Lazy Beijing Sunday

Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon.
Call Golze just to see how he’s doin’.
Hello?
What up, Golz?
Yo Sima, what’s crackin’?
You thinking what I’m thinkin?
BEIJING!!
Man, it’s happenin’!

My first morning in China, I looked out the window and saw... well, not much. It was shaping up to be a pretty polluted day. Due to jet lag I was up a little before sunrise (though I'm often known to be up at that hour, preparing for a productive day), so I thought I'd give it some time. A while later I noticed the moon still out. Hey, what's up, moon! Except it wasn't the moon, it was the sun -- and I was looking straight at it. I pondered for a while whether it was any less worse for your eyes if you could painlessly stare right at it through the think Beijing smog, but then decided it would probably just be safer not to ponder that at all.

When Durrell finally rose and came into the kitchen, he immediately let go a "Holy crap that's bad! Wow!" Which made me feel so much better, because things really weren't looking that good. The following day there were some thunder storms that rolled across Beijing. Things still looked bleak, but it was raining intermittently, so it was really hard to tell, although I was able to make out some cloud definition above. On Sunday, however, the weather gods had opened the smog sluice, flushing out all that was bad, and what was left was a beautiful Beijing Sunday. Durrell's apartment has a view of the new crazy CCTV headquarters under construction in one of the city's business centers. I have before and after pictures below. The new CCTV headquarters, playfully dubbed the "pair of pants" or "pair of shorts" by the locals, is the hook-shaped building just above the Worker's Stadium (Beijing's main sports stadium before construction of the Bird's Nest).

Before...

... and after.

We first headed out to the tailor's. I had a few suits made in China during my last trip, and managed to loose all of them. One had the pants lost by the cleaners (I did not, however, decide to sue for $54 million). Another, I left sitting on the coat rack above me while riding NJ Transit and wasn't able to retrieve from lost-and-found (meaning there must be some other NJ Transit-riding bastard with my exact dimensions). Finally, the third suit miraculously had pants that fit in China yet were "1970s leisure suit tight" (if not even embarrassingly tighter) when I got back to the states. And I came back back skinniest I've been in a while, so it's not that I put on weight after having that suit made. Did they shrink from the altitude in my checked bag on the plane? REGARDLESS, it was time to have some suits made!

The tailor was located on the upper floors of the Yashow Market. For $116 I'm going to have one hand-tailored suit and two custom shirts made. Can't beat that! It was also extremely quick. An assistant first spoke with me about what style of suit I wanted made out of which materials, and started jotting a rough suit schematic on a carbon copy pad. Then the tailor was called out for the heavy lifting: measurin' me up. He worked the tape, and shouted dimensions to his assistant. In total, the process took no more than 20 minutes and we were out of there by 11am. I'm headed back in a few days to try it on and make adjustments.

After a quick dumpling lunch, we headed out for the real activity of the day: a trip to a rooftop cafe near the drum and bell towers to read and take in the nice weather. This required hoping onto the Line 2 subway (blue line in link) from out stop, Dongsi Shitiao, on the east side of the Forbidden City to Andingmen, located north of Beijing center. Line 2 follows the Second Ring Road all the way around the Forbidden city, and the Second Ring Road was laid in the remains of Beijing's ancient city walls after Mao tore them down in 1965 as part of the Great Leap Forward, an effort to modernize China. But many of Beijing's major intersections along the Second Ring Road/Line 2 Subway still retain names that have meanings from the days when the wall still existed. Men means door or gate, so Andingmen means "gate of peace and tranquility" (the same way that Tiananmen means "gate of heavenly peace"). Ok, Chinese lesson over now.

From Andingmen, we headed south into the hutong alleys and deeper into the heart of ancient Beijing. The hutong are traditional low courtyard housing that are somewhat unique to Beijing. They've been subdivided so many times over the centuries and crowded with several generational families that they now are a warren of publicly private space. We walked down some of the more public alleys, still wide enough to squeeze a car through, but could peer left and right into long narrow alleyways connecting courtyards crammed with clotheslines, cooking stove tops, and furniture.

Clark's Patrio-artistic shot of an Olympically decorated hutong alley.

An incredibly small car (perhaps meant to be bicycle powered) ditched in the hutong.

Eventually, one of of these hutong alleyways opened into a small courtyard with the Bell Tower on one end and the Drum Tower on the other. On our walk over the alleys were narrow enough, and the surrounding courtyard walls high enough that I couldn't see these two towers until we were upon them, despite their impressive size. I believe the Bell Tower was originally constructed in the 700s, although has been rebuilt after several fires, and served as Beijing's timekeeper -- a Big Ben of sorts if you will. I'm not really sure what the Drum Tower's purpose was, although it's probably a safe bargain that it involved banging on some drum.

Beijing's Bell Tower

Beijing's Drum Tower

We headed for a small establishment on the side of the courtyard that had converted a hutong household into a small bar and cafe. On the ground level, they had managed to maintain a lot of the original interior, and it had a really rustic feel. They also installed a steep staircase up to the roof where they had placed all sorts of outdoor furniture, giving it the feel of an Adirondack lake deck. We were at tree level, so we sat there sipping some iced milk teas and enjoyed the rustling breeze while reading. There clientele was part Chinese, but mostly Expat.

Ben looking interested.

That evening, we headed back to the neighborhood for some Xinjiang cuisine. Xinjiang is China's westernmost province. It is mostly desert and inhabited by Muslim minorities like the Hui and Uigyurs. Ben, Durrel, and I have each spent some time out there. It's about as far as you can get away from China geographically and culturally while still being in China. Yet these minorities have a very strong presence in Beijing and other northern Chinese cities. It may be traveled by other means, but the Silk Road is by no means dead. The Uigyurs also have some great food that's pretty different from the rest of this country's cuisine.

Ben looking interested.

We ordered some chicken kebabs (jirou tuan'r), small grilled slices of bread (mantou), and a noodle dish consisting of small flat square noodles (imagine one half of a ravioli wrapper without the filling) tossed in a tomato sauce with fried onions and peppers. The mantou (to the left in the picture underneath the chicken kebabs) came out tasting almost exactly like garlic bread -- it was really good. So there I was eating garlic flavored bread and wheat based noodles mixed with tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Add a spice, remove a spice, and it wouldn't take much imagination at all to get the Never Ending Pasta Bowl (China's top scientists are still hard at work perfecting a non-clumpy alfredo sauce). So it's pretty clear Marco Polo spent some time hangin' with the Uigyurs. The noodle dish was also served with a spoon, which I thought was kind of interesting. Spoons exist in Chinese cuisine, but are usually reserved only for soups and look like the thick mini-ladels you also see in American Chinese restaurants.

The next day I had a meeting with someone not far from Tiananmen, so I decided to pop down and see how our old friend Mao was doing (still entombed presumably). The day was also very clear, but Beijing's intense heat and humidity was beginning to creep back. I was sweating bullets. Many of the tourists were avoiding the square itself (a 90-football field sized square of baking concrete) for shade on the tree-lined avenues surrounding the area. There were also a lot of displays set up in the square commemorating the Olympics and welcoming the Paraolympics, so you didn't get as much the sense of its massive scale as I remembered. But Mao's mug was still there, sitting on Tiananmen, and so was the police/military presence.

Although clips from the Olympics (the good ones, aka the opening ceremonies and female Chinese lifters lifting inhuman amounts above their heads) are still inescapable on the streets and subways (there seems to be a jumbotron on every major hotel in my neighborhood showing footage), many of the Olympic advertisements have quickly changed over to the Paraolympics. Below you can see huge amounts of workers arranging huge amounts of flowers on what I can only assume is a newly erected (or recently adjusted) Paraolympic monument. Ben, Durrell, and I have tickets to see wheel chair rugby, and this got me a little more excited for that coming up in a week or so.