Mokka mit Schlag » Travel

Saturday morning (Day #3) Beth was attending the conference so I decided to do some local birding. It took a bit of doing, but the kind folks at the registration desk managed to write “Please take me to the Old Summer Palace” on a piece of paper I could give to a cab driver. The disadvantages of a non-alphabetic language: they knew how to say the Chinese name of the Old Summer Palace, but it’s an uncommon name so no one knew how to write it. They ended up copying it out of my guide book. Nor did the first cab driver I tried no how to read it. Fortunately, the second cab driver understood it; and eventually I got there, paid my $10 Yuan admission, and walked in.

The first bird I spotted was a Black-billed Magpie, but soon after I found a different magpie, the Azure-winged Magpie, my first life bird of the day. This is very pretty bird, with an unusual distribution. They’re found in Spain, but then, for some reason no one understands, there’s a huge gap in their distribution until the middle of Asia. I didn’t get any good photos of Azure-winged Magpies thast day, but here’s one from a couple of days later at the Zoo:

Shortly after spotting the magpie, I met a Chinese birder, the first and only one I saw the whole trip. He was as excited to see me as I was to see him. Unfortunately his English extended as far as my Chinese: I could say “Nihao” and he could say, “Hello” and after that our conversation degenerated into a lot of pointing at trees and field guides. However in this process we were able to find a Great Spotted Woodpecker, and he was able to tell me that the crows we were seeing were indeed Thick-billed Crows, Corvus macrorynchos, not Carrion Crows. That made them life bird #412 for me. He also found a Great Spotted Woodpecker for me, and tried to teach me the Chinese word for Woodpecker (Sicha, I think if I’m remembering correctly). I tried to teach him the English word for “Magpie”. I’m not sure how much of that stuck with either of us, but it was the most significant interaction I had with a non-Anglophone Chinese the entire trip.
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Our plane doesn’t leave till 9:00 PM tonight (and arrives at LAX at 5:00 PM tonight, the wonders of the international dateline) so we did a little more sightseeing.

First stop was the Dongyu Temple, the first Taoist Temple we’d visited after slews of Buddhist Temples. It was a bit of an eye opener. I had no idea Taoism was this pagan. It apparently rivals Hinduism for sheer number of deities, not to mention ghosts, demons, and assorted other creatures. Plus there’s reincarnation, and a hierarchy of possible next lives. If I recall correctly, if you do nothing but evil you come back as an insect; if you do more evil than good, you come back as a bird or a fish; and if you do equal amounts of good and evil, you come back as a mammal (but not a person). Of course, you can also just end up tortured in one of 14 hells:

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Dateline: Beijing, Wednesday, April 23. We ate an early dinner at the Rathskellar again (not its real name, but I don’t know what else to call it.) We had the fish hot pot again. Then we grabbed a cab for the other side of town to catch the “Peking Opera for Dummies” at the Liyuan Theatre. We planned to wander around a bit before the show, but we hit the worst traffic we’d seen the whole trip, and got there with not so much time to spare. The folks we were planning to go with never showed up. I hope they just didn’t come instead of being stuck in traffic for two hours and still missing the show.
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Sunday it rained all day non-stop. I explored the subways and tried to get to the Natural History Museum, but the street I was planning to walk down was closed, and trying to take an alternate route I got lost in some Hutongs southwest of Tian’anmen Square. (The government is busy knocking down hutongs all over the city, and other perceived eyesores before the Olympics. Entire neighborhoods are being leveled left and right. Usually they don’t bother to exclude people from the destruction site, but for some reason this particular one was fenced off.) I eventually found my way back, but not a lot was accomplished today.

For lunch I stopped at a tourist joint near Tian’anmen square because I figured they’d have an English menu. (They did.) I don’t worry too much about eating at Tourist restaurants here because they’re mostly aimed at Chinese tourists, and are still weird and different enough. I have yet to see a burger or fries on any menu anywhere. First course was some nice fish soup (I thought I ordered beefball soup, but ‘m flexible) followed by the largest bowl of carp with Udon noodles I’ve ever seen. This could have fed a village. I was embarrassed when it showed up on the table. I hadn’t meant to order two courses, but I must have misunderstood the waitress when she brought the menu back to me and showed me some extra pages. I have got to learn enough Chinese to at least order competently by pointing at a menu. Pricewise though the whole experience cost just 70 Yuan, about $10. By local standards, that’s a princely sum for a meal for one.

I’m getting a little tired of playing tourist. I usually like to mix tourist activities with actual work, or a conference, or some non-tourist reason to be in a city. However, this time it’s Beth who’s at the conference, and I’m just spending the days exploring the city. This would be easier if the conference hotel was a little more centrally located. Beijing’s a huge city and walking around it in the rain just isn’t all that much fun.
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Sunday morning and it’s raining. I figure I’ll give it an hour to stop or calm down before I give up and head out anyway. I neglected to pack an umbrella. However I bought one easily enough at a little convenience store down the street. It was 26 Yuan (about $4) which struck me as a trifle expensive, but when I opened it I discovered it was actually a really large, solid umbrella, of the sort that sells for $20 or more in the states, not one of the cheap $3 umbrellas that magically on every street corner in Manhattan as soon as the rain starts.

Prices here are quite cheap. A couple of days ago lunch was an amazing duck sandwich from a little hole in the wall bakery in Shicha Hai for 4 Yuan (about 65 cents). A couple of times I’ve known I was getting a bad deal (a 10 Yuan Diet Coke, a $100 Yuan one hour cab ride), but I haven’t bothered to haggle because the price was at worst in line with New York prices, and usually cheaper still. If you bother to haggle at all, the price drops fast. If you don’t like haggling, just look for stores that use scanners on major streets. Then the price is whatever’s been entered in the computer, not whatever the clerk thinks he/she can get away with.
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The Chinese-language television channels in our hotel seem to be split into news, music, and various historical dramas. The dramas are roughly half Kung Fu, half soap opera. The only modern drama we’ve caught is one that we could best interpret as Chinese Law and Order; but otherwise China does seem to prefer drama set in the pre-revolutionary past. Whether this reflects the preferences of the viewers, the producers, or the government censors, I don’t know.

At least one of the dramas we caught came from Hong Kong. It took me a few minutes to figure out why the actors’ lips were as badly out of sync as in any Saturday afternoon Kung Fu movie on WGNO: this was a Cantonese movie from Hong Kong! Only this time it was dubbed into Mandarin instead of English.

The one English language channel at our hotel is CCTV 9, which brings new meaning to the motto “Fair and Balanced”. This is like a Chinese version of Fox News, only without the entertainment value. Right now they seem to be obsessed with two stories: the class system in Tibet before China “liberated” it in 1955, and the various protests against Beijing hosting the Olympics.
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