In which I eat a scorpion (written on Sunday 5th August)

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Well, as the title indicates, this week I ate a Scorpion. After school, looking for something to do, me and some classmates set off on the metro to Wanfujin, where we found between the Starbucks and the shopping malls a mass of picturesque alleyways, lined with stalls selling all kinds of exotic food. And by exotic, I mean exotic. Starfish, sea horses and beetles. Probably somewhere there was the little Mermaid, but we didn’t see her. And like I say, Scorpions. Little ones, the size of a ten pence coin. We bought a skewer of three and had one each. They had been dipped in batter and tasted like Cumin.



<span> This week again has been non-stop. Practically every evening somebody I know from the school has come up with some kind of activity. On Tuesday we went to the Silk Market again, Thursday to see the Hutongs (essentially old town) and then a film, Friday to a night club, and on Saturday I dragged myself to the 798 art district. And today, we went to the Forbidden City.



<span> I liked the Hutongs. The moment we stepped out of the metro we could tell they were obviously not the same as the bustling business district where we lived. The roads were narrower and the buildings smaller. Cars moved slower. The Sun was shining and as we ambled along the laid back, faintly makeshift atmosphere of the place reminded me of Saint Louis. This was the kind of place, were the Senegalese government that bit better at improving the economy, I could imagine the town would become.



<span> We stepped off the main road onto a side street and everything grew even narrower. Traffic shrunk to virtually nothing apart from a couple of rickshaws and electric scooters, and with it the accompanying noise. The constant rush of tyres and engines that had for the last two weeks been more or less a permanent soundtrack to my life was replaced with something hard to find in Beijing. Quiet.



<span> We walked further in and came across the Chinese equivalent of a village green, on which a bunch of old people were playing what looked to my untrained University student eyes remarkably like bums. Apparently they play this for hours and hours, way into the night when lights are brought in so they can keep going. Again, some things never change.



<span> And from there we came to the drum tower, which as the name implies was an enormous tower. In which drums are kept. I was pleased to discover in my limited Chinese that there was a student reduction, so we all purchased tickets and climbed up a long, steep flight of stairs to the top. The view was impressive and from the balcony you could see the whole of Beijing. From the low sprawl of oriental roofs that made up the Hutongs to the sky scrapers, and between the two a mass of trees. Being used to London, where large parks are the norm, the green was a relief.



<span> The drums were played when we were there. It was again an impressive display, though to be honest I preferred the lively, riotous clatter of djembe drums in Africa. Yet these drums were not meant for dancing. The current tower, the Gulou, was built in 1420 and the drums were beaten to mark dawn and dusk every day until 1924.



<span> We went to the cinema after that. The film was distinctly unspectacular- one that had been released in Europe almost a year earlier. However it was interesting to reflect on one fact, sitting in this big, glitzy American-style cinema: within my parents’ lifetimes people in China would have only ever gone to the cinema to see a few revolutionary operas and propaganda newsreels and the most they could ever aspire to own was a bicycle worth several years wages.



<span> Compared to now it seems like a different world, similar in only one respect. The film was a thriller. One scene was cut from it.



Three days later in 798 something a friend said reminded me of this. The district was originally designed as a factory complex in the 1950s with assistance of the German Democratic Republic, and the influence is obvious in the Bauhaus, redbrick, industrial design of the place. Now full of self-consciously trendy expensive boutique shops, espresso bars and art galleries it reminds me off a cross between Hamburg and Camden Market. We had wondered round looking at the art and talking, which as he had studied English at University was very easy to do. As a kind of return contribution I had shown him all the old European paintings on display and read the French inscriptions at the bottom (French is a language the Chinese find equally as sophisticated and beautiful as anyone else, and he was very appreciative of it).



He asked me if I had read any Chinese books at all and I answered that I had, Wild Swans by Jung Chang, a work now banned in China. He asked what it was about and I said truthfully that it was about the Cultural Revolution.



“We can not talk about the Cultural Revolution in China.”



Later we saw another exhibit, a short film on a loop. It started with a musician on a stage playing a grand piano with an open lid. Suddenly a man in riot protection gear came onto the stage and silently, without any warning, started pouring glue over the strings. Then he stopped and went away. The pianist kept playing and the man came back, pouring more glue, over and over again. The quality of the sound gradually went from a full, rich note to a mute, half-hearted plucking, then keys began to stop working all together. The pianist worked the piano harder and harder, slamming down on the keyboard, changing octaves as the keys went dead. Glue began to seep of the piano through gaps in the woodwork and dried to form white stalactites on the black varnish of the paint. And the man kept coming.



Finally the piano fell silent, the strings gummed tight and the pianist gave up and bowed before leaving the stage. The other man came back and emptied the bucket over the strings.



After we left as we were heading for the bus back my friend asked me what it was all about. I shrugged but thought “it’s about that thing you aren’t allowed to talk about.”



China is not the same country it was years ago. The fact that art like what we saw is even allowed on display shows that (tellingly, propaganda posters from North Korea that a few decades earlier in China would have been intended as gospel truth are now on sale in one gift shop in 798 as a curio). It has improved greatly, that is sure. But it still is not fully free.







Anyway, we went to the Forbidden City today and saw it through the constant haze of pollution which is always in Beijing air. It was spectacularly big, but I soon felt myself getting museum fatigue. Amidst the fading grandeur of the buildings and statues it was the human stories I was most interested in, told to me by my audio guide. Stories of spurned concubines and Emperors and plotting dowagers. All of us agreed we would not want to be Emperor.



The experience of eating Hot Pot on Friday was also interesting, but not to be repeated. We sat round a table with a gas burner about ten inches from our feet, upon which two vats of sauce were bubbling away. One vat was inedibly spicy, the other plain and tasteless. Throughout the meal various bits of food were brought to the table- vegetables, vast noodles about four feet long and something I recognised from a war movie as tripe- and were left with us to be dipped in the sauces and cooked, before being conveyed to our plates. That some of the food was raw meat and therefore potentially could cause food poisoning if not left long enough added a frisson of excitement to the proceedings.



The noodles were so slick that even our chopstick expert, the Japanese girl, could not cut them, and they had to be broken apart in a team. The metal spoons we had to serve ourselves with heated up to boiling point. The vegetables, after being boiled, were largely tasteless. By the end of the meal I had the distinct impression all the other Chinese diners were looking at us wondering how anyone could possibly make such a hash of eating. It was an experience, but also surely the most complicated, wantonly inefficient and time-consuming way of eating food it is possible to imagine.



And finally to the last dish I should mention this week. Out of sheer curiosity I decided to buy a ham sandwich at a supermarket. My curiosity was not unjustified- in Beijing there is a chain called Paris Baguette in which all the staff wear berets and striped jumpers, which oddly does not actually sell Baguettes, or indeed anything a Frenchman would recognise as coming from his country, instead just vague Chinese remixes of the exotic Western phenomenon of bread. I was therefore intrigued as to how they would interpret another English staple. As soon as I opened the packet I saw something was wrong- they had cut the crusts off. My blog entry ends here.

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