Living in Beijing: useful stuff

As I start to see the end of my time in Beijing approaching (still a fair way away yet!), I'm thinking of what things I would have liked to have known at the start, and also of how I can make all this knowledge about the city I've accumulated somehow useful to other people. 

So this is a list of stuff that is useful.

Touristing stuff:

• It's easy to see all the main touristy things like the Forbidden City, Summer Palace and the temples by bus or subway. I'd suggest either get yourself a good guidebook (not lonely planet, which is only useful for practical information) or look out through your connections for some kind of local (e.g. a language partner) who will take you there.
• Getting the Great Wall is a bit of a challenge by yourself, because it's a fair way out of Beijing. You could hire a driver or there's a bus-taxi method (in lonely planet) but I'd strongly recommend going with a tour group. If you like walking/hiking, I strongly recommend Beijing Hikers. Alternatively, I've heard the China Culture Centre does good tours. I would be wary of the random internet tour companies you might come across, especially if their English is not good. One other thing: avoid the Badaling area at all costs! You can hardly move for the tourists, and there are so many other amazing places to go. 
• Good places to go for weekend trips are (in order of preference): Shanghai, Qingdao, Chengde, Datong, Pingyao, and Tianjin, among many others (keep an eye on the expat mags for suggestions). You can also get to a huge number of places in China within a short flight, but it's probably going to be expensive.

Stuff to do around town that's not (too) touristy:

• I love cooking, and I knew almost nothing about cooking Chinese food when I came here. It's also a very practical skill for living in Beijing, as it can be quite difficult to cook food you normally eat at home for a variety of reasons (see below). So I've been to about a dozen classes at The Hutong. I thoroughly recommend any of their classes (make sure you get the membership on your first visit!)—check out this post for a taster. Black Sesame also does cooking classes, but I have never been to any of them.
• Check out all the green spaces in Beijing, especially during summer. There are loads of cool parks around the place where you'll laugh at the old people doing Tai Chi or Qi Gong in the morning, smile at the kiddies playing in the daytime or enjoy the music and dancing in the evening. The more time I spend here, the more I find myself wondering why we don't get together to dance or sing in public spaces at home, although it seemed so ridiculous to me when I arrived. I recommend Ritan Park or Temple of the Earth Park, but seriously any of them will do.
• Check out Houhai lake. It's a full of people most of the time (doing Tai Chi or just walking), but is definitely worth the visit. You can also grab a drink at one of the bazillion cafe/bars.
• If you like hiking, go with Beijing Hikers on any of their trips. They're all pretty great. There's also a local hiking group called Beijing Walkers (or Wallkers, depending on who you listen to), which goes for hikes every Sunday, but you have to know someone to get on the email list. If you do, jump on it, because the hikes are great and a lot cheaper than paying a tour company. Make sure you sign up as soon as the email comes out and be prepared for a hike that's on the difficult side.
• Go to any of the cool new hip and trendy restaurants that are opening all the time. To find out what's cool and hip, check out the expat mags (see below).
• Try out dragon boating. There's an expat-friendly club that trains on Houhai on Sunday afternoons at about 4.30pm—they're very chilled and you definitely don't need to be fit or have any skills in dragon boating to participate. It's a good way to meet people and get some exercise, but be prepared to be very sore the next day!
• Check out the streets of Nanluoguxiang, Guloudong dajie and Wudaoying Hutong for boutique clothes shopping, funky gifts, cool bars and cafes. I spent a large part of my life walking around these streets.
• Cycle through the hutongs south of Yonghegong, Andingmen and Gulou stations. It's one of the most fun, relaxing and cultural things you can do in Beijing.

Internet stuff:

• Before I launch into what's available on the web, I'll say this: Get a VPN before you come here if you can. You'll be amazed at how many websites you use regularly are not available at all (e.g. facebook/twitter, news sites), or at least not available consistently (google products). I suggest Strong VPN, which is reliable and trustworthy, with great tech support. Make sure you get one that is compatible with your phone, as well!
• 
  By far the best source for information about what's going on around town is the expat magazines. Timeout and The Beijinger are the best. Pick one up at any of the expat type cafes around town or check out their websites, which have loads and loads of information.
• For blogs, I like to follow The China Story, Danwei, and Lost Laowai when I have the time. There are plenty of others, plus all the major international news services generally have good China blogs.
• As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I like to listen to the China History Podcast and Sinica for China-related stuff.

Living stuff:

• Language training is a must in Beijing. Of course, there are millions of people who tour through the city without Chinese, but it's actually quite difficult to get around without at least a few words. Far fewer people speak English than you might assume. Plus, Chinese is fun to study after the first uphill battle with sounds and characters. If you ask me, you need to study both characters and pinyin, but that's just my preference because I'm a visual learner and I like to be able to read signs. Most people do one-on-one classes or intensive group classes. I can recommend Rose Finch (although it's quite expensive), or my friends have also recommended The Hutong School.
• Groceries. I've mentioned this in earlier posts, but it can be quite difficult and expensive to get ingredients for foreign foods. It's not just that you can't get your favourite brand of crackers or some vegemite, it's that you can't buy breakfast cereal, or bread that's not sweetened, or cheese. Chinese supermarkets (Merry Mart, Dia, Wumart, etc) can be very confronting and uncomfortable, or loads of fun, depending on your outlook. If you can't cope, which has been me for a large portion of my time here, there are western or semi-western supermarkets around. Look for BHG, Jenny Lou's or April Gourmet in the expat districts (largely in Chaoyang). Expect to pay the same price at home for anything that's imported.
• How do you know which bus or subway to catch? Plug it into google maps on your phone. Seriously, I couldn't live without google maps. Just tell google maps where you want to go, select public transport, and you're away. It has all the bus and train routes already plugged in.
• Public transport doesn't run after 10.30-11pm ish. Catch a taxi, if you can get one. I could go on a rant about cabs, but I won't. Suffice to say the cabs are hard to pull over (particularly at night) and the drivers are mean, and they definitely don't speak English. Remind yourself they treat everyone the same way, including Chinese locals.
• Electricity and gas super cheap and is usually paid with a card that you take to the bank. Now, the only way of doing this is with a Chinese bank account card, but if you smile sweetly enough, the staff will do it for you.
• Re. finding a place to live, this is mostly done through agents (you generally pay them a fee of one month's rent, up front, for this privilege). Check out the classifieds on The Beijinger for recommendations and for rooms available.
• Clothes shopping is not as cheap as you might think. Anything you could get at home is the same price as at home, unless you're at a market. I suggest visiting Yaxiu (Yashow) Markets or the Beijing Zoo Market. Be prepared to bargain hard (starting at 1/10th their asking price is a good idea) and to have to push through swathes of people.
• Buy a bike! Seriously, it's so much fun cycling in Beijing. I wouldn't pay more than about RMB 300 for a reasonable, if clunky, second-hand bike. If it breaks down, there are plenty of shops in the hutongs that fix them quickly and cheaply. Buy a helmet from one of the expat areas (or, even better, bring it from home) because, even if nobody else wears them, you're an idiot if you think your brain is safe in Beijing traffic.

Wow that was a huge brain dump! I'm sure there's more useful stuff I could provide, but that's the bones of it. Hope it's useful to someone, and if you need more info, feel free to comment!

Two days without email

On Wednesday I went out with my work colleagues for a Mid-Autumn Festival lunch (apparently mid-autumn is worth not only a few days' holiday, but a free lunch, too!). Afterwards, I was drowning in post-feeding fatigue, and suggested to my friend at work that we go and grab a coffee at Starbucks. I'll have you know Starbucks is almost the only option for takeaway coffee in most of Beijing, lest you think I would actually choose Starbucks coffee of my own volition. Anyway, my colleague, being Chinese, is not really a fan of coffee, so I'm a bit surprised she has accepted my polite invitation. 

Soon, I find out why. She wants to talk about her personal life. She's having some issues with her husband, who is currently in the USA with work. My colleague has seemed a bit quiet all day, and now I'm starting to find out what's the problem. She asked him to email her every day while he was away, she says, otherwise she might get worried about him. And he promised he would. Two days went by without an email (which, she says, she didn't even really notice because she herself has been busy), and she suddenly realised he hasn't kept his promise. She started to get annoyed that she hadn't heard from him. So, she wrote him a nasty email saying she was hurt by his actions, or lack of actions as it appears. He wrote back saying he was tired, very busy, had taken on someone else's job in addition to his own because his colleague is incompetent. She wrote back with more nasty words, and then a few days later logged on to his email account (why does she have access to it?) and saw he hadn't even opened her most recent emails. How to exact revenge on this horrendous crime? She changed his email password, the same one he uses for business communications. 

I always wonder in this situations whether you're supposed to coo and soothe the girl, or whether you should give her the straightforward opinion that is forming on your tongue. But at this point, I can't help but exclaim how ridiculously childish her actions are. She admits she knows this, but can't help herself. She's an only child and is used to getting her way. Her husband has an older sister (the one child policy actually only covers about half of Chinese families—fodder for another post!), so he's used to sharing things, sharing a person's attention, and sharing his email account, perhaps? 

She changed his password back after a few days of making him stew over it. Then, realising she was a bit grumpy with him, he tried to call her 20 times in one morning, from the other side of the world. She didn't answer, and still won't talk to him.

She says she thinks they are not suited to each other. They come from different backgrounds. Her father is rich and has nought to spend his money on except for his darling little girl. Her husband's parents are not so well off, and he doesn't like the idea of her father paying for everything, including their house. Actually, he doesn't like to talk about money at all, in complete contradiction to most of his Chinese mates. She can't understand why. She thinks you have to be practical about these things, and the reality is that money is all that matters in China these days. Money, and family. She doesn't like to cook or clean and feels like she's not a 'good wife' to her husband, but she still needs his undivided attention at every point, otherwise she feels lost. If they were not married, she says, they would certainly have split up. She doesn't want to divorce him because it would hurt her parents.

There's more to it, obviously. You can't summarise the complexities of a marriage in one conversation at Starbucks. Still, I can't help but wonder how much of this is common across China, a nation of single child families, of strong family ties, of vastly unequal gender expectations, and of marriages that must last forever. Throughout the conversation, in response to my wide-eyed surprise at her actions and feelings, my colleague conceded this must be hard for me to understand because of cultural difference. 

But the lesson I'm taking away is: you men at home (you know who you are), when you think your girlfriends or wives are being too needy, should spare a thought for the poor Chinese man whose wife may divorce him because he was too busy to email her every day.

:)

Addressing a Chinese audience

I haven’t been in China long, but I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some great gaffes on the part of Westerners who are trying, in vain, to establish relationships with Chinese people in professional meetings. They hear that Chinese culture is strongly interested in ‘gifts’, so they fret over who they should give the golden pens they brought along from home. Then they try to provoke conversation across the table and end up just talking to fill the void of silence when they receive no response. Afterwards, they try to make conversation at lunch about how they decided to be vegans at age 19 ‘because eating another living creature is wrong’ and wonder why their Chinese colleagues are appalled.

Sitting in a particularly boring meeting like this the other day, I decided to write a list of suggestions for anyone contemplating a first time introduction into the Chinese professional world. The primary purpose of this list is to ensure I don’t forget my own learnings here, so if it happens to useful to anyone else … bonus!

• Don’t expect to be able to hold an informal dialogue about working topics. For some reason I can’t fathom, Chinese people expect the format of any professional meetings (aside from those over a meal) to be presentation party A - Q&A - presentation party B – Q&A and so on.
• At the end of any speech or presentation, there’s usually applause. Something niggled at me for a long time about this applause that I couldn’t quite pin down, and then it occurred to me … it’s too short! Chinese audiences only clap for maybe half the length of time that you would expect an audience at home to do. I didn’t even know we had applause rules, but there you go.
• Use a powerpoint presentation. Call it a ‘ppt’.
• Use pretty, simple pictures on your ‘ppt’, especially graphs.
• USE SIMPLE LANGUAGE. EVERYWHERE. I cannot stress this enough. Someone tried to use the word ‘Orwellian’ in a comic way and it met a lot of blank stares, obviously. Chinese people will not ask you to explain if they don’t understand your English, because it’s embarrassing for them. So don’t be an idiot, speak slowly and use words that are easy to understand rather than jargon. This also applies to any written documents and the ppt.
• Don’t assume your Chinese counterparts will have any background on your topic, even if it’s their field. Academia in China is … different to the West, and the differences are felt throughout the business world. I once saw a director of an institute with decades of academic research under his belt say that he couldn’t understand how agriculture produces greenhouse gas emissions.
• Assume that their views are China-centric (this is definitely not something that only occurs in China) and assume that they will repeat Government language/ideas.
• This should be self-evident, but avoid criticising (or appearing to criticise) the Chinese government, culture, food or popular ideologies in China.
• Use lots of figures and numbers to gain respect, while still trying to make a point.
• Ignore the people walking in and out of the room, sleeping on their desks or taking pictures with their huge Nikon cameras. They don’t realise you think this is rude.
• Bring some kind of sweet food if you can, even if you’re not the host, and make sure tea is available if you are.
• Always introduce important people at the start of a meeting and use highly respectful forms of address. An important Chinese guy I know once addressed a group of PhD candidates from another country as ‘your excellencies’ (ok, maybe this was a bit of Chinglish, but it gives you an idea of what is expected!).
• Use excessive language of thanks and imply prestige where you can.
• Gift giving is a part of Chinese culture, but you don’t have to give gifts if you don’t want to. It's much more important that you pick up the bill for the food if you are the ‘host’, although a small gesture (e.g. a trinket) will always be appreciated.
• Providing a lunch or dinner is necessary for almost any meeting. Try to arrange the meeting to be before lunch and then have a banquet – you’re likely to get more interest and appreciated feedback from participants. A dinner is even better, but there are a whole set of social rules you’ll have to navigate, and they are likely to try and get you ridiculously drunk.
• Avoid saying ‘no’ directly in response to a question. Instead, think like a politician and ignore the actual question by diverting the discussion onto a tangent.

Shanghai, land of ... Westerners?

So I finally made it down to Shanghai over the weekend. To be honest, I was a bit ambivalent about it when we were organising the trip. Shanghai wasn't on my list of 'must-see' places because I usually don't like big cities, and I particularly don't like touristy places. I try (often unsuccessfully) to get off the beaten track and make a bee-line (aside: do bees really fly that straight??) to anywhere that is famed for natural beauty. Particularly mountains. Unless you very tall buildings as mountains, Shanghai is not known for any kind of natural beauty. And it's a big city. And it's touristy. But, as it turns out, Shanghai is absolutely magnificent.

It's so incredibly Western that I almost forgot I was in China at times. In fact, it reminded me so much of Sydney the resemblance was uncanny. The Bund is exactly like Sydney Harbour—tall buildings, a long esplanade, pretty lights, expensive shops and lots of tourists (a key difference is, at the Bund, everyone is interested in taking photos of me, rather than the buildings!). The (former) French Concession really reminds me of the ritzy suburbs in Sydney like Wollahra, with loads of little boutiques, cool cafes and tree-lined streets. And East Nanjing Road pedestrian street seems unsettlingly similar to Pitt Street Mall.

The Bund:

Shanghai Museum:

Cool ceramic camel in Shanghai Museum:

Even the people seem to be more 'westernised' than in other parts of China, including Beijing. Like, they pause for you when you approach a pedestrian crossing. I was so confused the first time this happened I stared at the driver wide-eyed until he crossed in front of me anyway. And the streets are far less noisy because drivers don't feel the need to honk every few seconds lest there be a moment of peace and quiet in the middle of the day. Taxi drivers didn't scorn us just for existing, and picked us up as soon as we raised our hands.

English seems to be much more widely spoken than in Beijing, and we discovered that 'western' food is actually cooked into something that resembles what I eat at home. It even seems as if they don't push as much as the rest of China does to get on the subway or across the street or into a doorway. We got to the end of the trip and realised that, not only had we not had the pleasure of seeing someone vomit or piss in the street, but we so not a single person spitting, either. What is this strange alternate universe?

It was a nice break from China for a weekend, but I'm still glad of my decision to move to Beijing, even if I had had the option of moving to Shanghai. What's the point of living in China if you're not experiencing Chinese culture?

Notes for travellers:

• The fast train from Beijing to Shanghai goes at least once an hour every day. It takes 5 hours, is very comfortable, and costs 555 RMB (cheaper than air tickets, so I hear). Not difficult to get a ticket at all, so no need to stress out about booking too early.
• We stayed at The Phoenix in a triple room. Very comfortable, quiet, and more hotelish than a hostel. It's kind of in the middle of everything but just far enough away to catch a cab or subway anywhere. Next time, I'd stay in the French Concession. All accommodation is expensive in Shanghai, so it's worth just staying where you want to be.

The lush island

Qingdao (青岛, literally Lush Island) is a cute little German-style town on the seaside. It was invaded and occupied by the Germans from the late 1800s until the first world war, at which point the Japanese took over, then the Chinese, then the Japanese again, and finally the Chinese post-WW2. During the time it was occupied by the Germans, they built roads, sewers, shops, etc. and gave it some of the best public services in Asia at the time. They also built a brewery—Tsingtao (see? Qingdao/Tsingtao, same same but different), which is still the most famous brewery in China, domestically and internationally. Although the Chinese clearly see the German (and, subsequently, Japanese) invasion as subjugation by a foreign power, it’s one of the primary reasons that Qingdao is so nice to visit and so prosperous today. 

Actually, for those who have been there, it reminded me a lot of the Gold Coast in Queensland—tall shiny buildings, huge public areas by the seaside, people are relaxed and the weather is humid from the sea. Amazingly refreshing from the dirty, smelly and very flat cityscape that is Beijing. 

We went there for the international beer festival, which I expected to be a tiny little expat wank. But, as it turns out, it’s a huge Chinese tourist event, which attracts almost 4 MILLION people per year. On the day we were there I reckon there would have been HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people. We were fooled into thinking the half-kilometre square at which we entered was the extent of the festival, which resulted in a very long and confused phone call to our friends when we were trying to find each other.

As the day wore on, we uncovered more and more different parts of the festival—beer tent after beer tent, rides (horrendously expensive), several hundred food stalls that were ALL selling the same chuanr, incredibly kitsch mouse ears/masks/bracelet things, pole dancers (in the middle of the children's rides!), character parades, contortionists, food sellers dressed in drag, half naked men jumping on tables in response to an African man on stage yelling 中国好不好? (Is China alright?). What is it with Chinese men deciding that shirts are optional as soon as the temperature goes over 30 degrees?

The sheer volume of the festival, everything about it, was astounding. It's hard to describe how it feels to be in the middle of a sea of sweaty, drunk, loud, enthused, mostly male Chinese. To be honest, all the lights and sounds and people pushing was a bit too much for the senses. What got us in the end was the BLARING music from every direction. We are a group of young people who enjoy going out for a drink and seeing some live music, but seriously, the noise from this place was unbelievable. I honestly don't understand why it is that Chinese people must have music up just loud enough to make the speakers start crackling, no matter how large they are. Anyway, end of rant. Let's just say it was definitely a cultural experience—definitely worth one visit, but I wouldn't be going back without earplugs.

Notes for travellers: 

• Fast train Beijing to Qingdao is 4.5 hours, 315RMB, very comfortable. They book out quickly, esp on weekends for events like the International Beer Festival, so get your tickets as early as possible within the 10 day window allowed by the ticket sellers.
• We stayed at Old Observatory Hostel. Pros: great service, chilled out vibe, amazing rooftop bar with Western food and good beers and cocktails. Cons: beds are super hard, it's noisy because of the type of people who stay there, it's a taxi ride away from much of the seaside. Overall would go there again.
• International Beer Festival: Travel from the old city area is about 15km (40-50 kuai in a taxi), entry is 20 kuai , beers are 20 kuai each minimum. Beware almost everything inside is relatively expensive, and it's hard to get decent food unless you love chuanr.

Literacy

My ayi (a respectful term, I think, for someone who cleans your house) caught me doing my Chinese homework today. She smiled and said a few things I didn't understand, and then one that I did—"I never learned to read characters". I felt embarrassed, as I has asked her last week to read something for me and try to explain the instructions. She acted as if she needed glasses and couldn't see the small print.

She pointed to some characters on the page: 谢谢。我也祝你和爸爸圣诞快乐 (Thank you. I also wish you and Dad a merry Christmas). She pronounced the first three characters, and then said 'I can't read that one'. It occurred to me that, even though I constantly come across five year olds who have better command of Chinese than I do, I am actually more literate than many middle aged people in China. Wow.

Yet another great podcast

This one got me through several long train trips in Yunnan: the China History Podcast by Laszlo Montgomery.

Check it out on iTunes or at http://chinahistorypodcast.com/. I suggest starting from episode 1, but if you like to mix things up, then pick whatever you fancy.

A great leap forward

Ha. There are so many Chinese sayings to make fun of. Life here is just an endless series of classless puns.

Anyway, what this post is actually about is learning a foreign language. I spent some time in Yunnan recently—which was absolutely gorgeous, by the way, I highly recommended going there—and one day we were stuck in a little Tibetan village with no other laowai in sight. The village was one of those cute little places you see in postcards. Rolling green hills, terraced crops, big square Tibetan houses ...

We were led towards a hut that had a gated yard out the front of it. Immediately on entering the gate, the pungent smell of cattle arse attacked our noses. Suddenly not so picture-perfect. Into the small shack at the back and I realised this is where we were having lunch. 

Feeling a little out of place, and unable to ask anyone in English what the hell is going on, I decided to throw caution to the wind (I suddenly realise what a strange saying that is ...) and try out some of my Chinese. I'm mentally trawling through pages and pages of vocab lists from my textbook.

"这是什么?" What is this? (pointing to the small bowl that is being laid out in front of me)
"是酥油茶." It is suyou tea. Suyou? What is that? Whip out my iPhone dictionary ... ah it's butter tea. Oh, and it tastes like watered down butter. Funny that.

Also I see a hard yak cheese served with sugar, soft bread rolls and yak's milk yoghurt—this is cultural experience at its best.

Ok, so we've established what we're eating. This is going ok! They can understand me, and I can pick up some of the words they're saying. Let's keep going.

"你叫什么名字?" What is your name?
Ok, I didn't really understand the answer to that, probably because you have a Tibetan name that's hard to pronounce.
Let's try ... "你去学校马?" Do you go to school?
"是的" Yes. 
"你 每天去学校马?" Do you go to school every day?
"每天" Every day.
"你今年多大?" How old are you?
"十三." 13. What the? You look about 6! 
"你今年多大?" How old are you? Ooh you cheeky little boy.

So we progress like this for a while. How many brothers and sisters does he have? Is that his older brother? Why is he not at school today? Then he asks:

"你哪国人?" What is your nationality?
"澳大利亚人" Australian. 
Wait a second, I have an idea.
"你要看照片 ... ahhh [I don't know the joining words] 澳大利亚?" Do you want to see photos ... Australia? With a smile.
Oooh that's done it. Now I have a large crowd of Tibetan children pressing in on either sides, eager to see the image being projected from the iPhone.

I show them kangaroos ("袋鼠!" How is it that this 13 year old Tibetan boy knows the mandarin word for kangaroo?), emus (no idea what that one is!), some scenic landscape from near my home. Next I find some pictures of my 妈妈 mother and 爸爸 father  ... now how exactly do I explain the concept of step-parents? "不是我爸爸 ... 是 ... 我妈妈的男朋友" This is not my father ... it is ... my mother's boyfriend! Oh my vocab is failing me, that elicited a bit of shock. 

And this is a picture of 我的男朋友 my boyfriend. "你有几男朋友?" How many boyfriends do you have? What? Did you really just ask me that? "一个!" One! He almost looks disappointed. 

Oh now this has really got them started. Questions are coming from left, right and centre. What's you're name, what's this place, what work do you do? And many that I can't understand. My head is exploding from trying to translate backwards and forwards from this crazy language. Time to redirect their attention.

"你们看, 这是北京" Look, this is Beijing. Attention is glued back to the iPhone.
"我们的中国!" Our China! They suddenly recognise the photos I'm showing them. It's a place they've never been, and they may never go there. It's more than 2000 kilometres away from here. I realise how lucky I really am, to be able to live in a place that is, in their eyes, so magical.

This is one experience I'll never forget, and not only because of the yak butter tea. It's the first time I conversed with someone in China in their own language!

The aircraft experience

So you kind of assume that flying in China is just like flying in the rest of the world. It's a straightforward process of check in-security-wait-board-fly. At that point I start to enjoy myself, forced to curl up with a book or a movie for hours on end, accompanied by hot cups of tea brought by the very responsive flight attendants.

Chinese planes? Well they are a different experience altogether. You start with the check-in queue, which, despite being signposted in both English and Chinese characters, somehow always manages to fool the locals into thinking they can take the express queue just because they don't really want to wait in the others. I can see why they give it a try, really, because Chinese airport staff seem to have a problem with actually doing their jobs. It's like every person is the first flyer ever to approach the check-in desk, and the staff can't figure out how to work the machinery, despite having two people behind every counter (one to move your bags between the two luggage belts that don't connect, of course!). If you're lucky, you might get some entertainment as you wait for the paint to dry in the form of a local guy who's got himself drunk and can no longer stand up in the queue.

Past check-in, the next phase of the party is airport security. Now this is the bane of any frequent traveller's life. But there's a special level of profanity reserved for Chinese airports, surpassed only by US airports. You've got to understand that there are far more people in China at the moment than worthwhile jobs, so they've got to find as much space as they can to absorb labour. It also increases the chance of them actually delivering the service you're supposed to be providing, because it compensates for the extreme incompetence of their workers. So keeping those things in mind, it's really quite reasonable that you have five staff per line: you need one to check your passport again (with video camera behind on case of any mishap), one to play solitaire on the computer as your luggage goes through the scanner, two to feel you up after you go though the full body scanner (one for each gender, of course), and another to stand around looking completely useless but very authoritative in their freshly ironed airport uniform.

Next stop is the departure hall, where you have your choice of a range of Chinese delicacies to pick from. These include such delights as chunks of meat in vacuum packs (not refrigerated), dried packaged baby tomatoes and hawthorn berries, unidentifiable fresh fruit with spikes and fingers, pine nut and rose happiness cake, cigarettes, and of course the ubiquitous baijiu ... all at only four times the price you'll pay on the street! If you can drag yourself away from the shopping, waiting at your gate before it's even open will be a long queue of Chinese people, making sure they get on the plane first to get the best spots for their carry-on bags. Wander past the three separate people checking your boarding pass within five metres of each other, and you're finally aboard your blessed plane. The quality of the infrastructure is significantly better than you've been lead to believe (what with all those stories of Chinese planes falling out of the sky mid-meal service), and the flight assistants are quite pleasant, so you're thinking maybe this is on the up. Maybe you'll be able to relax now.

And you can ... at least until the crew tell you that you're about to land. The seatbelt light, you learn, is really more of a vague suggestion than an actual rule, and your fellow passengers are actually allowed to get up whenever they like. Particularly just when the plane's wheels touch the ground, at which point it is totally acceptable to spring out of your seat with the agility of a surprised kitten and open the overhead lockers, spilling the contents on all those who were stupid enough to heed the seatbelt sign. Of course, the next battle is to get off the plane as soon as you can, lest you be one of the suckers left behind with a 30 second delay to the baggage collection, which means you obviously can't secure the best spot to wait 20 minutes for your baggage to come out.

At last your baggage has arrived, despite the team of 7 airport staff cleaning the baggage belt with filthy rags where your baggage is supposed to be coming out, and you think maybe you're nearing freedom. You can almost smell the fragrant wafts of Beijing smog coming from the exit. But alas, another uniformed airport staff member is shouting at you in urgent Chinese. She's pointing at the sticky bag tag on your luggage and waving frantically. You see someone else motioning to the luggage tag stuck to their boarding pass. Your boarding pass, of course, is long forgotten in the depths of your carry-on as it's now adopted the stately title of most-favoured bookmark. Dig it out, prove that you did not, in fact, steal someone else's luggage along with their dirty underwear and you're freeeeeeee … 

At least, you're free to sit with a cranky taxi driver in a traffic jam for the next two hours.

剩女 and 小姐

A fascinating read on sexism and the Chinese language: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4116

(with translations and pinyin for those of us who have only learnt 3 of the 50 or so Chinese words for women mentioned in the article!)

The train experience

I am just finishing off The Joy Luck Club  by Amy Tan (yes yes, I know, I should have read it years ago, but here in China it somehow seems more appropriate), and I found a passage that describes almost exactly my experiences with trains, planes, and, well any kind of public transport in this place really. I'm sure many expats will sympathise!

The landscape has become grey, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like ours passing by in the opposite direction. I see platforms crowded with people wearing drab Western clothes, with spots of bright colours: little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach. And there are soldiers in olive green and red, and old ladies in grey tops and pants that stop mid-calf. We are in Guangzhou.

Before the train even comes to a stop, people are bringing down their belongings from above their seats. For a moment there is a dangerous shower of heavy suitcases laden with gifts to relatives, half-broken boxes wrapped in miles of string to keep the contents from spilling out, plastic bags filled with yarn and vegetables and packages of dried mushrooms, and camera cases. And then we are caught in a stream of people rushing, shoving, pushing us along, until we find ourselves in one of a dozen lines waiting to go through customs. I feel as if I were getting on the number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco. I am in China, I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don't bother me. It feels right. I start pushing too.

My favourite podcast

I listen to this weekly podcast while I'm walking through the hutongs to have dinner, while I'm riding to work (don't worry, Dad, I have the volume turned down pretty low!), while I'm staring out the windows of public transport, or while I'm shaving my legs. Yep. So check it out:  http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/ (this week's podcast is on the Beijing floods)

Rumours in China

One of the peculiar outcomes of censorship is the proliferation of rumours. I hear all sorts of strange stories all the time here—a whole car of policeman was run over by a bus, sweet potatoes you buy on the street are cooked in old chemical vats, air conditioners cause respiratory diseases (but the smog doesn't!), Bo Xilai was innocent/guilty/a victim of his own wife ... a personal favourite of mine was the rumour that the Chinese Government was overturned by coup, which turned out to be (fortunately or unfortunately) entirely untruthful. How on earth did that one start?

One particularly tragic outcome of that is that people don't know what is happening exactly when they need information most—during natural disasters. The recent heavy rains in Beijing came as a surprise to me when I received emails and messages from friends and family back home. How is it that the international media know about the local weather system before locals do? I direct you to an interesting read from the New York Review of books about the consequences of this information failure.

The outcome of all this is that nobody trusts the information that is given to them. I think that'd be an interesting topic for a PhD thesis.

Getting caught in the rain

(no pina coladas, sorry!)

Tonight I rode home in the rain at midnight. It was fantastic - I got completely soaked, but the rain was just cool enough to make me feel like the cycling was no exertion at all. It felt so good on my skin and the streets were almost bare.

I told my flatmate it made me feel so alive. She told me that was clichéd.

Inner Mongolian grasslands

When I read the word 'grasslands' I didn't think much about it. It conjured an image of an open grass field speckled with trees and some livestock … bounded by villages, highways or industry. In China I've got used to the feeling of being constantly surrounded by people or their endeavours. That's what I imagined when I signed up for a hiking tour of Inner Mongolia. But for once I am so so glad I was wrong.

Grasslands are not just a few miles of grass. The grasslands of far north Inner Mongolia are hectares and hectares of green as far as you can see. The hills are soft and smooth, like an artist has painted them on, and they sit calmly resting on the landscape as if they had never and will never have any purpose other than to bask in the summer sun. The grasslands aren't even marred by small groups of trees or tufts of cow pat-induced weed. It's like a children's book background - perfectly rounded, soft green grass against a baby blue sky with cuddly looking egg shell clouds.

I wonder what geological and political miracle has allowed these serenely fertile fields of plush green carpet to remain untouched!

I suspect it's something to do with the cruel winter, which begs an even more scholarly question about how the hell all the beautifully fragile wildflowers—and the equally delicate butterflies, grasshoppers and (unfortunately for those with hot blood in them) mosquitoes—survive under several feet of snow for half of the year. Where's a good botanist when you need her!

The industry that does dot the pristine natural landscape ('wilderness' doesn't quite fit somehow) is almost as beautiful as the grass itself—golden ribbons of canola (rapeseed) crops are, just now, flowering in thanks to the warmth of the few months of sun they will get this year. The little villages that support them are poor, hard working towns full of low houses and fences built from the thin, long logs sourced from local forests (one of the other big industries of this region). But the farming equipment is sophisticated and the farms are incredibly large. I guess when there's no natural barrier to end your field, then you just keep driving that plough until you hit someone else's farm! And the villagers seem as happy as their crops are to be waking up to a glorious sunlit morning, even of they do have to spend the majority of daylight hours tending to their land or animals.

At the end of our trip, a quiet Belgian lady in our group who had lived in China for the better part of 20 years turned to us and said "What a rare gift to see such untouched natural beauty in China. It's good for the mind".

Cycling in Beijing (a loooong post)

Since I bought a bike about a month ago, I have spent a reasonable part of my time here cycling. So much so that it's become part of my life, like my iPhone, my hiking boots and yoghurt. Man I love yoghurt.

So cycling. Originally I was resisting buying a bike. As long as you have google maps and a 3G connection, you can get buses and subways from anywhere to anywhere in Beijing between the hours of 5.30am and 10.30pm. Yep that's right, despite being one of the biggest cities in the world, Beijing's public transport system shuts down after dinner. There are plenty of taxis around but, unfortunately, these are also hard to come by at night time and ... well I'll reserve my comments about taxi drivers for a later post. I secretly quite like the fact that you can't catch a bus in the middle of the night. Maybe this is because it more closely resembles my city of birth, whose population is less than 2 per cent of Beijing's, or maybe it's because my window here overlooks a busy road, where bus drivers do not hesitate to notify unwitting cyclists that they are in the way by blasting their horns. But I think deep down it actually just feels more wholesome this way. It's like the city is punishing you for staying out too late—the little angel on your shoulder gently saying YOU SHOULD BE IN BED!

Where was I? Oh yes, I was resisting buying a bike. Simultaneously, I was looking for some place to exercise, to work off the fine layer of (Peking roast duck-) fat that was starting to envelop my hips. Gyms are surprisingly hard to come by in this place. Chinese people don't use them and, for the most part, the Westerners that want them are paid a sum fit for a monarch in this city. That means gyms here are under-equipped and incredibly expensive. I scoured the internet for weeks trying to look for a reasonably priced, clean gym that was nearby to my office or my house. I eventually found one gym in the basement of the Chang'an theatre and they quoted me ¥2,000 for a six month membership. That is actually more expensive than at home, and here my income is only a fifth of what I was earning at home! Crazy!

Even though I tried my very hardest at bargaining in Chinese and, when that didn't work, my colleague called and spoke Chinese with the gym manager, they wouldn't budge on the price. So I got grumpy (as I usually do when I don't get enough exercise) and stomped off to my local bike guy. That is, a place on the street where my friends bought their bikes at slightly less of a Western-premium than those in the bike shops. I bought mine—a little rusty but totally loveable—for about ¥200. Check it out:

I explained in very broken Chinese that my friend, who had come with me, also wanted a similar standard of bike. The trusty bike guy says "10分钟" (10 minutes) and toddles off. My friend and I are left a bit confused, standing there wondering whether he his actually going to come back. Sure enough, ten minutes later he's back, with a really nice Giant bike in reasonable condition. Hmmm ... wonder where he got that from? And I wonder what sort of deal he has with the bike shop he's standing in front of for them to let him get away with this?

So I'm assuming both our bikes were stolen from unsuspecting foreigners at some point. Bike stealing is a big problem in Beijing, which is kind of to be expected when most people leave their bikes on the street without locks. Maybe this is showing my Western gen-Y origins, by why the hell would you leave a bike unattended in a huge city without locking it? To be fair, most foreigners buy shiny new bikes with shiny new locks, and people still manage to steal them. I hear that many of the locks sold on the streets of Beijing actually have uniform keys (of course! it's cheaper that way!) so that probably doesn't help, although I suspect most of the stealing is done with a trusty set of bolt cutters.

Wow have I really written this much without even getting to the actual riding part? Let's get to it.

Riding in Beijing is nothing like riding in Australia. At home, if you're a cyclist, you must be:
a) super athletic, because obviously you ride hundreds of kilometres a week (and/or up and down mountains);
b) rich, because look at that shiny silver titanium bike that you chose over a house deposit; and
c) really un-self conscious, because ... c'mon you're wearing lycra!

Here, it's completely the opposite. Everyone rides a bike, or at least remembers the time when there were no private cars, and it was the only way of getting around. Cycling is not for exercise, or for leisure, or for competition, it's to get you from A to B. That means you have to do it in a suit and tie, or a skirt and heels, or a silk dress, depending on your destination. It means there's no point in having gears, because Beijing is flat and you can't ride any faster than the traffic, which is all going under 20km/hr anyway. It also means you have to find some way of carrying around your most treasured things, like your handbag (everyone has a basket), your best friend (no problem! they can just sit on the luggage rack at the back!) or your garbage (get a three-wheeler with a trailer!). Think I'm joking? Check out these pics:

You also need to have some way of avoiding the rain:

This is how the world-class recycling system in Beijing works:

How else do you carry your mattresses? 

The S curve

I’m a third of the way through my time here now. I’ve passed the two month mark. In our training before I left, I was told that I should expect a bit of a U curve in terms of my happiness overseas. That means at first you’re on a bit of a high, because what you’ve been looking forward to for months is finally here. You get to do cool stuff like go to the Forbidden City and see the Great Wall. You’re meeting new friends, buying cheap alcohol and having a great time. But then it starts to settle in that you’re away from everyone you love and you start to notice the annoying things about this crazy new world—like the fact that you can never get on a subway without being pushed around, and you have no idea what is in the contents of your food. Eventually, you come full circle as you start to get used to your new life; settle in and start to explore the things you didn’t expect to enjoy before you came, like the new fruits that come into season every week and the joy of a clear sky once in a month or so.

Because my brain likes to overthink things in minute detail, I think my u bend is actually an S bend, and it started from when I found out I’d be leaving. I was on a high, excited about going somewhere new and challenging, excited about the personal and professional gains and thrilled with the victory of winning the place. But then I started to worry about every possible negative thing—the smog, the big city atmosphere, the language barrier, the lack of a support network. Then when I finally got here I realised it’s no way near as bad as I thought it would be! This place is great fun! The friends I’m making are wonderful and there are so many things I can’t get at home. Even learning Mandarin is exciting and motivating.

This is where the S bend starts. Think an S lying on its side, so it kind of looks like a u and an n joined together. When I got here I was riding up the side of the u, and I am now afraid that I’m plateauing across the top of the n. The new exciting stuff is getting boring, and I’m starting to get sick of constantly dealing with my inability to communicate with everyone. I’m really really missing everyone at home, and I constantly think about the day when I’ll get to see them again.

Or maybe this is just a volatile ride—one week you’re flying high and the next week you can’t imagine how you will possibly make it to the end. Let’s hope so, because I really don’t want to slide down the other side of the n!

Camping at the Great Wall

(Continued from Great Wall part 1)

Then we decided to get a bit adventurous. My friends had a festival of birthdays (since when are there so many birthdays in June? ... that makes then September conceptions in case you couldn't work it out) so they decided to go away for a weekend to celebrate. What better thing to do to celebrate your birthday than go out to the hills, haul a 10kg pack up a mountain, get covered in sweat and dirt, sleep on a rock, wake up at 5am and repeat the whole thing again backwards? Yes! I say best birthday idea ever. So that's what we did.

I'm going to give some detail for those who are wishing to do a similar trip. We hired a driver with a small truck, only just big enough to accommodate all of us and our bags. We left Beijing in the middle of the day, stopping at Sanfo to hire some gear. Both the driver and the equipment hire were quite cheap—a few hundred kuai per person all up—and you can basically hire everything except boots. Unfortunately the gear is not particularly well designed for hiking (it's heavy and not weather-proof) but it's fine for a night.

Back to the exciting stuff. We went to 箭扣 (Jiankou, near the town of 西栅子村—Xizhazi), which is one of the most rugged sections of the Great Wall near Beijing. It took us two hours in our tiny van to get there—by which time all of our extremities had gone to sleep, which is really lucky because it was incredibly hot. That is, it was hot until it started raining. Pouring, actually. It was like we arrived in the mountains, and the sky broke in half. Thunder and lightning and huge gusts of wind. When we arrived at the little guesthouse (info here) at the bottom of the mountain the locals were actually laughing at us. Great Wall fail.

We ate. We waited. We lamented our forgotten raincoats safely in our dry wardrobes at home. We considered the likelihood of being struck by lightning on a tower. We drank beer to calm the sense of frustration.

Somebody must have prayed as well, because as suddenly as it had started, the inclement weather miraculously dissipated. What the? As it turns out, the rain was a godsend because it cooled the air to a bearable hiking temperature and, the best part, it cleared the smog completely! So my adventures at the Great Wall had now come full circle. And it was glorious:

And the best thing is ... I got a room with a view:

It's at this point, you inch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming and think: what an amazing adventure I'm on!

My first go at ... the Great Wall!

There's really only one thing to say about the Great Wall. It's spectacular! It's everything you expect it to be when you look at those pictures that fancy photographers post on their websites to make themselves seem well-travelled.

I've been now twice since I've been living in Beijing, and both have been very worthwhile. The first time I went with a tour group—Beijing Hikers—to 龙泉峪 (Longquanyu), which is an unrestored part of the wall (=crumbling rocks, overgrown shrubs and a whole lot of natural beauty). It was an incredibly smoggy day; in fact, according to the US Embassy live twitter feed on air quality, the air was 'hazardous'—i.e. the worst possible rating. If you're wondering how normal that is, I've seen 'hazardous' 2-3 times in the seven weeks I've been here. When it gets to that point, you can hardly see 500m in front of you and your nasal passages start to fill with gunk, so that you have to blow your nose once an hour just to breathe. That's the kind of pollution that gives you asthma even when you've never had it at home.

Anyway, back to the Great Wall. So when I first went there I couldn't see much for the haze. What I could see was pretty much like everything you see in pictures - long sweeping curves of wall that look like they've been painted by a Chinese water painter's brush tip, against a landscape that's dense with bright green forestation ... and tourists everywhere! The one thing that was actually surprising (that I hadn't noticed just from seeing pics) was the steepness of the mountains. The wall goes straight along the ridge line, which is incredibly jagged. It's like the teeth of a coarse saw if you look at it from the side. To give you an idea, the Chinese character for mountain is based on a pictograph and it looks like this: 山.

So walking along the Great Wall essentially involves going straight up a hill to the top, and then straight back down again. None of this faffing about zigzagging from left to right to make it easier on the old hammies. Nope, let's just go straight up the thing. It looks lovely from photographs but, to be honest, is not a particularly practical way to take on a mountain. What's even more amazing is ... they built a wall on it! Who's idea was that? Really, these mountains are virtually impassable anyway, it seems a little ridiculous when you get to the top to see they've built a wall that essentially goes vertically up the side of the mountain to keep out the 'invaders'.

But the climb is totally worth it. Check it out:

By the way, a small piece of trivia: the Great Wall is not visible from space. Google it.


(stay tuned for part two of the Great Wall series)

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ...

One of the best things about living in a place where 35 degrees in spring is a normal occurrence is that it gives you an excuse to eat ice cream whenever you like! And Beijing is a great place to eat ice cream.

Check it out:

And they're all pretty tasty! Well, except for the corn one. Who would have though, corn doesn't make good ice cream?

Beijing street food

Food is one of the best things about living in this city. My clothes are bearing the brunt of that - I'm sure I've put on a few kgs already! Since I spend so much time here thinking about, talking about and eating food, I thought I'd do a special blog post just to share some of the amazing things I've digested over the past 6 weeks.

I have no fridge, microwave or even sink in my workplace. So, given there's no possibility of bringing my own lunch to work, I've made it my mission to try as many local restaurants as I can, and sample as many dishes as possible. I started with a little corner which has a cluster of typical Beijing street food vendors. These stores are the kind that sell only one thing—like dumplings or pancake or some other tasty treat—but they have a few tables, stools and umbrellas out the front that look as if they have seen better days. You can get takeaway or, if one of the two or three tables is actually free, you can sit yourself down for a proper meal ... on a bright orange plastic plate. People look at me strangely when I sit down by myself, so I guess it's fairly uncommon to eat alone. Although, come to think of it, they could just be looking at me strangely because I'm white, a foot taller than most of them, and can't speak Chinese. 

My first experience was with the baozi stall, which is staffed by a lovely young man who puts up with my barely. Baozi (包子) are fat little steamed buns. They're often filled with pork or vegetables, but can be filled with anything really. I know this because I did a cooking class where we made baozi! Check out that post here.


Baozi are the best thing in the whole world and they look like this:

Then next stop was the jiaozi place. Jiaozi (饺子) are a bit like baozi, in that they are small and delicious. Jiaozi are a bit like baozi that have grown too big for their clothes. It's as if they lived in Beijing too long and have therefore become a fatty mcfat fat, so their exterior has kind of become thin and stretched. 

See? Just like an overweight baozi! (or maybe ... an overweight baozi that has subsequently lost a lot of weight and has developed flaps under its arms)


Next up is my rou bing (肉饼). I'd been eyeing off what looked to me like some kind of Chinese version of gozleme since I arrived. Not knowing the translation, or actually having any idea what it was, I politely asked the waitress if I could have a vegetarian one of those, and she started at me blankly. As it turns out, 肉饼 translates roughly to 'meat pancake'. Oh, riiiiight.

One of the other fascinating things about Beijing street food is that often the waitress will ask you whether you want a soup to 'drink' with your meal. The tasty looking orange soup you see in the picture is pumpkin congee. 


Ok this is where things get weird. You can see that I started out with the things that looked relatively familiar, or at least easily identifiable. But, as I was determined to get through every shop in the street corner, I had to try the last one—lürou huoshao (驴肉火烧). Now, you've got to understand that, when you don't understand a word of Chinese, and can't read characters, it's not a matter of being able to chat to someone and figure out whether or not you feel like that particular morsel. You've just got to point and hope for the best. What I pointed at was this:

Pretty tasty-looking, right? I'm thinking it's corned beef. It looks like corned beef, tastes like corned beef. A bit strange that in China they have beef that's so similar to how Mum cooks it at home. And it's pretty tasty!


Off I trot back to work, where I've become accustomed to looking up the things I've eaten after every lunchtime. I start by googling 'Beijing meat sandwich'. Nothing looks similar to what I've just eaten. How about 'meat in pastry China'? Nope, that doesn't work either. Several more combinations of random words—Beijing street food, China corned beef, China beef brisket. Nothing. Oh, how about 'Beijing meat burger'? This is what I click on:

Ohhh ... donkey. Oopsie.