Le printemps à Pékin/ Beijing: A working progress?

FRANÇAIS

Aéroport de Pékin: il est 22h00. Après consultation de nos notes gribouillées un peu plus tôt, nous prenons la ligne de bus no. 2. De l'autoroute d'abord, puis de grandes avenues, très sombres et presque désertes. Nous descendons de ce premier bus pour remonter aussitôt dans un deuxième: le no. 22. Encore des avenues, puis des rues, toujours à peine éclairées. Atmosphère silencieuse. 6ème arrêt: on descend et on se met à marcher dans la pénombre pendant plusieurs centaines de mètres avant de pénétrer (enfin) dans le hutong de Zhengjue.

"Hutong" en Chinois signifie "ruelle". Il est maintenant 23h00 bien tapées. Contrairement au reste de Pékin, les hutongs sont très animés à cette heure de la nuit. Plein de marchands de bouffe ambulants. Les barbecues fument! Les gens mangent dehors, assis autour de petites tables basses, sur des tabourets miniatures. On dirait qu'ils jouent à la dînette!
D'autres jouent pour de vrai: l'air archi-concentré, ils sont plongés dans des parties de "mahjong", genre de jeu de cartes aux allures de dominos.

Et puis il y a les salons de coiffures, plein de salons de coiffure ouverts!... Avec sans doute autre chose dans l'arrière-cour...

Encore quelques mètres et nous arrivons enfin à la Lanterne Rouge, notre demeure pour les dix jours à venir.

Que fait-on à Pékin pendant 10 jours?

- On visite: la Place Tienanmen, la Cité interdite et le Temple du Ciel.
- On va au marché de Panjiayuan où se vendent des antiquités fabriquées "y a pas longtemps".
- On se rend à Simatai et on marche sur la grande muraille de Chine pendant 10 kilomètres.
- On mange du canard Pékinois, forcément!... Malheureusement plus gras et moins croustillant que ce à quoi on peut s'attendre... Le canard Pékinois serait-il meilleur à Londres qu'à Pékin?
- On va dans un resto chic pour déguster des spécialités venant d'autres provinces de la Chine dont le Yunnan: des oeufs préservés, encore appelés "oeufs de mille ans" (le "jaune" est vert et le "blanc" est marron-violet transparent) accompagnés de tofu cru, le tout flottant à la surface d'une huile au chilli plutôt douteuse (Une bouchée me suffit tandis que Jason se montre plus persévérant), du tofu fermenté, dont le goût s'avère être aussi désagréable que l'odeur... Conclusion: il y a certains plats qu'il faut avoir mangé depuis tout petit pour pouvoir apprécier.
- A la Lanterne Rouge, on discute avec la Suède, les USA, l'Angletrre et l'Australie et on boit du vin chinois La Grande Muraille, de la bière Tsingtao et de l'alcool de riz.
- On assiste à une compèt' de hip hop entre slameurs chinois. On comprend rien mais c'est pas grave...
- On va voir un spectacle d'acrobatie chinoise: danse des lions, numéros d'équilibre, contorsionistes, assiettes en procelaine, etc...
- On assiste à une comédie musicale sur le thème du Kung Fu... Combats et sabres dans tous les sens... Tous les mecs adorent! (une comédie musicale pour les hommes).
- On se fait couper les tifs par un coiffeur en herbe.
- On se fait masser à l'hotel The St. Regis, apparement l'hotel le plus chicos de Pékin (merci Mounira, merci Frank!).
- On se ballade dans les rues poussiéreuse de Pékin. De jour comme nuit, c'est marteau-piqueurs, pioches, pelles, marteaux, faucilles... Pékin est en chantier. Plus que 400 et quelques jours avant les jeux de 2008...

ENGLISH

Our first view of China and Beijing as we drove from the airport was of broad boulevards and the wide expanse of Tian'anmen square. This was followed by the narrow maze of hutongs, which is Chinese for narrow alley, where we found our hostel the Red Lantern.

When we ventured out during the next few days we discovered the surrounding hutongs were lined with food stalls, shops and more hairdressers than any neighbourhood needs. It turns out "hairdressers" in some neighbourhoods is Chinese for brothel. That's why there was rarely anyone getting their hair done.

The other thing you notice quite quickly is that Beijing is one huge building site, accompanied by large holes in the roads and pavements, cranes, trucks and a lot of dust. All the construction and demolition is the result of the eleventh five year development plan and of course the push to get everything up to scratch for the Olympics. Combined with the dry heat and the general pollution you notice the dust in the air almost instantly and if you stand still for too long you end up looking like 19th century chimney sweep. But anyway, more about Beijing.

Around the corner from our hostel was a lake that we searched out as an antidote to the bustle and madness on the main streets. We only just found it after getting lost in the hutongs, which looked very similar to us newcomers (grey walls and red doorways). The lake (Beihai) in the day was buzzing: people playing Chinese chess, Mahjong, exercising, tai-chi-ing, singing and kicking around a coloured shuttle cock in a kind of cross between badminton and hacky sack. At night the fancy bars and restaurants at the lakeside were rammed and people cruised in duck shaped pedaloes with twinkly eyes. Very cosomopolitan and I guess not what we expected.

In attempt to do better with Chinese food here than we do at home, "one chicken chow mein and and egg fried rice please", we ate at a Yunnanese restaurant: spicy dried beef; steamed vegetables with shaved pickles; sweet pumpkin cakes that should we should have had for dessert; preserved eggs a.k.a. 1000 year old eggs that floated in an oily sauce. To our amusement, but not so we laughed, the whites were translucent brown/purple and the yellows were green. Next up the fermented tofu also got the thumbs down. It smelt bad and unfortunately tasted like it smelt. We decided that these last delicacies were an acquired taste that we would have had to begin acquiring a lifetime ago.

For the rest of our time in Beijing we:

- Walked around Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City admiring Mao's picture and his architectural legacies which were impressive in there square-ness, size and concrete-ness.
- Ooh-ed and ahh-ed as we watched Chinese acrobats somersault, juggle hats and ride 15-up on a single bicycle.
- Visited the Temple of Heaven and had our pictures taken by a handful of Chinese tourists: it seems we're tourist attractions ourselves
- Walked 10km along the Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai. This is a section of mostly un-restored wall and wandering along it gave us some idea of what this old engineering feat was about and how difficult it must have been to keep out those marauding hordes. If you look down from the wall there's some pretty difficult terrain to negotiate either side, so you'd imagine if an invading army managed to deal with all that then a wall, no matter how great, was hardly going to send them home with their tales between their legs.
- Watched a Chinese MC battle (if you don't get it, think 8-mile in Mandarin) where we heard Chinese rappers saying "Yo, yo, yo, yeah N*?&a!"
- Ate Peking duck, which was fattier and less crisp than we expected
- Shopped at the tourist tat market and ate at the night food market
- Watched a Kung-Fu tale on stage that featured fighting 5 year olds and the hero performing feats on beds of nails
- Had a luxurious massage at a the St Regis hotel which is apparently where George W. stays when he's in town. Thanks Mounira, thanks Frank!
- Hung out at the hostel drinking Great Wall wine, Tsingtao beer and tasty rice wine with Sweden, the US of A and Australia
- Mocked up a salon in our hostel room to save Nathalie a visit to the "hairdressers"

Among the other things we noticed in our first week in China were that queuing is against the law, hacking and spitting is required by law and crossing the road should be done when the maximum number of cars, taxis, buses and bicycles are heading directly toward you. Also, the majority of tourists in China are actually Chinese so places of interest that you visit are not swamped by foreigners but by locals (if you see what I mean). Clever heh?

All in all, we spent 10 days in Beijing, partly because we had some visa business to sort out, partly because we couldn't get a train ticket due to the Golden Week rush and lastly because we needed to slow down for a while after the whirlwind of Japan. But here were are in China, with only the Mandarin for "hello" and "thank you" to get us by and we're off to Xian on an overnight train to see some figures made from clay.

---

---