Weekends in Beijing

It’s been about two weeks since my last post, and it has been the most relaxing two weeks of the entire trip.  After our weekend in Shanghai, we had to present our projects and take our final for 3104 (Supply Chain Modeling: Warehousing and Manufacturing), but then the class was over.  That class was incredibly time consuming and difficult, so we were all happy to be done.  Now, we’re taking 3103 (Supply Chain Modeling: Logistics), and while the material is still challenging, none of us feel as stressed out.  We have more time to relax and enjoy being in Beijing.  Because we had 3104 first, many people really did not like Beijing or living in China, but now that we have a change to breathe and enjoy it, a lot of people are much happier.

The weekend after the final, I decided to stay in Beijing.  I was still sick (because I hadn’t had time to slow down and heal), so I didn’t feel up to traveling.  Almost everyone else went to Shanghai, but the people who had gone to Shanghai the weekend before stayed in Beijing with me.  We slept in every morning (although I still woke up by 9.30 thanks to the bright sun), didn’t rush around, and didn’t make plans ahead of time.  We discovered some good restaurants and enjoyed having different kinds of cuisine, not just Asian food or fast food for every meal.  We did a lot of shopping, and most of us got our entire list of gifts out of the way.  I also got the chance to see the new Superman movie in an international movie theater (it was in English).  I have now seen movies in the USA, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and China!  Now, if I was in the USA, this would probably be an incredibly boring weekend, but after everything I have been doing and how sick I was, the weekend was perfect.  I even woke up on Monday morning without being sick!

The whole next week was just about as relaxing.  Our class wasn’t too stressful, so we got to explore more of Beijing in the evenings.  We had a big celebration on Tuesday.  Lane and Molin had both had birthdays on the previous Saturday (22 and 20, respectively), and Tuesday was Kevin’s 21st birthday, so we combined them all into one and had a big party on Tuesday night.  Almost the entire group (I think only about 3 students didn’t come, and even professor Sokol came with us) went to Steak and Eggs, a ‘North American Diner’ we had discovered in the embassy district.  This restaurant is owned by a Canadian who, through a bizarre set of circumstances involving SARS and travel restrictions, found himself living in Beijing without good cheap American food.  All of the meals are very cheap, and even the drinks are only 15RMB (less than US$2).  Kevin loved the food, and drinks that cheap are perfect for a 21st birthday, so we spent a lot of time there.  We also ordered three custom-made cakes (chocolate, strawberry, and coconut) for each of the birthday kids.  After dinner, some of us continued the party in the bar district and spent some time bar-hopping.  Needless to say, Lane was the only birthday kid who made it to class on time.  Molin made it to the afternoon class, and Kevin was in bed all day.  He came back to class the next day to take the exam!

Now, we’re on to this weekend.  I am still in Beijing (I don’t have more outside-of-Beijing travel plans for China) and really enjoying it.  Beijing is so big that it takes a long time to explore all of the districts.  There were only five of us who stayed here for the weekend, so we didn’t have to deal with a lot of people wanting to do different things.  On Thursday evening we explored the restaurants near the university and ended up at another hotpot restaurant.  We liked this one better because we each got our own pot of boiling water (so we didn’t have to chase our meat around and get caught up in other people’s chopsticks), and we also ordered dumplings and vegetables, not just raw meat.  The dumplings were the most complicated to cook.  You had to get the timing just right so that they were in long enough to cook, but if they were in too long the pasta would get too soft and fall apart, dumping all of the fillings into your pot of water.  They were also very slippery, making it difficult to remove them from the pot with chopsticks.  

Friday we got up earlier than we had the last weekend, went back to Steak and Eggs for brunch (we like how cheap it is for such good food!), and then wandered over to the Silk Market to finish up our shopping.  Kristen had to buy a suitcase and pick up the clothes she had had made (a suit and four button-ups) as well as do her second fitting for her silk dress.  I had a cashmere coat made as well as two button-ups because Kristen’s fit so well.  The Silk Market doesn’t just have clothes and silks, so we also got a lot of things on our lists taken care of.  That night we ended up back at Mexican food for dinner.  It’s nothing like the Mexican that we get back in the states (especially in Dalton!), but it’s fairly good for Mexican food in China.

On Saturday, Kristen and I had had enough shopping and wanted to do more cultural and sightseeing things around town.  She won’t be here next weekend, our last weekend in Beijing, so she wanted to make sure she saw these things.  We ended up being on our own because the other people wanted to sleep all day, but we had a good day on our own.  It was one of the most gorgeous days we have had in Beijing so far.  No clouds, no smog, bright sun, good breeze, etc.  We started with going through the Forbidden City.  The Chinese authorities refer to it as the ‘Palace Museum,’ but it is known as the Forbidden City because no commoner was allowed inside for over 500 years.  It was really cool.  We began at the north gate and walked through to the south gate.  When we first walked in, we were reminded of the Grand Palace in Bangkok.  The architecture was really ornate, and the gardens were very oriental (obviously).  After we made it through the gardens, however, the buildings and temples were built much farther apart, and there were large expanses of empty space.  For example, a raised bridge would connect two temples, and the edge of the square would be lined with other buildings with porches, but everything in the middle was open space.  After we left the Forbidden City and were facing Tiananmen Square once more, we realized that it wasn’t unexpected to encounter such large expanses of open space in China (as Tiananmen Square is the largest open square in the world).

After the Forbidden City, we walked back over to Wangfujing to eat lunch and do a little bit of shopping before going to the Temple of Heaven Park.  We weren’t very hungry, so we ducked into a KFC to grab a quick bite, but it was so busy that we couldn’t find any place to sit down!  This was the largest KFC I have ever been to, and at 2pm it was so crowded that two people couldn’t find a place to sit.  It was crazy!  After lunch, we walked over to the biggest bookstore in Beijing so Kristen could buy new books for the plane home, and I bought a National Geographic with a cover story about panda bears.  They are so cute!  I am going to miss panda bears when I return to the USA.  And watermelon with every meal.  Watermelon is very popular in China in the summer.  Almost every restaurant serves it as dessert after your meal, and all of the student cafeterias sell slices of watermelon at meals.  It’s delicious!

After leaving the bookstore, Kristen and I caught the sketchiest cab ever to the Temple of Heaven Park.  It seemed like a registered cab because it looked like other cabs and had a sign and a meter, but it was definitely an illegal one.  Unfortunately for us, we didn’t notice that the meter was three times as high as it should be until we got almost all the way to the Temple of Heaven, and the taxi driver wouldn’t let us go without paying the full amount.  That was very unfortunate for us, and we were not happy with taxis for awhile.  We were OK, though, after getting in the park because it was so beautiful.  This park is a lot like Central Park in NYC in that you can completely forget that you are in the middle of a big city.  It was hectares and hectares of trees and grass and greenery.  I would not have believed Beijing capable of producing something so green in the middle of the city if I hadn’t been here myself.  The park is huge, so we didn’t see all of the alters, but we did see the crowning glory of it all, the alter that is pictured on all of the postcards, and that is all we really wanted to see anyways.  We enjoyed wandering around the park, especially because there were groups of Chinese choral groups and musicians practicing around the gardens.  It was very relaxing.

The pearl market is right next to this park, so after leaving we walked back over to pick up a few more things before meeting the boys for dinner.  We went back to Annie’s, a good Italian place we had been with Professor Zhou after our 3104 final.  Everyone had food they enjoyed, and I had the best arrabbiata sauce I have had in China.  We had good food and good wine and then came back to the university to watch some of our new DVDs.  What a good day!

Now, it is Sunday.  It rained this morning and is still very overcast, so our plans for going to the Summer Palace are shot.  We are all taking care of things around here, like catching up on emails and schoolwork, before potentially going to a Chinese acrobatics show tonight.  Apparently they have 15 Chinese riding one bicycle, so it should be interesting.  I’ll let you know.