Goodbye Beijing?

For the duration of my time away, I haven't completed abandoned Mum. I do send her the occassional email, and receive the occassional reply in return. This past couple of weeks, I've noticed Mum signing off by saying "Looking forward to reading your blog". Now I'm not the most subtle of people, but I can take a hint, and I know that this meant that it had been a inexcusably long time since my last blog.


Just over a week ago, myself and one of my classmates made a pledge to study even harder for the last two weeks of our stay. To put this plan into action, we changed our class from 4 hours of class with 7 others, to just two hours of class a day with two people. We also changed our class from a morning class to an afternoon class, which means that we spend the whole morning working in a local coffee shop. What relevance does all this waffle have to me not writing blogs, I hear you ask... Well, I'm not at school from 8:30am until 6pm, which means that by the time I get home, my brain is completely fried, and the computer is occupied.



At some stage last week, I paid a visit to the Wangfujing night market. This place is evidence that the majority of stereotypes are true: Chinese people do eat anything! Now those of you reading this while eating, I recommend that you skip this paragraph and move on. On display here were seahorses, snakes, lizards, insects, and many other animal parts on sticks, ready to be roasted and served to willing customers. The most disturbing thing I saw here was that many of the scorpions on the sticks were still alive, and that they would move when you went near them. I've included one of the less gruesome pictures, but you get the idea.

Its been a good few days. On Friday, we had a chilled out night with a few beers in the pub (again!).

Saturday, I went to hear a talk by an American businessman named Jack Perkowski. This man was a Wall Street veteran of 20 years, who left all the home comforts of America to set up a business in China manufacturing car parts. He arrived in China in 1991, never having been here, and not speaking a word of Chinese, but has subsequently created a business that has grown five-fold in the past 15-odd years. I'm not really selling it to you well, but his story was pretty inspirational, and he said some quite eye-opening things about operating in China. One thing that struck me as particularly poignant was that he set up his business with a British born accountant that spoke Chinese; now if I play my cards right, that could be me in 3 years time!

After this talk, I went to the usual Kung Fu lesson. It was good, as always, and I'm annoyed that I'm stopping my training, just as some things seem to be clicking.

I had a friend visiting Beijing from Ningbo, and together with some other friends, we all went to this Thai place for dinner. To cut a long story short, I played the usual trick of telling the waitress that it was my (non-Chinese-speaking) friend's birthday, and he got a group of performers surrounding him, singing to him in front of the whole restaurant - evil, I know. Little did we realise, that they would also give us free cake, champagne and a discount - not bad for a pretend birthday!



After that, we went to watch the football, but the less said about that, the better.


On Sunday, I made another escape from the noise and pollution in Beijing by going to Xiang Shan (the Fragrant Hill in English). The weather was fantastic, and we made hard work of climbing the mountain, but on reaching the top, the view over Beijing was incredible. Have a look for yourself on the photos.


The real highlight of my week happened on the Monday night though. The previous Tuesday, myself and a few friends had entered a pub quiz the previous week, and had come a respectable 6th out of 11 teams. This Monday, however, we entered an even harder quiz (as verified by Time Out Beijing) and we won!! Admittedly, we had a team member who knew every fact about everything, but that didn't stop me basking in the reflected glory. The prize was a nice bottle of Italian red for our team, which was promptly consumed.


Yesterday (Tuesday, for those of you reading this blog later), was my Chinese mum's birthday, and we went out for dinner. I am truly amazed about how much my Mandarin has improved since the last time I went out to eat with the family: I know understand the majority of what they say - as opposed to only understanding a few words, and smiling and nodding. After dinner, I had a long chat with the dad about China's situation with pollution, and it was interesting to see the Chinese view of it. The USA, Britain, Germany etc, are all developed countries, yet their emissions are still relatively high; China is developing, is also a much larger country than the others in terms of population, and larger than the others (with the exception of America) in terms of size, therefore, these developed countries should either help China to reduce their emissions or let it be for a few years. In addition, much of the industry in China is related to supplying cheaper products to the West, and if the West wants this, high emissions will be a bye-product. Admittedly, these are all simple concepts, but it was interesting to hear it come out of the mouth of a Chinese national, defending his own country. There was also some talk about Mao Zedong, and about Taiwan, and this was a treat, because very rarely do older Chinese talk about politics and recent history.

As it stands, my Chinese visa expires on the 7th May. I'm looking to get a flight to Vietnam on that day, but if not, I'll extend my Chinese visa and stay another week.

Its weird, because I thought Beijing to be an ugly, unfamiliar city at first, but I've gradually grown to like this city, and now feel at home here. It retains very Chinese elements, and my Mandarin is now of sufficient standard to feel at home here. At the same time, there are also the home comforts, and the large expat network. It seems a shame to be leaving here now, but I do have a feeling that I'll be back at some stage.



Til the next time,

Nihal

Sorry, its been a couple of weeks since I last posted. This is for a number of reasons:


1. I fell victim to the student's worst friend - procrastination. This meant that whenever I went on the computer, I spent time messing around on Facebook, frequenting Tottenham Hotspur forums, or watching episodes of generic American TV series




2. I don't have that much to write about. My life has settled into a [pretty decent] routine, whereby I go to school during the week, go out Friday night, sleep in on Saturday morning, Kung Fu at 5 followed by a trip to the Hot Pot restaurant, then back out again on Saturday night. Finally I try to cram in something cultural on the Sunday.



3. Alright, there aren't "a number of reasons", there's only two, and these are that I'm lazy and boring!


With that said, I will attempt to make this as entertaining for you as possible.



So if I strain my memory way back to the depths of last fortnight, I had to go through the painful ordeal of renewing my visa. I don't know if I'd mentioned this before, but a couple of weeks earlier, I had gone to the visa office, with the aim of renewing my visa, only to be told that I'd arrived two weeks too early! This time, I arrived at the visa office on the day that my visa was due to expire. I had all the correct documentation in place, had checked it with the head teacher at my school, and was confident that I could arrive, give my passport in, and all would be well. As with any classic comedy, things didn't go to plan. I got to the visa desk at 2:30, and the sullen looking visa-officer told me that I first had to go and renew my residence permit at my local police station. He then told me that the visa office shut at 4:30, and that I had to hurry up.


Anyway, to cut a long story short, I had to take the cross-city trek to the police station, convince them that I needed the residence permit before I got a new visa (and not vice versa), finally, I got back to the visa office, 5 minutes before closing time and handed in my passport. I forgot to mention that it was about 32 degrees this day, and the hot weather, combined with my nervousness about being classified as an illegal alien resulted in me sweating like a pig.


And this, my friends, is my one gripe with India and China - red tape, and lack of clarity in the public services. No-one seems to know what the right way is to go about doing things, everything seems to be last minute, and even the smallest of tasks will take you half a day to do!





So my cultural visit for last week was a trip to the art district. Anyone who knows their Chinese history, will have heard of the so-called Cultural Revolution which greatly damaged culture and intellectualism in China (I hope I don't get in trouble for this!). The result is that the arts still remain a fledgling sector in Chinese life; much of what you see are traditional Chinese oil paintings, using the images of the 12 animals, or some other Chinese symbolism, there seems to be little contemporary Chinese art. I was hoping that when I visited 798 (Beijing art district), I would see things using traditional Chinese imagery, but with a modern spin on it. Instead, I was treated to gallery after gallery of depressing paintings, that were technically very good (not that I'm anywhere near an expert), but seemed pretty uninspired. The place itself was fantastic though - a welcome change from the hustle and bustle of regular Beijing life, and a breath of fresh air to see lots of arty-types in Beijing. I'm sure that this place will develop well over the next few years, and is well worth a visit.

A couple of days ago, I went with the school to visit the Yanjing Beer Factory. Now, I should have learnt from past experience that a beer factory is not quite the Willy Wonka-esque place of my imagination, with rivers of beer, bridges of pretzels and mountains of crisps. In fact, the beer factory tour meant a half an hour walk through various control rooms, a Chinese tour guide, who spoke far too fast for me to understand, and a small paper cup of beer at the end. You'd have thought I'd already have learnt from my experiences at the Heineken and Guinness factories!!






Another blog comes to an end, so till next time,


Zaijian

The Tomb Cleaning Festival

I realise that my title sounds pretty grim, but I'll endeavour to make this post anything but morbid! The tomb cleaning festival ("sao mu" - to my Chinese speaking friends), is an occasion when Chinese families visit and clean the tombs of their relatives. There's more history/meaning behind it but I'm too ill-informed to give you any decent idea of what it involves. So the result of all this tomb-cleaning was that I got a 3 day weekend!!

Friday evening was very low-key and civilised. It started with the Mum teaching me how to make "jiaozi" (Chinese dumplings). I feel like I'm becoming more and more Chinese - eating Chinese food for every meal, drinking Chinese tea, studying Kung Fu, and now learning how to make jiaozi.

We had a bit of a laugh when she said that my jiaozi were "sleeping" - they were all falling over instead of standing up properly. They tasted good though!



After this, I went to a friend's house for a couple of much-deserved cold beers. The whole week, I'd been working hard, and these felt like the reward for all the hours spent learning characters. As I said, the night was quite low-key, and I was in bed by 1.

On Saturday morning, I slept in, watched some stupid TV programmes on the internet, and pretty much did nothing of any note. I had a Kung Fu lesson in the afternoon which was quite intense. This lesson, I saw what my teachers were actually capable of - one broke a punch bag (!!) by kicking it repeatedly, and the other did about 15 backflips in a row! I was in awe!

From there, I went to a bar to watch the football. The less said about this the better, but I did meet a few other Spurs fans which is always a pleasure! Having drowned my sorrows, while watching Arsenal and Chelsea both trounce their opposition, we made our way to another club. The club was called Bling, and as implied, this meant the usual blend of commercial RnB music, gaudy decor (a Bentley complete with spinning rims made up the DJ booth) and expensive drinks. I got home at the sociable hour of 4am.

By Sunday, I had both a headache and a desire to do something other than consuming warm Chinese lager, so I got a few friends together to visit a mountain village 2 hours outside of Beijing. This village - Chuandixia - was built around 200 years ago, and still retained many of its 'Hutong' style buildings (houses with all of the individual rooms built around a courtyard). We had to take a number of winding mountain roads to reach the village, and we were equipped with the obligatory crazy Chinese driver. If we hadn't felt fragile from the previous night, everyone was feeling pretty worse for wear by the time we reached Chuandixia.

The weather was fantastic, and we spent the first couple of hours walking around. Initially, some helpful Chinese person had told us that if we climbed the mountain, we would be able to find rooms to stay in. This later turned out to be false(!) and we thankfully met some people halfway up who told us this wasn't the case! At about 5, we decided to look for somewhere to stay. Most of the buildings took the form of Hutongs, and were basically impromptu guesthouses/ restaurants. We found a place with a decent courtyard, clean facilities, and relatively friendly staff, all for the princely sum of 20RMB per person (About GBP2 each). We all slept on one huge traditional 'Kang' bed (basically a huge heated platform with a thin mattress on top.

Dinner wasn't anything to write home about (ironic that I still mention it), but at the place where we were eating (it would be misleading to call it a restaurant), we met a group of Chinese people who were eating behind us. To cut a long story short, they invited us to come and drink beer with them, and the rest, as they say, is history! We were given about 4 hours of free Mandarin practice, and we were also taught a great deal about Chinese drinking etiquette - if the host invites you to "empty your bowl [of beer!]", it is seen as very poor manners not to do so! Some thirty odd bottles later, we crashed out in our Kang-bed.

The next morning, we awoke to a breakfast of yellow porridge, cold boiled eggs, and some rather suspect looking black things, which we soon found out were insects. I lost my appetite instantly, and those who hadn't felt slightly nautious before were definitely feeling pretty ill now.

We soon embarked on our main task of the day - climbing the mountain. The weather was fantastic - about 25/26 degrees, but in our hungover state, we made the oversight of forgetting to buy bottles of water before climbing the mountain! We made hard work of climbing, but the effort was worth it, as we were greeted by amazing views of the village and the surrounding mountains.

Overall, the break was a welcome one, and the mountain village made a pleasant change from the noise and pollution of Beijing's city centre.

I'll blog more later - its getting late, I still haven't done my Mandarin homework, and the dad seems to be annoyed, as I've been hogging the computer for the last couple of hours.

Till then,

Zaijian