The neighborhood around this stretch of Xisi Avenue seems to consist mainly of little hardware stores, so if you're in Beijing and need a light fixture, a ceiling fan, or plumbing supplies, this is where you go.


It's a very ordinary part of Old Beijing with nothing touristy to attract foreigners, though it's not too far from Beihai. Luckily, the new subway Line 4 has a stop very close by, which makes it pretty convenient to get just about anywhere. There were several restaurants within a few minute's walk, and one stop north on Line 4 is one of my favorite parts of town: the street full of music shops. Two stops south is the Xidan shopping area, which is a good place to buy clothes and books.

During my first week there, it was the national holiday, so the other rooms were full. A large family from Nanjing was there, and they brought their little dog.


We chatted one evening in the courtyard. One of them was a college student who knew a bit of English, but the chatty old man didn't, and his accent was difficult for me to understand. I showed them some of the pictures on my camera, and they insisted on posing the dog for me. They claimed that Nanjing dogs are better than Beijing dogs, but I'm not sure in what way. When I told them I was from 西雅图 (Xiyatu, Seattle), they of course mentioned Sleepless in Seattle, which seems to be a movie everyone in China has seen.

In Beijing, October's weather is generally pretty pleasant. It rained a couple of times while I was there, but was nice most days, following the usual pattern of clear skies after a rainfall, gradually diminishing air quality over the course of a week or so, then another rain. By the end of my stay, it was starting to get a little chilly in the evenings, but not so much that I needed to see if the heater in my room worked.

No reservations, part 3

Back to part 2.

2008-10-06

Once it was daylight, we saw we were passing through a mixed agricultural and industrial area. Corn dominated.
Around 7am we arrived at Pingyao. From here on out, we had no reservations for transportation or lodging. At the little train station, there were a bunch of taxis, which in Pingyao are mostly either open electric golf-cart-like vehicles or three wheeled things kind of like modified motorcycles. We found one and asked him to take us to a hotel in Gucheng (the Old Town), haggling for the price until he agreed to ¥2 per person. It was not a long ride, but it was really cold in the open car.
Once we passed inside the city wall, we could see why there were very few full-sized cars as taxis. The streets are very narrow and mostly dedicated to pedestrians, bicycles, and scooters along with the taxis. There are barriers preventing any wheeled vehicles from proceeding, and if you’re on a bike you have to pick it up to get past.
We paid the driver and looked at the first hotel, then three others. Actually they’re called guest houses, and are not really like a standard hotel. There are a bunch of them around the old part of town, just as there were in Lijiang.
We settled on the second place, which for no reason I could tell, was called the Catholic Guesthouse in English (the Chinese is 永庆斋客栈 Yongqingzhai Kezhan, which has nothing to do with religion as far as I can tell, something like Perpetual Festival Guesthouse), and they agreed to let us stay for a ridiculously low price.
We got two rooms like this one for two nights for a total of ¥100 (a little less than US$15). Right, that is ¥25 per night per room.
It had a Western style toilet which was a bit old and stained, but worked just fine. What we didn’t check was the hot water. Apparently they claimed hot water was available 24 hours.
These guest houses all feature at least one courtyard, and are basically repurposed old buildings.

So we checked in (and they never had me fill out the government’s foreigner temporary residence form), dropped off our bags, had a quick breakfast there, and went out to take care of our first order of business.
We rented four bicycles for the day, and rode off to the train station to arrange for the next leg of our journey.
This is us discovering that there were no seats available for any trains to Datong on the 8th. Well, there’s always buses, right? We asked direction to the bus station, and rode there to see if we would have better luck.
As it happens, bus tickets can only be purchased on the day of travel, so we checked out the schedule and prices, and headed back towards the Old Town.

We passed through what you might call Auto Row, where a bunch of new and used vehicle sales and repair shops were located.
This type of vehicle seems to be the area’s equivalent of the American pickup truck: the farmer’s general purpose work and delivery machine. We saw them all over the place, sometimes loaded with truly amazing cargoes. There are also electric versions, including many outfitted as taxis.

Aside from its Old Town, Pingyao is famous for a type of preserved beef, so we rode to the factory store for the most famous brand, but all the staff were on their lunch break and the store was closed. While we stood around discussing what to do, one of the sellers came and let us in for a look. My companions bought a couple of boxes for gifts, and I agreed to take one bag myself.

Then it was back to town to drop off the boxes at our rooms.
This is the outside of the West Gate.

Then we rode around town to get a feel for where things were, and to find lunch. Just down Nan Dajie (South Street) from the Catholic Guesthouse is Shilou, sometimes called the Bell Tower, though the Chinese just means City Tower.
Pretty soon, one of the themes for the Pingyao portion of the trip made its first appearance.
There are lots of cats in this town. It seemed that about half of the shops had one or more hanging around somewhere, even curled up in the display cases.

For lunch, we wanted to try out some of the local specialties, so we picked a restaurant and ordered some.
On the far side are some fried balls (“poms” on the menu) filled with figs and red beans, sweet and gooey and tasty, if a bit greasy. And watch out for the seeds! Then there is a noodle dish that was pretty good, and a soup with tofu and fatty pork (bacon, essentially).

After lunch, while my companions were busy haggling at a jewelry stall, I rode the short distance to the South Gate.
This was the city’s main gate in its heyday. I think the area just inside it here was where the guards were garrisoned. During the middle of the 19th Century, Pingyao was the banking center of China, with several large nationwide banks headquartered here, and that great wealth made the city a showpiece of Chinese culture at the time. However, once the imperial situation started changing around the turn of the 20th Century, the banks didn’t adapt, and within twenty years, had all failed, reducing the city to a quaint backwater. And fortunately for us today, leaving it untouched by modernization. With the troubled banking situation in the US right now, it makes me wonder...
After the jewelry shopping was done (at least for the moment), we continued our ride, and came across something not listed in the guidebook.
This Christian church near the East Gate is still in use.

Along the inside of the eastern wall, you can see that behind the brick facing is a pile of dirt.
And you can see another of the wide variety of vehicle designs in use. And speaking of vehicle designs...
These larger three-wheeled things are very common as well. You can’t see it from this angle, but the engine is between the two seats, and it uses a belt to drive the rear axle.
We rode around the inside of the wall from the East Gate around to the north and discovered that the east side of town has very few tourist attractions. Just normal everyday life over here. That’s a pile of ears of corn set out to dry.
And that’s a pile of coal in the street with buckets to carry it inside for heating and cooking.
By the time we returned the bikes, it was after dark.

For dinner, we went to a somewhat more upscale place that was recommended in a guidebook. There was a guy in an old-fashioned costume who beat on a drum and announced the arrival of customers.
You can tell it’s upscale because the dishes all match. On the left is a local snack consisting of mashed potatoes formed around a stick and deep fried. You dip them into either the sweet sauce or the spicy salt powder. Interesting, but not outstanding. At the back is a chicken and vegetable dish that was good, and nearest is a nice eggplant dish.
I had been fighting off a cold for several days (living on Sudafed and Halls lozenges), so didn’t feel like a late night (and honestly, Pingyao does not have a bar scene like Lijiang does). We went back to the Catholic and arranged for a driver to take us to a site out of town in the morning.

Continue to part 4.

Zen and the Art of Hotel Management

I recently had my first opportunity to see something of China outside of big cities. Having visited Shanghai and Tianjin, along with living in Beijing, I’ve had a fair taste of what Chinese city life is like. But China is a big country, and much of it is made up of something other than urban density and development. A quick weekend getaway to a small town seemed like a wonderful idea. Of course, in China, a “small town” can have a population of over a million. So maybe it’s not fair to call Lijiang a small town, but it’s certainly a far cry from what I’m used to. Besides, the part of Lijiang we saw was not really the city itself, but what they call Gucheng, or Ancient Town.

I’ll cover the travel details in a separate post. For now I’d like to get on to the fun stuff.

Lijiang is located in the northwest part of the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. It is a mountainous region, not far from the Tibetan border, but its latitude puts it near the tropics, so lush vegetation is mixed in with the high altitude, giving rise to an interesting assortment of plant life. The airport is located quite a distance from town, and the taxi ride into the city took use through a valley covered with fields, mostly corn and sunflowers interspersed with vegetables and fruit orchards. In the orchards, the ground under the trees was heavily cultivated with vegetables, conserving real estate. In some ways, it reminded me of the Big Island of Hawaii, with crops planted underneath a verdant green mountainside.

As you’ll see, much of Lijiang Gucheng is not accessible to cars, so the taxi took a winding path up the side of Lion Hill and stopped in a stone-cobbled lane, where a woman met us to guide us to the Zen Garden Hotel. It was a little way down a winding stone path, and as soon as we saw it we knew we had made the perfect choice of a place to stay.
This is the courtyard just inside the entrance. Living up to its name, the hotel gave us an immediate sense of peace, much needed after the hectic activity of Olympics in Beijing. After completing the required paperwork, we were shown to our room.
The furnishings were old style (I’m no expert to know if they’re real or reproductions), but it had the modern conveniences we like.
The bathroom was entirely new, and they had wireless internet. They also provided two apples, a fruit-filled pastry, a lovely tea set and some bedtime reading material.
Just outside our room was a covered walkway open to the air. From there, the view over the town was rather nice.
The “lobby” is also nice.
On a cool, rainy late summer day, they light a brazier. It’s a pleasant place to sit with a pot of tea.
I was amused by the technique used to tend the coals in the brazier.
On the lowest level is a small dining area where they serve a breakfast buffet, kind of a combination Contintental and Oriental breakfast. There are some bird cages, so during the day you can hear the birds and the sound of the running water – very relaxing. And in the afternoons, one of the staff members would play a bamboo flute in the lobby.

The only drawback we found was that the plumbing in the bathroom was very noisy. When someone is taking a shower, it’s almost like a jet engine roaring. There is also a demented rooster nearby who starts crowing about five in the morning and continues for hours. But aside from that, it’s probably the best place I’ve ever stayed. I’ll take it over a big city luxury high-rise any day.

If you’re planning a trip to Lijiang and are looking for a wonderful place to stay, you can’t do better than this. The Ancient City is full of small hotels like this one, many of them less expensive (this is about US$144 a night), but it’s hard to imagine any improving on it.

Coming up next, Lijiang Gucheng itself, as well as other Lijiang sights.

Some pictures by D, some by me.

Scraping both the sky and the bottom of the barrel

As promised, here are the rest of the highlights of my recent Shanghai trip. For lack of a better plan, I’m going with straight chronological order, which puts this one first:
That’s looking from a pedestrian bridge near my hotel towards the Huangpu River. The building in the distance with the “keyhole” near the top is the Shanghai World Financial Center, which when complete will be 101 stories tall. There’s an interesting story about its design, which you can read about if you’re interested.

After taking that picture, I turned 90 degrees for a view of the bridge where I stood.
Unfortunately, this captures the essence of Shanghai (and, to be fair, every other city). You’ve got the aging infrastructure with the peeling paint on the elevated expressway. You’ve got the prosperous young people with their shopping bags and new clothes. And there is the one who does not benefit from the prosperity.

Speaking of prosperity...
I know I’ve posted pictures of this area before. It’s the Nanjing Lu retail area, and a perfect illustration of ren shan ren hai (see previous entry for explanation). This was a little after noon on Sunday.

After I tired of the crowd (and the constant harassment from guys trying to sell me watches and bags) I picked a random side street and went to see what I could see.
I ended up in the Hardware Zone. There were at least four blocks worth of stores like this, every single one of them selling some kind of hardware, from pipes, lumber, paint, and flooring to electrical items, tools, bathroom fixtures and appliances. If you figure about a dozen shops per block times two sides to each block times at least six streets, you end up with a ridiculous number of retailers. Once again, I am amazed that so many businesses can sell the same thing in such close proximity to each other and stay in the black. Especially when you consider that there are also big multi-department stores (along the lines of major American hardware chains). I think it has something to do with the way commerce works here. A building contractor will buy supplies from someone he has a connection with – a relative, a school friend, or the like – and negotiate a price rather than just go to a big impersonal box of a store.

Most deliveries are done by motor scooter. I saw a man zipping down the street on a scooter with a length of plastic pipe about 12 feet long over his shoulder.

Just beyond that I came to Suzhou Creek where a steel bridge crosses it. Like many places in China, this stream has been known by many names. When Shanghai first came into being it was called Songjiang, but it was renamed Wusong in the Thirteenth Century, and (if I understand right) it’s still called that further upstream. It’s just another example of how inconsistent the naming of places is here.
Not many tourists would come here, so I assume the merchants are selling to locals.

After that, I got on the Metro to check out the part of town where the Björk concert would be. I got off at the Zhongshan Park station, which was in the middle of a booming area. There was a fancy multistory shopping center pretty much like all the rest of the fancy multistory shopping centers I’ve seen in China.
I walked in the direction of the International Gymnastics Center, and saw police cars stacked in a parking area underneath the elevated Metro tracks.
This is a massive vacant lot surrounded by massive apartment complexes on two sides, a smaller, older neighborhood on one, and the train tracks on the other.
In my post about the concert I mentioned that there is a Baby Mall underneath the venue. This is one of the shops in there. I didn’t know that Beatles, Inc. had a line of children’s items.

I saw another scooter scene that was pretty amazing. It was too dark to get a picture, but this is what I saw:

A man and a woman came out of the store with four shopping carts filled up with two-liter jugs of cooking oil. The woman waited while the man went over to the parking area. He returned on a beat-up old scooter, and they proceeded to load the jugs onto the scooter. I counted a total of 44 jugs. Apparently this was unusual enough that a small crowd gathered around them to see how they were going to accomplish this seemingly impossible task. They stacked seven or eight of the bottles on the platform where you normally put your feet, then took out some long straps and threaded them through the jugs’ handles. Figure 18 jugs each on two lines. With considerable effort, the man slung the jugs over the seat of the scooter. Of course this rendered the machine unrideable, so they pushed it away. I guess you use the tools you have available.

If you want to be chronological, go back and read my concert post now, then read about Nanshi and Yuyuan, and you’ve covered this little trip.

I was taken by a UFO

Wherein I try to remember what happened in Shanghai on 30 September. Once again, some photos by D and some by me.

You might remember that on Saturday evening, D discovered that her Zen MP3 player had been stolen. Thinking that our insurance just might cover it, and that insurance companies tend to like documentation for claims, we stopped by the hotel’s front desk and spoke to the manager about reporting the theft to the police. Although it took a while for her to understand what we wanted, she eventually assigned a purser to walk with us the two blocks to the local police station.

It was down a little side alley off Nanjing Road. It’s amazing how quickly the upscale glitz turns to piles of cardboard and lines of scrappy bikes. Lots of scooters too. Instead of going in the main entrance of the police station, our guide took us down a grubby stairway to the basement. He said he knew the officer in charge, so we didn’t have to wait in line with the general public. We went into a little cement office where there were two rickety desks, some folding chairs, and a bare light bulb for illumination. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating, but not by much – and perhaps my mind is filling in some details I don’t remember clearly.

Again, it took a little while to get our wishes across – the officer spoke almost no English – but he seemed to accept that an American insurance company might like something in writing. And it took a little while longer to figure out what form was appropriate and how it should be filled out. I ended up taking the standard Chinese form and just writing in my own words in English what happened, being careful to include such things as the estimated value and the time and place of the incident as near as I could guess.

Then we went upstairs and waited in the lobby while the officer got the document registered and stamped and whatever they do. Official paper in hand, we returned to the hotel and thanked the purser for all his assistance. Hope he wasn’t too disappointed that we didn’t tip him – but I’ve gotten so used to not tipping here, that I didn’t want to set a precedent.

After that little adventure, we had a good portion of the day to kill before it was time to head to the stadium for the final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. We consulted a map and saw a temple near a subway station, so off we went.

The Shanghai Metro is mostly nicer than the subways in Beijing, in part because it’s simply newer. The tracks are above ground in many places.
The temple we visited is called Jing’an, and one thing sets it completely apart from the other temples I’ve visited in China. It’s new.
In fact, it’s still under construction, being built by a local religious organization. The piles of building materials don’t discourage worshippers, however. We saw many people of all ages paying their respects.
We wandered around for a while, fascinated by the setting. In China, you just get used to such things being old, not alive.
There’s also the setting. Seeing this in the middle of a bustling commercial dynamo like Shanghai makes for some pretty stark contrasts.
And also, given how shoddy most current Chinese construction is, it’s nice to see workers taking real care about their craft.
Though I suppose it’s possible some pieces, like the wood carvings, could have been salvaged from older structures.

Anyway, there you go. A temple in Shanghai that doesn’t show up in the tourist guides.

When we left the temple, we decided to wander around the neighborhood a bit to see a part of town other than Nanjing Road and the Bund.
As part of their financing for the construction, the temple rents out the ground floor of their outer walls for shops.
We saw this restaurant. Its name is translated as Fishiness Infinitude. Um, OK.
This is a typical scene.
Eventually we made a circle and came around the opposite side of the temple, where there was a shopping center having a sidewalk sale.
This was a nifty bit of public art along the same sidewalk. It was originally part of a set of statues.
But his companion has been overwhelmed by the economic boom.

Eventually it got to be time to head for the stadium. Sunday afternoon turned out to be a hideously busy time on the trains. We were crammed up against each other along with a lot of people obviously going the same place plus a lot just going wherever Shanghai people go on Sunday afternoons.
Luckily, the Metro station is right there, attached to the stadium by a raised walkway. But the trip had been so crowded and uncomfortable that D said, “We’re taking a taxi when we leave.” I didn’t argue.

A few days earlier, back in Beijing, we had watched in stunned amazement as Brazil embarrassed the American women in a big way. National pride aside, it was a wonderful performance by an underdog team of charismatic players, and the stodgy Americans didn’t stand a chance, even aside from some questionable personnel choices. Sure, Briana Scurry was less than stellar in goal, but honestly I don’t think Hope Solo’s presence would have changed the outcome. The South Americans had the North Americans beat at every single position.

That defeat set up the matches we saw in Shanghai, with the US playing Norway for third place, and Brazil taking on reigning champs Germany for the trophy.

You might remember in my description of the previous game we saw, that they had a lot of security, with at least three guys per section. Check this out:
Every single seat in the first row of the lower level was occupied by a security guard. It was a ring of white polo shirts all the way around with the exception of the VIP section behind the benches. I guess they didn’t want any trouble.
Of course, the US didn’t have much trouble with Norway. Here’s one of our goals about to go into the net. By the end of it, we felt sorry for the Scandinavians, and were kind of happy they managed to score at least once.
After it was over, we even saw Briana and Hope hug each other. Aw, ain’t that sweet?

As for the first place match, we were definitely caught up in the wave of enthusiasm for the Brazilian team. It had been really something to watch them on TV, and we would have dearly loved to see them give Germany the same treatment they had given us.
But alas, the Germany vs. Brazil match was basically a story of missed opportunities for Brazil. This is perhaps the worst of them.

Our section was populated mostly with Germans, who were quite obnoxiously enjoying their team’s success. In the second half my BlueBerry buzzed with an incoming email. It was from JW:

From: JW (China)
To: JD (China)
Sent: Sun Sep 30 06:46:05 2007
Subject: We just saw you

We just saw you on tv behind the happy Germans.

Hope you are having fun.

I replied:

From: JD (China)
To: JW (China)
Sent: Sun Sep 30 06:47:04 2007
Subject: Re: We just saw you

We'd be having more fun if brasil was ahead!
--------------------------
Sent from my BlueBerry Wireless Handheld

As soon as the game was over, they started building a stage out on the field for the trophy ceremony. We had no desire to see the Germans get all smug and even more unbearable, so we snuck out, hoping to have an easier time finding a taxi.

After a pretty wild ride where the driver tried to avoid the traffic jams on the main streets, we ended up back at the hotel. It was getting late, but we didn’t feel like retiring yet – and we hadn’t had a proper dinner (like all Chinese venues, there was no food to speak of at the stadium). I had been wanting to see what it was like up in the UFO on top of the hotel, so we went up to the 45th floor, got off the elevator and went to the little elevator that takes you up to 47. There was a little combo (piano, upright bass, drums, and a singer) playing music on the circular stage in the middle. We took a table on the second level so we could see out the windows better. We got there just before they closed the kitchen, so we picked a selection of expensive appetizers to go with our drinks.

I seem to remember as we were sitting there listening to the music that it would make a humorous blog entry to describe what they played and how they sounded, but right now I’m drawing a blank. I’ll have to consult my offboard memory (aka D) for some hints to jog something loose and post later about that.