On Thursday I went to the beautiful Temple of Heaven park. Before you get to the temple, however, you walk through a huge park where retired people exercise every morning. The range of exercise is pretty amazing. Again I saw a man writing poetry in disappearing water. I never saw tai chi, but large groups of mostly women do various types of line dancing or what we used to call aerobics set to music. A few people just walk and some exercise alone under a tree. Some men were practicing Chinese juggling - a spinning top with a rope. Some other men were kicking a shuttlecock (basically hacky sack with a weighted shuttlecock) and a few people were playing badminton. A small group was tossing a cloth ring - kind of like playing frisbee - and one group of women was doing faster tai chi movements with a racket and ball in one hand. They had to not drop the ball as they went through their motions. I joined in a couple of the groups to try my hand at their activities. This largest group was singing Chinese songs.
It struck me that there were no young people in the park at all; everyone was retired. I described to my guide the soccer and basketball leagues that my children play in but she said they do not exist here. Young parents are so busy working, commuting an hour or more each way, and then helping the children with schoolwork for two hours a night. Besides, there are no tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields, or baseball diamonds in the parks. There are indoor gyms that younger people go to (and pay for), but the public spaces are for retirees.
My guide, Laura, who is 32, does not want to get married or have children because she does not want to give up her life. Besides guiding in Beijing and taking group tours around China, she has led tours to Europe and the United States. Needless to say, as the product of the one child era, her mother is not happy. There is a marriage market in the parks on weekends for the parents of children like Laura. Each parent puts up a sign with a picture of their child, his (or her) age, education, job, salary, and other pertinent information. If the parents reach an agreement, they then have to convince the children to meet. Once Laura's mother did find someone for her, but Laura insisted on contacting him first on WeChat. The young man told Laura, among other things, that he wanted someone who had never been in a relationship before. Laura was deeply offended that a 30 year old man would expect a woman his age to be a virgin (her translation of never being in a relationship before) and she refused to have anything to do with him. Welcome to modern China meeting traditional China.
The next day I visited the beautiful Summer Palace. The palace, which housed the emperors in the summer (duh!) has a lake and miles of gardens. A long arcade with pictures painted on the inside and outside runs along the lake, leading the Chinese to say that this is the longest art gallery in the world.
The emperors rarely left the Forbidden City or Summer Palace. One emperor, however, managed to go out in disguise to see how his people lived. When he returned, he had a fake shopping street built on the grounds of the Summer Palace so he could pretend to go to market like normal people.
My last day in Beijing was free so I decided to go to the Panjiayuan Market which was supposed to be a large antique market/flea market. It is hard to talk about anything in China without saying "the biggest in the world," but I walked into the biggest bead and gemstone market in the world. That was my unofficial conclusion after I walked up and down rows of beads, gemstones, and jewelry for half an hour. It turns out I was not even a third of the way through. I knew I would be buying rocks for Bobby and Teddy's collection today.
In one section a large group of men was gathered around a table full of nondescript rocks and looking at them with flashlights. Nearby some workers seemed to be cutting and polishing. I could not quite understand the process. You buy the rock first based on shining a flashlight and hope for the best?
I managed to negotiate the Beijing Metro to the market on my own with only one minor blip. All of the machines, signs, and announcements are in English as well as Chinese. I figured out how to buy a ticket at the machine, but it only took 5 and 10 yuan notes. So I had to leave the station and I had to go buy another Coke Zero to get smaller bills. Ah, the sacrifices we make. One thing on the Metro confused me. In the tunnels, I could see digital advertisements outside the windows, but we were not passing them; they stayed in the same place. Another new technology. On the trains, pretty much everyone is on their cel phone.
And what do bored stall owners do at the market?
The code on this display is for paying the seller. The buyer pulls up his payment app on his phone and takes a photo of the seller code. Immediately both parties receive confirmation that the payment was made. I am an old fogy paying cash for everything but China is pretty much a cashless society.
Eventually I came to stalls selling wood carvings, art, and other things. Finally, two Coke Zeros later, I came to the antiques.
No one wears anything resembling "traditional" Chinese clothes - whatever that is. I fit in completely as everyone wears western casual clothes - jeans or slacks, t-shirts or blouses, sneakers or sandals. After a while I noticed that a lot of the t-shirts had logos or writing in English but I never saw any with Chinese writing. I asked my guide about this but she had not even noticed it. She did say that shirts with brand names such as Nike or Adidas are expensive so people wear them as their "good" clothes when they want to impress someone. Okay. But I saw a lot of shirts with random English like "eat pizza" or "looking for something."
The only other antiques I saw at the market were old Mao posters and little red books. There were also a lot of book sellers. Obviously I can't read the Chinese titles but it seemed that the books were old. Did they survive the Cultural Revolution or is old here from the 1980's? I don't know.
After a trip to the Confucius Temple and another acrobatics show, I returned to my hotel to pack. I got around all day on the Metro, but my guide had told me that my station would be closed after 6, so I walked back. On October 1, which is National Day, there is a big celebration in Tiananmen Square. This year is the 70 anniversary of the People's Republic, so the celebration will be even grander. Tiananmen Square can hold a million people and I gather that is how many performers there will be for the dignitaries and TV audience. I gather the show will be on the scale of the the Olympics opening or closing. So for weeks, various groups have been rehearsing and they close the streets around the square to make room for them. My neighborhood is close enough that they closed streets and the Metro stations. It is amazing that you can just shut down parts of a busy city - and bear in mind that it is still more than two weeks to October 1. As I walked back, I crossed over one of the ring roads with no cars on it. Locals were taking pictures of the road as it is usually bumper to bumper.
Of course I had heard about the horrible air pollution and coal usage in China and had brought a stack of face masks with me. So it was a pleasant surprise to see that the air quality in Beijing was normal and almost no one wears a face mask - far fewer than I saw in Vietnam. It turns out that up until about ten years ago, kitchens in Beijing had coal stoves for cooking. They have all been replaced with electricity or propane. Even in the hutongs (old neighborhoods with narrow alleys), houses do not have toilets but they have electricity. Also, all of the motor scooters are electric and motor cycles are banned. Yes, China has coal burning electric plants, but they are far from the cities. So the biggest source of pollution in Beijing today is the eight million cars. I have been told that the air does get bad in the winter when people have to heat their homes.
My hotel was in a remodeled hutong house but it took me several days to relate it to how people still live in hutongs. There is a narrow passage from the front door to the inner courtyard that is no more than 15 feet square. My room was large enough for a queen sized bed, a desk and cabinets along one wall, and a small bathroom with shower. Traditionally (and probably today as well), an entire family would live in that room (slightly larger since there would be no bathroom) and each family would cook on a stove in the courtyard. The night clerk at the hotel sleeps in a single person tent pitched in the three feet behind the front desk.
In the morning I am taking the bullet train to Pingyao. China just reached 10,000 of high speed railway lines. Yep. The biggest in the world.
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