First impressions

So after two days of mooching around Beijing, these are some of the highlights:


1. Split pants


Simultaneously the greatest and most disgusting invention with regard to children's fashion. I assume it's probably a mother's dream to devise a system that requires no nappy washing and, at the same time, results in less long and arduous toilet training. Not being at that stage of my life yet, all I can see is a kid pooing on the ground that I may accidentally step in at some point, which would clearly result in a very nasty looking stain on my beautiful orange flats. But hey, Chinese people discovered many of the world's great pre-modern inventions, so maybe I should just deal with it.


2. Ganbei!


Only my second night in and I'm already being pressured to drink. We were taken out to our first Chinese banquet tonight, and it fulfilled my expectations completely. Baijiu, gorgeous Chinese food, a fair bit of MSG, and great people with whom to share it all.


As an aside, baijiu (rice liquor, ~55% alcohol, usually served at Chinese banquets) is absolutely horrible. Not only does it make you shiver violently as it goes past the taste buds, but it burns all the long way down to your stomach. The stuff we tried was admittedly not top quality—certainly far from the infamous maotai—but the local Beijingers at the table still tried to force it down our throats, ganbei after ganbei! Our host was, luckily, a little flexible on the contents of our glasses, having had a few experiences himself where a night on the old baijiu was a bit much for his stomach (although he maintained that, at our age, he was able to drink a bottle and a half without breaking a sweat). So we also got to sample the local pijiu (beer)—yanjing, which is a Beijing beer reflecting the city's namesake before the Song dynasty. Perhaps to complement the ... strongly flavoured baijiu, the pijiu is actually only half strength—roughly 3%—so it tastes a bit like beer flavoured tea. I hear you can get full strength beers (although they are largely pale ales) so I'll have to look out for them. But really, the style of beer suits the perfectly balanced salty, sweet, spicy, sour mix of flavours of Chinese food, so there's really not that much point in bucking the cultural norms.


Speaking of Chinese food ...


3. AMAZING!


Every meal I've had here (a statistician may say that's not a representative sample of all Chinese food) has been cheap, fresh, full of veggies and delicious! The night before last, we went to a beautiful restaurant in an old hutong courtyard house. The place was a small hole in the wall with crumbling floors and a very suspect sewerage system. But the interior was softly lit with lanterns hanging from the roof and lamps on the tables, and decorated with gorgeous peacock feathers and wooden features. It was full (but not bursting) with a mix of locals and expats talking and laughing, which mingled in with the general noises of the street. And the food. The food! Dish after dish of eggplant in sweet spicy sauce, chillied mint, chicken hotpot, whole fish, field mushrooms in garlic sauce, and delicate little jasmine flowers served with a sort of scrambled egg! And all for less than AU$10 per person. Why did I not move to Beijing earlier?


4. Subways


So I guess living in a city with 19,999,999 other people you should expect to share a bit of space on the subway. Still, having my first Beijing public transport experience was a little bit of a shock. So so so so so many people! All on one tiny funnel through which they are trying to move with surprising velocity. Coming from a reasonably small city (especially by Chinese standards), my imagination was running wild with pictures of being trampled by hoards of overworked Chinese people, passports being stolen by snatching hands, and hours of queuing for an out-of-order ticket machine. But, to my even greater surprise, the queue was incredibly orderly, polite and safe. It's a kind of organised chaos that I've never come across anywhere else. Almost as if people respected each other. Maybe the world could learn a little something from the Beijing subway system.