More Beijing

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.

Beijing beginnings

Beijing has kept many of its old neighborhoods and building styles so, unlike Shanghai, parts of it look Chinese.  But it is not much smaller than Shanghai and the traffic is just as bad.  Worse in my opinion, but I took the Metro a lot in Shanghai.  Here I have a driver even if we only go half a mile and I know I can walk faster.  With 22 million residents, Beijing is the third largest city in China, just behind Shanghai with 24 million residents.  The largest city, which no American has ever heard of, is Guangzhou with over 30 million people.  The numbers continue to boggle the mind.  Although it has 22 million residents, Beijing has "only" 8 million cars.  It has six or seven concentric ring roads (beltways) with the first ring road being the most central.  Beijing controls the number of new cars that can be purchased with annual weekly lotteries; anyone can buy a car, but you have to win the lottery to get a license plate and be able to drive it.  Once you have a car, you can only drive it six days a week, and non residents can only drive in Beijing for very limited time periods.  No one in China does road trips.  Beijing has the second largest metro system in the world (behind Shanghai) with twenty one lines and 400 miles.

Beijing has kept some of its old neighborhoods called hutongs which consist of small houses on narrow alleys.  The houses may or may not have running water but do not have bathrooms, so every hundred yards or so in each alley is a public bathroom.  My hotel is extremely small - only eight rooms - in a hutong (although it does have bathrooms.)  It could not be more different from my room in the forty story Hilton in Shanghai.  It is a real Chinese neighborhood and I have seen only a handful of western faces as I walk around.

Besides the metro and too many cars, there are bicycles and scooters everywhere.  There are separate traffic lights for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, but the scooters do not obey any traffic laws.  They drive fast, on either side of the street, bike lane, or sidewalk, and often run red lights.  And they are all electric so you cannot hear them coming.  Everyone assures me that Beijing is extremely safe and I can walk around without worrying about theft, BUT ... if I am not careful, I am liable to be run down by a scooter.  It is always interesting to me that there are no thieves here but you really have to be careful when you go there.

In my first two days in Beijing, I went to the two big attractions:  the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  They both deserve their star billing.  The Forbidden City tour starts in Tiananmen Square which is so immense that no picture can do it justice.  It is surrounded by barricades and you enter through an underground passageway after showing your passport and going through security.  The government is not taking a chance on a repeat of 1989.



From Tiananmen Square, you cross the street to the Forbidden City, now called the Palace Museum.  It is truly a city with dozens of buildings and nearly 1000 rooms originally with over 800 surviving.  There are various exhibits to see but the buildings are the real attraction.

Everyone says you have to see the Great Wall to believe it and everyone is right.  I knew it was loooong - over 13,000 miles.  It was built and rebuilt over a period of centuries.  But I never quite had grasped that it was built on top of the mountains.  In the pictures of people walking on the wall, you can't appreciate the steepness of the wall and you absolutely can't tell where exactly the wall is.  From the parking lot at the base of the mountain, a bus shuttled us up about five miles of switchbacks.  Then we took a cable car to the top so we could walk a portion.  Of course you can hike up about a million steps if you are too proud to take the cable car.  I am not.  And there is a shortcut coming down:  a toboggan.  Of course.

You can see the wall snaking up the next mountain behind me.  When they started building the wall in the fourteenth century, every brick and every stone in the wall had to be carried up the mountain by people.  Although it had rained off and on the entire previous day when I visited the Forbidden City, we had a beautiful, clear day at the Great Wall and could see ridges of mountains far in the distance.

On a culinary note, I had traditional Peking duck on my first night in Beijing, and it was delicious.  The second day I tried Beijing style dumplings and the third day, I had dim sum.  Each day I try something new but the foods are still familiar to me.  The dim sum restaurant has four floors and is open 24 hours a day.  Both their dim sum and dinner menus had pictures and descriptions, and I have to say that the latter had many dishes that I have never seen.  Not just the unusual meats or pickles.  For example, they served boiled beef filet with something.  I would never boil a beef filet; sounds like a terrible waste.

Shanghai

My first four days in Shanghai flew by as I tried to orient myself to a city of 24 million people.  Shanghai is modern, cosmopolitan, and very international.  On Thursday we took a bicycle tour of the former French Concession and on Friday, a walking tour of the central city.  Both guides showed us these pictures of the Pudong (business section) of Shanghai 26 years ago and today.





Our guide on Friday was particularly interesting.  His Chinese parents moved to the Netherlands where he was raised speaking no Chinese.  His parents spoke a rural dialect that most Chinese cannot understand.  After he graduated college, he decided to come to China for a year to learn Chinese before returning to Europe to pursue a career in business.  After the year, he realized that he was not proficient, so he stayed.  Seven years later, he is fluent although he says he still often encounters words that he does not know.  And Europe has lost a businessman.

My first encounter with my tour company was rather inauspicious.  A guide and driver were to pick up Kasey and me at 6:30 to take us to the acrobatics show at 7:30.  We were ready and left at 6:15 as they said the traffic was bad.  After twenty minutes, we had gone only two blocks, so Kasey asked him where the show was.  Since she knows Shanghai, she realized that we could never make it on time in a car, and she suggested that we take the Metro.  The guide realized that she was right and agreed.  Duh!  So we went into the Metro.  The first car that came was so crowded that the classic movie chase scene happened:  I got on and the doors shut before Kasey and the driver could enter.  I didn't know what to do, but Kasey had role played this scenario with her four year old daughter, Ruby.  She signaled to me to get off at the next station.  I did and they arrived a minute later on the next train which was amazingly not crowded.  Whew!  First crisis avoided.  We arrived at the show with ten minutes to spare.  The driver got there with the car at 8.  The Shanghai Acrobatics show was not quite what I expected as there was almost nothing that I would call acrobatics.  Rather, the acts involved strength, balance, and unique talents.  I have seen similar acts before, but these really were at an incredibly high level.  I think the juggler was the best I have ever seen.  And one highlight was the dance with hula hoops.  I saw it with my own eyes but kept saying, that is just impossible.

On Saturday we took a breakfast food walking tour.  Before I came to China, I was told that Chinese food in China is not what we think it is in America.  But in my first few days, I saw dumplings, green onion pancakes, barbecued meat, and lots of noodles - exactly like the Chinese food I eat in California.  Yes I saw some foods that I did not recognize and others that I will never try (pig cheeks?  duck head?), but most of the food was very familiar to me even if the menus were unreadable.  On our breakfast tour, the guide introduced us to some Shanghai specialties that I had never seen before.  And I liked them.  This guide was very interesting, too.  An American who had majored in Asian religions, he came to China after college, also for a short time.  That was fifteen years, a wife, and twin toddlers ago.

I knew that people do tai chi in the parks in China, but did not expect to see ballroom dancing or singing.  Retired people come to the parks every day to socialize and practice different things.  The group below is doing line dancing while the man writes ancient Chinese verses with a paintbrush and water.  The verses disappear as the water evaporates and he keeps on writing.

 

After the food tour, I set off on my own to obtain a Chinese sim card.  I had rough directions to two stores and walked up and down a half mile long block looking for them, but saw no phone stores.  So I walked back to a mall that I was told had a store, and found one right in the central area.  But the lone clerk there did not speak English.  So I started asking likely looking people (young, college age, dressed well) if they spoke English.  They all looked at me as if I were speaking Chinese ... I mean, English.  Finally, the fifth person I asked said yes, and I was so shocked, I said:  really?  I asked her if she could help me buy a sim card, so she talked to the clerk for me.  Turns out he could only sell to Chinese people; foreigners had to go to a Chinese Telecom store.  She told me there was one at the end of the long block I had walked up and down (but had not turned the corner), and she insisted on escorting me.  She walked with me half a mile to the store which turns out to have closed.  So she called someone on her phone to find out the next closest store to go to.  It turned out to be about a mile away and she again insisted on escorting me.  I told her I could go by myself if she gave me directions but it turns out that she was more directionally challenged than I am.  She could only follow directions on her phone and that seemed to confuse her a bit.  Anyway, the store was there, she took me in, and negotiated my purchase.  Mission accomplished.  Then she went to a nearby Metro stop and I walked back to my hotel.  She was not much of a conversationalist in English, but as near as I could tell, she had not attended college but learned English in high school and does not use it for her work.  She works in some kind of technology center, but is not a scientist, "just a worker" - whatever that means.  I was impressed by her English ... and her determination to help me.  Also, she did not carry a purse or backpack.  She had only two things with her:  an umbrella (for the sun) and her phone.  Credit cards are rarely used in China and all of the Chinese have an app on their phones that they use for paying for everything directly from their bank accounts.  There is no need to carry a wallet or pocketbook.  I like to keep a couple hundred dollars on me and pay cash for everything, and that turns out to be a minor problem here.  Since the largest bill is 100 yuan (about $15) you can't put too much money in your wallet.

This morning we all went to Century Park which has a lake, sand area for playing, a small amusement park, and miles of paths and green area.  The park was full of Chinese families which are, typically, a young couple with one or two children accompanied by at least one grandmother who is actually pushing the stroller or watching the children, and maybe a grandfather.

Some random pictures from Shanghai.  First, part of the menu from the coffee shop we visited on the food tour.  Shanghai is cosmopolitan.

And Kasey's family vehicle.

I am leaving for Beijing tomorrow morning.  I was scheduled to be picked up at 8 for the ride to the airport but the guide said we should leave at 7:30 because traffic is bad.  Hmmm.  Sounds familiar.  I hope I make the flight.