Beijing in a heatwave

---

comments in italics by Jan, as usual!
The small French town we live in boasts, strangely enough, 3 Asian restaurants - not bad for a total population of almost 12 000. I describe these establishments as Asian (as they do themselves), as they serve a hotch-potch of Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Indian food in the form of an all-you-can-eat buffet. We were lunching in one of these places recently and fell to speculating whether similar restaurants existed in Asia where you would dine on say tapas, followed by a plate heaped high with a mixture of sauerkraut, pickled herring and boeuf bourgignon, and finish off with Christmas pudding? (They do!) But where could we eat genuine, authentic cooking from China? Well the answer was pretty obvious...

Getting there.

Jan looked a bit surprised when I proposed getting to Beijing by Aeroflot, as we once spent several hours waiting on the runway in Washington (in a plane, I should add) as the Aeroflot flight in front of us was unable to pay the landing fees and was being refused permission to take off again. I suppose they must have had a whip-round amongst the passengers eventually. Anyway, today's Aeroflot is a modern airline much like any other, and the flights were fine; the only downside being the necessity to transfer in Moscow.

A friend of ours once went to a wedding in Russia. I asked him what his impressions of the place were, and he replied that he was astounded at how gorgeous all the women were. I can only assume, then, that when staffing Sheremetyevo airport they must have dredged Moscow for the roughest dogs available, based their selection process on ill-temperedness and bad manners, then specially trained the successful candidates in sheer pig-ignorance. We arrived at terminal D, and transfer to terminal F unfolded like the plot from a Kafka novel. At seemingly random points we were required to do the whole shoe-off security thing (three times) (four, actually, but one loses count after a while) and our boarding cards were stamped officiously in various colours for no apparent reason. Eventually we were delivered by an ancient bus (which, bizarrely, had no luggage space!) to an unmarked doorway that resembled the back entrance to a seedy nightclub. Inside, a vast crowd waited at yet another security point. I asked a passing harridan if this was the correct place for our transfer. She glanced at my boarding card and yelled " DA, DA! EES HERE! " (all airport staff are apparently obliged to shout). I was not convinced, so after another 15 minutes queueing whilst various Russians debated the size of bribe needed to clear the customs point, I wandered around the corner, up some stairs, and found a grim looking official sat at a chipped melamine counter bearing the label " International Transfer ". Ho hum.

Terminal F is a depressing 1970s building which has been recently facelifted by filling it with prefabricated boutiques selling horrendously expensive tat I actually found it fascinating - different countries definitely have different tourist tat, wonderful!) - imitation Fabergé eggs, crystal birds, 4000 Euro bottles of cognac, etc. Presumably this is where your Oligarch does a bit of shopping after visiting his European football club. Unfortunately these boutiques occupy all the areas that were once passenger seating, so passengers now sit on their luggage and block the narrow passages that lead to the gates. Whilst all the luxury goods are priced in Euros, anything an ordinary person might like to buy (a sandwich or a drink, for example) is only available in exchange for roubles. A number of machines stand around the terminal into which you can introduce your Euros, and in theory some roubles are presented in exchange. Or not. We got a ticket on which something incomprehensible was printed in Russian. We tried to stop various members of the airport staff to ask what this meant but were answered with " EES NOT MY BEEZNEEZ! " . A kindly English speaking Russian who was using the adjoining drinks machine translated for us - "Eet says you must contact bank to get back your money ". Was there a branch in the airport, we asked? He asked the woman at the adjoining boutique and translated her reply for us " Only branch in Moscow centre, but close now. You can telephone tomorrow! " Oh well.

Arrival

By contrast, Beijing City airport is efficient and well-run; customs and security points even have little electronic panels on which you can evaluate the quality of service rendered by pressing buttons with smiley or frowning faces on them. The underground takes you from inside the terminal right into central Beijing for the very reasonable sum of 25 RMB (about 3 Euros).

We had decided to stay in the Dongcheng district, as this is the most central part of Beijing and where many of the main attractions are to be found. The hotel, in one of the Hutongs (the ancient alleyways built around courtyard dwellings) and where it would be oh-so-easy to get lost if you were me! was excellently located close to Guloudajie underground station, and just next to the Bell and Drum towers. I won't say much about the hotel - it was good value for money at around 30 Euros a night including breakfasts, but although comfortable enough it wasn't exactly the Hilton. A couple of odd features are worth mentioning - the absence of a wardrobe; ( there is a sort of coatstand thingy attached to the wall though, if you want to hang anything up) and the presence of a sort of sex mini-bar on which various aphrodisiacs were available as well as condoms, underwear, and special cleaning products for ladies (and gents) privates. (Worth reading the back, perfect Chinglish...)

Money

The Chinese currency, the Yuan, is usually referred to by the abreviations CNY or RMB. In speech, almost everyone refres to the Yuan as " Kwei ". Just thought I'd clear that up. Most things are cheap in China, (Jan got a set of hair straighteners for less than 4 Euros for example). Bargaining is the order of the day from street traders and in markets, - the classic advice is to aim to pay about half of what the sellers initial price is, but I did note that in one store the piece of jewellery that Jan was looking at started at 400 RMB, and had reduced to 30 by the time we got to the door. (She bought the same thing elswhere for 5 RMB eventually). Of course the Chinese have been traders for many millenia, but they do seem to have embraced the recent relaxation in government controls, so you would swear you were in a capitalist state, particularly in central Beijing where the roads are thick with top-of-the-range Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and other luxury cars. Quite a change, when allegedly 15 years ago you were considered to be well-off if you had a bicycle. ( ...and there are 9 million bicycles in Beijing, we've dodged every bloody one of them...)

Language

Wherever we travel, I always try to learn at least enough of the local language to be polite and to be able to order food, drink and lodgings. I spent a bit more time on Chinese, partially because it is known to be difficult, and partially because I found a complete language DVD on E-bay for 3 Euros, and it seemed somehow fitting to learn Chinese from a pirated DVD. I have to confess I didn't finish listening to all 60 of the Cds, but I learned enough to be understood without people falling about laughing at my mispronunciation of the tones. (The same word can mean up to 5 different things in Chinese depending on the tone used). ( and that, I think, explains why I didn't learn any of it, I'd probably have tried to ask where the nearest loo was - more on them later - and ended up telling someone their mother was a donkey - best to leave it to the experts...). I didn't bother trying to learn Chinese characters though, as you really need to memorise about 2000 or so to even begin to understand anything written. This did prove to be a problem for menus written only in characters (and indeed in recognising restaurant names), but thankfully for the most part the waitresses were patient and helpful.

Transport

The best way to get around Beijing is, without question, the underground system. Ten lines take you to just about anywhere you would wish to go, and for the ridiculously cheap fixed fare of 2 RMB (about 0,25 centimes of a Euro) whatever the length of the journey. The trains are clean, arrive every few minutes, and even have flat screens in each carriage showing cookery and travel programmes. The only downside is that they are always extremely crowded, and they stop running at about 10h30 every night. (and most of the stations have millions of steps going either up or down - escalators usually go up, but steps go either way, my knees are knackered!)

Taxis are also cheap, but their major drawback seems to be that unless you're heading for one of the major tourist attractions, the driver won't be able to find your destination. All the hotels issue their guests a card on which the hotel address is written in Chinese characters, but your taxi driver probably won't be able to find it anyway.especially if it's in a Hutong... On the subject of driving, you can tell that China has come to motoring relatively recently - the roads are complete chaos, and people drive without any thought of safety whatever. Bicycles, scooters and rickshaws are apparently exempt from rules of the road, so don't stop at traffic lights, often travel in the opposite sense to the rest of the traffic, and are never lit at night. Crossing the road is a major hazard for pedestrians, particularly from the electric scooters that appear silently from nowhere, and I can assure you that no vehicle will ever stop at a zebra crossing for any reason.

Food

China has a long tradition of regional cooking styles, so we chose Beijing partly so as to be able to sample as many of the 8 regional styles as possible, as well as the street food, private home cuisine, and so on. We arrived with a list a recommended restaurants carefully researched on the internet, but the addresses I'd noted proved to be fairly useless, as the huge street map I purchased didn't show any of them - the sheer scale of Beijing being such that to show anything other than the major thoroughfares on a map would be impossible. No use asking a taxi driver, either. Back to the internet, then, and Google maps... not much help as the majority show an arrow pointing to an area that when magnified is a blank space about the size of Cardiff. Finding the places we wanted to eat was really quite difficult. One thing that did surprise us was how little rice we ate (perhaps only 2 or 3 servings in 9 days there). Rice is served at the end of a meal in China as a sort of filler, but the the portions are generally so huge that we rarely made it that far. I won't review every meal we ate, but here are some of the highlights:

The first night we miraculously stumbled accross one of the restaurants on my list,the Dali Courtyard - thanks mainly to the sensible directions which instructed us to take the alleyway between the chemists and the fruit shop and then follow the red lanterns (there was actually only one, we eavesdropped on a tourist asking a local the name of the street, and caught the word 'Dali') (red lanterns symbolise a food outlet). We were a bit dubious when we ended up in a scruffy unlit dead-end, faced with a door on which hung a fly-screen of plastic strips, rather like the entrance to a meat-packing factory. I poked my head through, and a smartly dressed waiter asked me in English which name I had reserved in. Inside, a pretty courtyard ( complete with fountain) was surrounded by small rooms with a few tables in each. There was no menu, but for a fixed price of 100 RMB, we were presented with a succession of maybe a dozen exquisite dishes of Northern style cooking. My kind of restaurant.

Private home cuisine might suggest to Europeans a basic like-granny-used-to-make sort of place, but in China the inverse is true, such cooking stemming from pre-revolution times when aristocratic families vied with each other to present the most sophisticated and expensive dinners. We visited the Purple Jade Club, and were greeted at the door by 4 girls in red silk frocks ( the price of a restaurant can be roughly gauged by the number of red-silk-clad girls at the door - no restaurants in Beijing post their menu or prices outside). Inside, we were kindly shown to a couch in the lobby to study the menu - presumably we looked a bit scruffy for their establishment, and they wanted to give us the option of leaving without losing face once we'd seen the prices. The menu, as well as the expected sharksfin and birds-nest soup dishes, offered such exotica as monkey's head (beurk!) and turtle, ( and crocodile paw!), and though expensive, was still reasonable by European standards. Inside, the decor was based on a Chinese water garden, the tables on glass islands reached by wooden walkways. Next to our table was a water feature in which carp ( and black catfish, and turtles)swam and a live 4-foot crocodile basked on a stone. Seeing our interest in the animal, a waitress came across occasionally to poke it with a stick, making it twitch its tail and bare its teeth malevolently at us. The food was extraordinary, beautifully presented with each dish flanked by exotic flowers sculpted from potatoes.

Well, you can't visit Beijing without eating Peking Duck, so we had ours at the much recommended Yue Hai (once we'd found it). A whole duck was expertly carved at our table into paper thin slices, and served with the traditional pancakes, spring onion, cucumber and plum sauce. Delicious.

Hot Pot (nothing to do with the Lancashire version) is a dish that goes back millenia in China. Beijing has several hundred restaurants that serve only this dish, most of which seem to have chinese-character-only menus. We were heavily reliant on our waitress, then, as we didn't know what to order or how to eat it when it arrived. Basically, the hot pot is a large (and I mean large) dish lined with those big pink tomatoes you see everywhere in Beijing, filled with aromatics (celery, spring onion, herbs), the meat of your choice (lamb, pork, dog - although I don't think the word 'dog' appeared on our menu...) then topped up with clear chicken stock. The pot is placed on a heated element in the centre of your table, and everyone is issued with a bowl containing a spoonful each of chopped chilli, salt and sugar, and chopped garlic and ginger. Once the pot has cooked for a bit and the stock is flavoured, you spoon some of the soup into the seasonings and mix well to create a dipping sauce into which you dip the bits of meat and vegetables from the pot, whilst drinking the soup. Additional vegetables are ordered (we went for seaweed and pumpkin) which are then added to the pot until cooked. Meanwhile, the waitress comes round with a huge kettle full of stock, from which she regularly replenishes the pot. As with many dishes we ordered, this could easily have fed 5 or 6 people. The Chinese very sensibly take home the leftovers in plastic containers.

Street food consists mainly of things on sticks cooked over charcoal braziers - practically anything can be eaten off a stick, it seems. We were unable to identify a great many of the items on offer (obscure bits of various animal intestines seems to be remarkably popular), but some of the more unusual offerings included snake, dog, starfish, and various grubs and insects such as scorpions. On some of the pre-prepared sticks live but well-impaled insects were still wiggling about. Bon appetit!

Another night we went to the famous Jin Ding Xuan for Cantonese cooking. The restaurant is on 4 floors, each of which seats several hundred people, and was packed full. Outside, 30 or 40 people waited on folding chairs having been given a ticket by one of the red-silk-clad girls. Every few minutes she would bawl out a number through a microphone and speaker set up on the pavement, and the lucky ticket holder could go inside to eat. It was worth the wait. ( and you get huge bowls of sunflower seeds to ease your hunger pangs. This is also your chance to buy knock-off DVDs - I bought Avatar and Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, the Ian Dury biography, for 10 yuan - about 1 euro 25, shameful I know, serve me right if it's unwatchable...)

We saved Schezuan cuisine, which is famed for being hot and spicy, until the last night. When they say spicy, thats what they mean - our "donkey meat without soup" was lip-numbingly hot. Strangely, donkey meat with soup wasn't on the menu, although "donkey skin and tendon" was. Yum!(It was deliciously tender, and if you didn't eat the gum-destroying chillies, perfectly edible)

Sightseeing

I won't list all the attractions we visited in Beijing, as there is plenty of information about the most famous tourist spots on the internet and elswhere. I will say that the main attractions are world-class, and entry prices very reasonable compared to attractions in Europe. Here are a few observations though:

The Great Wall is, of course, a must for anyone visiting China. The section nearest Beijing at Badaling is reputed for being grossly overcrowded, so we decided to visit the section at Mutianyo, which is maybe an hour and a half drive out of town. There are various ways to get there - organised tours (not my thing), a bus that leaves at 7.30 am (as if!) taxi (would they be able to find it?) or the method strongly disadvised by travel reviews, which is to take a privately organised trip offered by one of the touts in Tian'anmen square. (Don't even think about it!).The reason they are disadvised is that you risk spending half the day being dragged around Jade and silk factories, where your "guide" receives a commission. We went for this option, so when the guide turned up at the hotel I took her on one side and told her we didn't want to visit anywhere other than the wall, or she wouldn't get paid. No problem, she said. Once in the car, she started to describe the obsession of the Empress Cixi with what sounded like 'crysom" and how it was one of Chinas great cultural products. What was it? asked Jan. Decoration, she replied, surely we would like to see one of the only two factories in Beijing allowed to produce such a culuturally important product? No I said, we wouldn't, but Jan was evidently curious so I acknowledged that we could possibly make a visit if we had time after seeing the wall. Big mistake, as we shortly afterwards drew up in the car park of what turned out to be a cloissoné factory. I stated point blank that we were not getting out of the car until we arrived at the great wall. The driver roared off, muttering furiously, probably something along the lines of ''bloody round-eyes wasting my time'' or some such thing... to our ''guide'' (although why she was called a guide escapes me - she told us only the things most people already know, ie, the Great Wall is the only man-made construction visible from space, etc. and she didn't bother coming up onto the wall with us, so no guidance there either!), obviously in a huff. We arrived at the wall and the guide tapped her watch saying "I wait here for you, you back in 90 minutes!" We'll see about that, I thought. Access to the wall was via an open cable car And he means ''open'' - nothing but fresh air surrounding you, and a slim single bar between you and an 800 foot drop. The scenery is terrifyingly spectacular!) (you can walk up, but it's a long way). The wall itself defies all superlatives, and is physically quite demanding, (even the 'easy' bits, the Chinese do love their steps!)particularly in full sun and 42°C as it was the day we visted. ( to my shame I had to give up before we reached the last tower, I just couldn't face yet another set of steep - and they were steep - steps - too hot, too steep, too knackered!) Several hours later we descended by the metal helter-skelter type chute arrangement (great fun) unless you have a couple of Yankee eejits right behind you, who didn't seem to realise that you can't actually overtake on a toboggan! Other than that, it was nice to remember what it's like being seven again, wheee!) to see our guide with a face like thunder.( ''I been waiting 50 minutes for you!'') Not possible to see the wall in such a short time, I blithely explained. She recovered a little in the car on the return journey and tried half-heartedly to persuade me to visit a silk factory or a tea house, but Jan had fallen asleep by this time so I used her tiredness as a pretext to return straight to the hotel. The driver was clearly furious and turned off the aircon as punishment. (b-----d!) Back at the hotel, I paid the agreed fee and delivered in my best carefully rehearsed Chinese a phrase implying that their honourable ancestors would be proud they had shown us the real Culture of China rather than any tourist rubbish. "You didn't say you spoke Chinese!" blurted the guide. I couldn't think of the phrase "you never asked" quickly enough, so contented myself with a raised eyebrow implying I had understood every word of their conversation. In fact, I barely understood one word in ten, but I'm pretty sure the conversation was centred on what a pair of miserable chiselling roundeyes we were.

The Summer Palace is, like Cixi's winter place (the Forbidden City), built on a such a scale that it is impossible to see everything there in a day. What I really liked about this place was the fact that the Empress had spent the money earmarked for building a Chinese Navy on what is a 290 hectare personal pleasure park, including, on the vast lake, a marble barge in which to drink tea. After all, tea just wouldn't taste the same consumed in any of the other of the several hundred ornate buildings that make up the palace. In the long term, she made the right decision - a navy would be mouldering at the bottom of the sea by now, but the Summer Palace is there for us all to enjoy (though I don't suppose Cixi would be happy to see the great unwashed wandering around her private appartments).

When you get tired of all the temples and palaces, the Drum tower merits a visit, (and it's twin, on the other side of the square, the Bell Tower, one huge F--- off bell! )if you don't mind climbing the long, steep staircase. On the half hour, five drummers appear and ceremoniously beat the 'watch ' in a superbly co-ordinated five minute percussion performance. ( Very physically demanding too, by the end, the five well-muscled blokes were gleaming with sweat, mmm... and minutes later, they were doing press-ups, behind the scenes, as it were!)) Well worth seeing.and as a reward for climbing all those sodding steps, the views across the city are spectacular, old Pekin meets new Beijing)

Shopping
This is for the girlies, really. Poor Chris was very patient, wandering along innumerable 'special streets' - mainly pedestrianised shopping areas, quite amazing with their old Pekin architecture juxtapositioned with trendy globally recognisable modern shops, and some pretty old traditional ones too.You can buy anything here, from ferrets (yes, really!) to fur coats, and still have change from a farthing! I bought the already mentioned hair straighteners from a huge department store that sported a Father Christmas on a sleigh above the front entrance, and the stuffed heads of a monkey, a tiger, a cow (!) and a deer above the side entrance... You could, if the fancy took you, buy a jar with a huge scorpion, or a snake, or some grub-like creatures in it. Or how about a t-shirt with total nonsense written in English on the front - my favourite was I LIKE NO PENCILS? IT'S READY! The idea seems to be grab a handful of English words and chuck them at a t-shirt - if it's in English it must be good... We had lots of laughs reading t-shirts on the metro, helps to pass the time on long journeys....
The huge - and I mean huge - flea market is worth a visit too, although it's not really a flea market in the Western sense.
There are different areas selling stuff like jade, or carpets, or Buddhas, or vases, or even life-size statues of elephants! And the cherry on the cake is the wonderful restaurant just behind the place, where shopped-out folks go to recharge their batteries, and eat yummy, inexpensive, nicely served food. The market is called the Panjiayuan Antique Market, and the restaurant is just behind it, can't remember the name, I'm afraid, but look at the photo and you'll recognise it when you see it... We did ask a waitress 'what's the name of this restaurant' and she wrote it down for us - or at least we thought she had - when Chris translated it back at the hotel 'Fan Dian Mingzi' means 'what's the name of this restaurant?'!!!

Dislikes?

What did we dislike about about Beijing, or China in general? Well, inevitably the sheer volume of people becomes a little oppressive, but then this one city has a population 1.5 times bigger than the whole of Greece. The other thing is the pall of pollution that hangs over the city, though this may have been exacerbated by the high temperatures during our visit (it was never less than 35°C, and sometimes over 40°). Also, the Chinese seem to have a fondness for loudly hawking up phlegm and spitting in the street.( beurk! again - gut-wrenchingly horrible, especially if you happen to be eating...)

Don't, don't, don't visit the zoo if you're into animal rights, or even if it makes you mad to see animals in cages. Most of the animals have little space to wander - even the pandas were kept behind glass, although they did seem to have plenty of space.
The big cat's house was appalling. Beautiful Bengal, Chinese, and white tigers, jaguars, a black panther and a couple of lions, were locked into too-small dismal, filthy, smelly, hot concrete boxes, surrounded by literally hundreds of noisy people. The poor animals just lay there listlessly, unmoving, clearly unhappy, and in the case of the Bengal tiger, with no water - this in temperatures of more than 35°. They did have small, scruffy areas outside to wander in, but they had no access to them the day we visited - not sure why...
The monkeys are kept in a place called Monkey Hill (if I remember rightly) - again behind glass - and at least two of them seemed to be suffering from some kind of skin disease; never have I seen such scruffy, unkempt, scabby-looking animals. Even Chris (who believes that there is a conspiracy amongst primates to take over the world - I know - go figure!) found a little pity in his hardened-to-monkeys heart!
The elephant we saw stood immobile, apart fom a constant shifting of it's feet. Not even a slight swaying of it's trunk. It looked dirty and miserable.
Oddly, we saw tiny turtles in huge aquariums (aquaria?) side by side with an enormous lizard in a container hardly big enough for it to turn around! The Chinese don't have the best reputation for human rights, so I doubt that animal rights are high on their list of priorities, but it would be nice to think we could change things by protesting to the Chinese government - an Internet petition maybe? What do you think?

On the whole, Beijing is an exciting an interesting place to visit, and tourism is growing at an enormous rate. The speed at which things change in China is astounding (much of what you read on the internet is hopelessly out of date). I suspect if we go back in 10 years it will be completely unrecognisable....

---