Beijing - Week 1
I am in Beijing! In fact, we've been here for just over a week, but I haven't had enough internet access to be able to post til now, when we are back in the city and in a room with internet connection (I love my laptop). So this will be a long post to catch up as far as I can until I get sick of writing or M wakes up (we've just got off the overnight train from Xi'an, which arrived at 7am).
We arrived last Sunday at 8:30am after a 12 hour flight. England is 7 hours behind China, so it was bedtime back home just as morning was beginning here. This made for quite a long day! By the time we got to our hotel, checked in and showered, it was about time for lunch, so we went out in search of a nearby vegetarian restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet as one of Beijing's top 10 eating spots. It was fortunate that on the way we were sufficiently distracted by steamed vegetable buns to grab one for a snack, because the restaurant we were headed for turned out to be no longer there. As did the next one up the road also recommended in the guidebook; and the next. Now, the current edition is about 2 years out of date, but that's a pretty bad strike rate. To be fair, though, the pace of development in modern-day Beijing is probably quite bewildering even to locals: we've constantly been encountering taxi drivers who don't know where new streets or buildings are. Beijing is a city permanently under construction, it seems!
Eventually we ended up at the food court under the Oriental Plaza on Wangfujing St, apparently Beijing's largest shopping centre. The array of food was amazing: stalls with food from all over Asia, of all sorts of types, and all for what seemed to us to be ridiculously low prices: 15-20RMB for full meals, which comes to about £1 (A$2.50, and the British pound buys less food when eating out than an equivalent amount of Australian dollars). After being paralysed by the sheer amount of choice available, and the fact that there were no labels in English, meaning that all we had to go on was pictures, plastic models or watching to see what other people were having, I settled on wheat noodles with various spicy pickles in soup (Northern Chinese) and takoyaki (not Chinese at all!), which were both quite delicious. (The Chinese don't seem to use words such as "good", "nice" or "tasty" to describe food when speaking English - everything is either "very delicious" or "not very delicious".)
Next we wandered around Tiananmen Square, getting thoroughly confused by the system of pedestrian subways, which are the only way of crossing the roads around the square. It is apparently the largest open public space in the world; and it is huge, but the vastness of it is now broken by the imposing bulk of Mao's mausoleum planted smack in the middle. The Chairman also overlooks the square from an enormous portrait hung on the Gate itself (Tian-an-men means the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which borders the square to the north) which is still visible right from the other end.
After a fair bit of walking, M decided her feet had had enough, so we headed back to the hotel. The Far East Hotel is described as a youth hostel, but the twin rooms are all in the hotel section, and I've never had such luxury for about 8 pounds a night: proper hotel rooms with towels changed every day, fridge (albeit not very cold), TV and all the amenities. Hotels here are good value! We fell into bed at about 9:30pm after over 30 hours of being awake - with the result that I woke up at 4am, feeling like I'd had an afternoon nap, and couldn't get back to sleep. Grah.
On Monday we got a late start (after I finally started drifting back to sleep at 9am, M elected to sleep in too, and then we woke up and it was nearly 1pm) so only had an afternoon's worth of sightseeing to fit in - just enough to visit the Lama Temple, or Yong-he-gong, in the northern Dongcheng district. This is the biggest temple in the city, and is a mishmash of various Buddhist styles and denominations. Built as a Han Buddhist temple several centuries ago (can you tell I've forgotten exactly when?), it was converted to a lamasery (Tibetan Buddhist monastery... I wonder if a llama farm would be a llamasery?) in the 18th century and still houses lots of monks, whose job now seems to be to help herd tourists around and stop us taking photos in the wrong places. Amongst the artifacts it contains are an 18 metre tall Maitreya Buddha supposedly carved from a single trunk of white sandalwood; several representations of assorted other Buddhas in the various temple halls, and an impressive collection of smaller Buddha figurines, with useful explanations of whom/what they all are, in the adjacent museum.
Just as we were about to leave and head to the Confucius temple across the road, what had been a slight drizzle suddenly transformed into a full-on downpour, forcing everybody at the temple to take shelter inside or under the eaves of the halls and trapping us there for about half an hour until the rain abated enough for us to get out. Normally I don't mind walking in the rain and getting a bit wet, but this was like taking a shower in all one's clothes, so making a run for it wasn't an option! On our way out, there was an enterprising street vendor doing good business selling umbrellas for 10 yuan, so we gladly handed over our 70p worth of RMB (ren-min-bi, the official name for yuan - the unofficial term is "kuai", so we were quite confused until we figured out that they all mean the same thing. Plus there are "jiao", which are worth 0.1yuan/RMB/kuai and are also referred to as "mao") in exchange for keeping slightly dry.
As it was too late to get into the Confucius temple, we decided to have an early dinner at Baguo Buyi, a Szechuan restaurant also recommended in LP, which we were quite surprised to find actually there for a change. My "buyi jiang yu" (Buyi fried fish) turned out to be a whole fried fish which came on a huge plate, entirely covered by dried chillis and szechuan peppercorns! I gathered (with some relief) from the waiter's sign language that we were meant to scrape off the chillis and just eat the fish underneath, now nicely spiced from all the seasoning on top. It was "very delicious", although I did manage to numb my tongue a few times by accidentally chewing on some of the whole peppercorns. We also enjoyed hot and sour soup (suan-la-tang, which I managed to ask for in Mandarin and get, even though it wasn't on the printed menu), which was savoury and very peppery - a rather different experience to the bright red, chilli-laced, sweet-sour version at Tai Wu etc, which I also love; an eggplant and potato hotpot which turned out to also contain pork; spicy bean-thread noodles and corn fritters. More food than even we could manage, and it only cost us 110RMB (about £7) between us. I could get fat very cheaply here!
It has occurred to me that I should probably do some work before we go out - have an article to write by 10pm tonight - so further recounting of the week's adventures shall have to wait until tonight...
We arrived last Sunday at 8:30am after a 12 hour flight. England is 7 hours behind China, so it was bedtime back home just as morning was beginning here. This made for quite a long day! By the time we got to our hotel, checked in and showered, it was about time for lunch, so we went out in search of a nearby vegetarian restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet as one of Beijing's top 10 eating spots. It was fortunate that on the way we were sufficiently distracted by steamed vegetable buns to grab one for a snack, because the restaurant we were headed for turned out to be no longer there. As did the next one up the road also recommended in the guidebook; and the next. Now, the current edition is about 2 years out of date, but that's a pretty bad strike rate. To be fair, though, the pace of development in modern-day Beijing is probably quite bewildering even to locals: we've constantly been encountering taxi drivers who don't know where new streets or buildings are. Beijing is a city permanently under construction, it seems!
Eventually we ended up at the food court under the Oriental Plaza on Wangfujing St, apparently Beijing's largest shopping centre. The array of food was amazing: stalls with food from all over Asia, of all sorts of types, and all for what seemed to us to be ridiculously low prices: 15-20RMB for full meals, which comes to about £1 (A$2.50, and the British pound buys less food when eating out than an equivalent amount of Australian dollars). After being paralysed by the sheer amount of choice available, and the fact that there were no labels in English, meaning that all we had to go on was pictures, plastic models or watching to see what other people were having, I settled on wheat noodles with various spicy pickles in soup (Northern Chinese) and takoyaki (not Chinese at all!), which were both quite delicious. (The Chinese don't seem to use words such as "good", "nice" or "tasty" to describe food when speaking English - everything is either "very delicious" or "not very delicious".)
Next we wandered around Tiananmen Square, getting thoroughly confused by the system of pedestrian subways, which are the only way of crossing the roads around the square. It is apparently the largest open public space in the world; and it is huge, but the vastness of it is now broken by the imposing bulk of Mao's mausoleum planted smack in the middle. The Chairman also overlooks the square from an enormous portrait hung on the Gate itself (Tian-an-men means the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which borders the square to the north) which is still visible right from the other end.
After a fair bit of walking, M decided her feet had had enough, so we headed back to the hotel. The Far East Hotel is described as a youth hostel, but the twin rooms are all in the hotel section, and I've never had such luxury for about 8 pounds a night: proper hotel rooms with towels changed every day, fridge (albeit not very cold), TV and all the amenities. Hotels here are good value! We fell into bed at about 9:30pm after over 30 hours of being awake - with the result that I woke up at 4am, feeling like I'd had an afternoon nap, and couldn't get back to sleep. Grah.
On Monday we got a late start (after I finally started drifting back to sleep at 9am, M elected to sleep in too, and then we woke up and it was nearly 1pm) so only had an afternoon's worth of sightseeing to fit in - just enough to visit the Lama Temple, or Yong-he-gong, in the northern Dongcheng district. This is the biggest temple in the city, and is a mishmash of various Buddhist styles and denominations. Built as a Han Buddhist temple several centuries ago (can you tell I've forgotten exactly when?), it was converted to a lamasery (Tibetan Buddhist monastery... I wonder if a llama farm would be a llamasery?) in the 18th century and still houses lots of monks, whose job now seems to be to help herd tourists around and stop us taking photos in the wrong places. Amongst the artifacts it contains are an 18 metre tall Maitreya Buddha supposedly carved from a single trunk of white sandalwood; several representations of assorted other Buddhas in the various temple halls, and an impressive collection of smaller Buddha figurines, with useful explanations of whom/what they all are, in the adjacent museum.
Just as we were about to leave and head to the Confucius temple across the road, what had been a slight drizzle suddenly transformed into a full-on downpour, forcing everybody at the temple to take shelter inside or under the eaves of the halls and trapping us there for about half an hour until the rain abated enough for us to get out. Normally I don't mind walking in the rain and getting a bit wet, but this was like taking a shower in all one's clothes, so making a run for it wasn't an option! On our way out, there was an enterprising street vendor doing good business selling umbrellas for 10 yuan, so we gladly handed over our 70p worth of RMB (ren-min-bi, the official name for yuan - the unofficial term is "kuai", so we were quite confused until we figured out that they all mean the same thing. Plus there are "jiao", which are worth 0.1yuan/RMB/kuai and are also referred to as "mao") in exchange for keeping slightly dry.
As it was too late to get into the Confucius temple, we decided to have an early dinner at Baguo Buyi, a Szechuan restaurant also recommended in LP, which we were quite surprised to find actually there for a change. My "buyi jiang yu" (Buyi fried fish) turned out to be a whole fried fish which came on a huge plate, entirely covered by dried chillis and szechuan peppercorns! I gathered (with some relief) from the waiter's sign language that we were meant to scrape off the chillis and just eat the fish underneath, now nicely spiced from all the seasoning on top. It was "very delicious", although I did manage to numb my tongue a few times by accidentally chewing on some of the whole peppercorns. We also enjoyed hot and sour soup (suan-la-tang, which I managed to ask for in Mandarin and get, even though it wasn't on the printed menu), which was savoury and very peppery - a rather different experience to the bright red, chilli-laced, sweet-sour version at Tai Wu etc, which I also love; an eggplant and potato hotpot which turned out to also contain pork; spicy bean-thread noodles and corn fritters. More food than even we could manage, and it only cost us 110RMB (about £7) between us. I could get fat very cheaply here!
It has occurred to me that I should probably do some work before we go out - have an article to write by 10pm tonight - so further recounting of the week's adventures shall have to wait until tonight...