Advertisement
Green. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it. A mere 36 hour train journey and the brown sand of mongolia had faded into a chinese spring. Grassy mountains dripping with vegetation, fields of succulent crops, walkways lined with trees. And I mean trees with leaves. It was heaven.
Beijing was not the hectic metropolis I had imagined. Yes it was busy but very little of the city is high rise so the 22 million residents are spread in a thin layer over an enourmous area and the normal noise of city life can just dissipate into the open sky. Also it is a city of safe havens. There is an abundance of temples and parks where you can retreat and relax. And its not just the tourists. The temple of heaven park is thronging with local dance classes, games of hackeysack and random music lessons. The chinese seem to love their games. You can't walk along a street and not come across a huddle of men playing cards on a makeshift table, a communal activity where each move played is critically discussed by a large crowd of onlookers.
My hostel was in a lovely hutong (narrow alley) district
Wise words indeed
The Forbidden City, Beijing near to the Lama temple, north of the city centre. The main street was a bustling thouroughfare cramed with incense shops and food stalls. Exactly the right type of place for someone trying to eat as much tasty stuff as possible for as little money as possible. I found a great place for breakfast. A chinese greasy spoon where I started my day with a bowl of hot sweetened soymilk with either deepfried dough sticks or steamed pork dumplings (bao zi). Either choice cost me about 40p.
Bao zi have pretty much been my staple food. They are white yeast dough dumplings which I have long had an obsession with and possibly formed a large part of my desire to visit china. Anywhere you can see a steamer you can get them for a few yuan and from road side stalls they are big enough that a couple can constitute a meal. You can get any variety of fillings, although my limited chinese means all I can specify is meat or vegtable, the exact contents is pot luck. One of the best so far was pork and fennel, I couldnt ask for it again but as I'm yet to
have a bad one Im quite happy with my ordering system.
Also all around my hostel were BBQ restaurants. This seems to be one of the most common street food of beijing. The concept is simple. Put anything you can find on a skewer and cook it over an open fire. Very tasty. Unfortunatly I missed out on some of the more unusual meats. scorpion, seahorse and starfish all got skewered but not in any of the places I ate. The usual was just mutton or beef, and occasionally squid.
If you go for a sit down meal here, the way to eat here is to share. You order comunal dishes for the table (a concept I do my best to honour in every food situation) so the more people the better the variety. Dishes have been quite faithful to the food I've eaten in china towns in the UK, although they tend to be more vegtable based. Spinach and garlic has been a constant (satisfying my 'green' urges) and egg and tomato, apparently very popular in the north, is absolutely delicious. If i listed all the nice dishes I'd go on for ever. I'll try and space
Tourists!!!
The Forbidden City, Beijing the details out over my various blog entries!
While I'm on the subject of food the most interesting thing about the diet of northern china is the lack of rice. Wheat is the done thing here and although in beijing you can get food from just about anywhere, its not a staple as it just doesn't grow. Wheat presents itself in lots of tasty forms. Copius noodles, dumplings and stemed bread and although I do really like rice, I can just about survive on such tasty things as these! And its not like I havent had rice about once a day anyway.
I should probably touch on subjects other than food (although I'm loath to leave it). Believe it or not I mainly stuck to three brief meals a day in beijing so I did have time for a bit of sightseeing in between.
As I mentioned above, beijing is not short of nice places. It is a beautiful city and although I stayed nearly a week I only got to scratch the surface. On my first day I visited the Lama Temple, next to my hostel and was welcomed in from the busy road by almost
Incense
Lama Temple, Beijing total silence and the smell of incense. The summer palace also, was a place of solace. The chinese tour groups came on mass but yet didnt take away from the peace of it- a vast lake surrounded by temples and gardens, hills melting into the distance- the ancient retreat of the imperial chinese.
The peace was shattered in the forbidden city. For centuries normal chinese were excluded on pain of death, now they are making up for it. I went on a sunday and it was like an aging mosh pit. Old men elbowed their way through the crowds, desperate to get a picture of a throneroom, children were abandoned for the sake of seeing an ancient treasure, seas of red hatted tour groups stampeeded between temples. (n.b. no gradmothers were hurt in the taking of any of my photographs).
On the same note, I'd like to talk for a minute about the risks of meeting tour groups. Tour groups are dangerous for two main reasons. Firstly, there ability to swarm. If you get stuck in the middle of one, you can get carried miles out of your way before you even realize what happening. There is no
Boat trip
Summer Palace, Beijing way out. Secondly, as a westerner you risk the dreaded photo chain. Now, normally in china, you dont get very far without someone telling you you are beautiful (i.e. wierd and pale looking) and asking to take your picture. With a nice chinese couple this is fine, one maybe two pictures. If it happens in a tour situation however, with 50 or so eager tourist looking on, escape can be nigh on impossible.
A trip to beijing (so the tour companies tell us) is not complete without a trip to the great wall of china. Unlike my cousins who trekked the whole length of the wall in 2007 (
), I went for the lazy option, a day trip with a 10km hike along a section between Jinshaling and simatai, about 130km north of beijing. It was resonably reconstructed but the views were stunning and the wall itself was nice and crumbly in places. It was steep too, the wall built along the mountain ridges and followed the lanscaep as it dipped up and down. Actually the steepness of the mountains made me wonder why they even needed the wall- by the time any invading mongols reached the top they a steep descent
The Great Wall, Jinshaling to Simatai must have been so exhausted they could hardly have posed a threat to national security. I suppose there is alwasy the possibility that ancient warriors could have been fitter than me!
The rest of my time in beijing was spent wandering round hutongs and temples. I saw drummers in action at the drum tower and I succesfully managed to bargain for bananas. My mandarin is at best very iffy but I managed to buy a train ticket. 'Hard seat' to datong, 7 hours west of Beijing and the home to 50,000 buddhas.
Did I make it to the train station? Did I meet the Buddhas? Most importantly were there Bao in Datong?
For answers to these and other questions, tune in again soon, for the next exciting installment of the girl in seat 62.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.11s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 64; dbt: 0.0605s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Mummy
non-member comment
useful signs
who needs guide books when you have the useflu signs you photographed?! Thank you fo your latest mouthwatering blog . x