After sleeping for about 9 hours, showering, and eating, I was starting to feel human again, and today was my day to go wander in the sun and play tourist in order to try to reset my body clock ahead 12 hours… think about that when you set your clock back and get an extra hour.
Breakfast
Breakfast at the hotel is also a buffet. It’s listed as costing 200 RMB (about $30), but is fortunately included in the price of my hotel room. It has some savory items, some western items, and overall a good selection, including some steamed Chinese buns, fruits of all types, yogurt, an omelette station, sausage and bacon, cured meats and cheeses, and salads. They have a guy running a juicer, and one of the juices on offer is Watermelon juice. It’s quite tasty, sort of like distilled watermelon flavor. I also have been able to try dragon fruit which tastes sort of like a mix of apple and kiwi.
One of the interesting things is that they have several of the Chinese buns (chewy glutinous dough, stuffed with some sort of filling and then steamed) that were made up to look like different animals. They had one with cuts in the dough to make it look spiky and two black dots for eyes to make a hedgehog, one with some sort of black fruit to serve as eyes, ears, and nose to make a Panda, and then one with a different shape (think Marshmallow peep) and a yellow color that looked like a baby chick. The filling was slightly sweet and vaguely lemon-flavored, almost like poundcake. If I had known that this was the only day that they would do it, I would have gone back to get my camera, so unfortunately, no pictures.
Suitably fed, it was time to go play tourist.
First stop was the Forbidden City – cab fare was all of 40 RMB ($6), plus same for entrance to Forbidden City, and then same again for an automated English walking tour guide. $18 is pretty good for a day of touristing.
Cabbie on the way there was apparently tired of waiting in traffic, made a right turn because the right turn lane was open, drove about 500 yards past the intersection, and then pulled a U-Turn right in the middle of the street – in front of oncoming traffic (!), then made a right to get back on the street we were just on.
Forbidden City is very large (250+ acres). I spent probably 3 hours walking around, and I didn’t even see everything. It’s hard to describe, other than to say that it served as living, working, government and ceremonial space for the Emperor and his court of multiple hundreds of people. There are at least 12 palaces which held either concubines, eunuchs, sons of the Emperor and their wives, the Emperor and his wife, etc. All of it is very ornate, with amazing craftsmanship in the details, especially the intricate carvings on the roofs of the buildings, stone sculptures, and tilework. There are also areas where court was held, festivals were celebrated, etc. One of the most amusing was the Palace of Accumulated Beauty (or as my guide translated it, Concentrated Beauty), which was the place where the concubines for the emperor lived and where new ones were judged.
There are lovely gardens, and many cypress trees which have been molded into different shapes, and are now hundreds of years old. I got to see one of the first telephone switching rooms in China as well.
What’s funny is that after I came back from dinner and checked my RSS feeds, this was posted on EngrishFunny.
I saw hundreds of these signs in the Forbidden City today, and my hunch is that one of those occasionally snarky Internet Geeks who usually attend the IETF saw this and posted it to this website in the last couple of days…
From there, I walked to Tian’anmen gate, headed for the well-known (infamous?) Square of the same name. As you walk out of the Forbidden city, you pass through yet another very ornate gate, through a small square, and then a tunnel under the actual gate. As you exit the tunnel, you look back to find that you are walking under a huge painting of Chairman Mao, with two large placards in Chinese on either side of it. Wikipedia tells me that the left one reads "Long Live the People's Republic of China", while the right one reads "Long Live the Great Unity of the World's Peoples". Across the street is the square itself. You have to actually go under the street using a tunnel in order to get to Tian’anmen Square itself, and once you get to the entrance, you see that the entire area is fenced in, with only one entrance that everyone gets funneled through. There is a security checkpoint there, which has an XRay machine that all bags have to go through, and then they appeared to be using handheld metal detectors and pat-downs on the Chinese that went through. Apparently, tall, slightly overweight Geekus Americanus tourists are deemed to be non-threatening, because they waved me through with no further inspection. Perhaps if I had been wearing my Google t-shirt, I would have garnered more attention, but I made a point not to wear it that day.
Inside Tian’anmen square is the Monument to the People’s Heroes, as well as the Mausoleum where Mao is buried. Mao’s building has two large sculptures on either side, but I am unable to find much by way of explanation of what they represent. Entrance to Mao’s Mausoleum is “free with valid ID” but it is only open until noon, and I was there well afternoon, so no looking at dead revolutionaries under glass for me today. I noted that there was heavy police and military presence in and around the square, as well as video cameras mounted to the very large light posts that populate the area. As you walk down the street away from the square itself, I actually saw police in what could be considered SWAT or riot gear – low-grade body armor, helmet, and a pretty heavy-duty billy club. Not as reassuring as perhaps it was intended to be.
Here’s one for you: Tien’anmen literally means “heavenly peace” and Chang’an Avenue, which I crossed to get to the square means “forever peace.” So… yeah.
While I’d bet that Alanis would have had trouble working that into her song, you could just about trip over the irony in all of that. I think that the thing that bothers me most about Tian’anmen Square is the fact that there is no memorial, not so much as a mention of the protests that killed at least hundreds, if not thousands of people. Apparently this is still one of the things that is very carefully censored inside of China – they don’t even attempt to put a positive spin on the events. Wikipedia says this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989#Continuing_issues
Side note – while I was looking on Wikipedia for info about this to supplement my memory, the hotel wireless dropped, and punted me off of my VPN connection back to the US – it does this after a few minutes of inactivity. I decided that since I wasn’t doing anything that required me to log in, I’d just do without the VPN. I wasn’t really thinking about the content… The first time I Googled Tien’anmen square’s Wikipedia entry, I got results (from Google.cn) and was able to hit the Wikipedia page with no problem. By the time I clicked the link to “Tank Man” I was unable to get to it, and when I clicked back to go back to the referring article, I couldn’t reach that anymore either until I fired my VPN back up. *shudder* End of experiment.
I walked for about 3 or 4 more kilometers down the same road, passed some shopping districts, other hotels and just sort of wandered around looking at the sights. The street was lined with Gingko trees, which were all showing their fall yellow color, so it was pretty nice. When I say shopping, I was sort of planning on walking to the Silk market, but I never did find it. This was obviously the high-end shopping district – Burberry, Mont Blanc, Tiffany’s, etc. I also saw what I think was a Porsche dealer (other side of the street and hard to get to from where I was), and the “Audi Forum” which was on my side of the street and open. In the front of the showroom, it had: A Q7 V12 TDi, an S5, an R8 V10 in both regular AND convertible, all in the same copper color. I got tired of walking and grabbed a cab around 4pm. The sun was going down – it gets dark here about 5pm right now, and it was pretty obvious that I was running out of things to see, so I called it a day. Plus, I noted that the haze had been getting progressively worse all day. First thing in the morning, it’s bright and clear and you get probably 2 miles or more of visibility. By evening, it’s more like ¼ mile. As it was, when I got to Tien’anmen, I couldn’t see Mao’s mausoleum clearly from the gate.
I had to go to a nearby hotel and grab a cab from the taxi stand, because I was having trouble hailing one just on the street. One cabbie actually waved me off!
The only English I spoke while out wandering around today was from people trying to either sell me their services as a tour guide, a trip to the Great Wall, or convince me to come see their “student art exhibition” which after the first time, I learned had the subtext “where I can purchase many great Chinese paintings for low, low prices” and that likely while some of the “students” were claiming that they had painted certain ones, you could find the same exact paintings at other shops for a quarter of the price. Some colleagues told of “students” that were near tears, and said that if they didn’t sell a certain number of paintings that they couldn’t continue school, so this is apparently quite the racket. I did have one person ask me what my “2+2=5, For extremely large values of 2” shirt meant. That wasn’t easy to explain through the language barrier. I learned after the fact that apparently the very friendly English speaking women that I was chatting with that were supposedly on Holiday from some other part of China were also trying to play a game, whereby they say that they were just about to go to “a tea house nearby” and they invite you along for some coffee or tea. If you go, they expect you to pay, and often the costs are multiple hundreds of Yuan. I guess they perfected this whole “fleece the tourists” thing when everyone was here for the Olympics.
I wanted to get out of the hotel for dinner, so I asked the concierge to recommend a place within walking distance. He recommended a place that he said they [the hotel staff] often go for meals, that it was good, cheap food. He mentioned that they didn’t have English menus, but did have picture menus, so I figured I’d give it a try. I walked past some street vendors cooking food in carts, and briefly considered trying my luck there, but figured after having sushi and raw oysters at the buffet last night with no ill effects, I should probably give my system a day or two to adjust to the local bacteria before pressing my luck quite that much.
I don’t think that I actually ended up where he recommended, because as far as I can tell the Chinese characters he wrote down didn’t match the sign of the restaurant that I ended up going to, but I still enjoyed my meal immensely. (update, apparently this was his recommendation, because the same guy recommended it again later in the week, and I confirmed that it was the place with the red lanterns).
I ordered a Yan Jing beer, which is a nice crisp lager – very little bitterness or hops, reminds me of Miller High Life. It was in a 500 ml bottle (16 oz), and cost me all of $2. This, I could get used to! I also ordered something that they called Chicken and Peanut, but looked to me like Kung Pao, and a bowl of Hot and Sour soup. The waitress also pointed to fried rice, and so I nodded for that, thinking it was a side dish. Then, they brought out my food, and my jaw dropped. Each of the items I ordered would have fed at least two people by themselves. The soup bowl was probably 32 oz, and then there was a full plate mounded with shrimp fried rice, and another with my chicken. I managed to eat about half of each of the entrees, and one small bowl of the soup before I was so full I could barely walk. The whole meal was 50 RMB, which is about $7.50, and it was very tasty. The chicken was the right combination of spicy and savory, and had a lot of very large (thumb-sized) white scallions in it. Other interesting things about this restaurant – the waitstaff used devices that looked like little Blackberries to enter orders, and there was a button on your table you could use to call them, to ask for water, or to ask for the check. When I asked for water, I got a pot of hot water. I knew tea was popular, but that seemed a bit strange to me. I headed for the hotel and began working on typing up the days’ events while they were still fresh in my mind. Tomorrow starts IETF activities, so I’m hoping for another good night’s rest.
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