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!

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.

How to make baozi

Step 1: Locate some flour and water. Might sound easy, but just imagine if the flour package was covered in scribbles that look like they should mean something to you but actually are just there to taunt you.  Mush up flour and yeast so that it looks like a lump of pale-coloured excrement. Go have a glass of wine for an hour, your lump needs to rest.

Step 2: Locate some vegetables. Guess whether vegetables are actually grass or something edible. Mix up vegetables with some kind of protein.

Step 3: Wake up your dough by punching it. Roll it into little Mexican hats.

Step 4: With extreme difficulty, making sure you get filling all over your hands, face, hair and clothes, shove grass into flat baozi so it becomes round baozi. Cover it with muslin while you spend 20 excruciating minutes on each bun.

Step 5: Steal the teacher's baozi and pretend they were yours. Lap up the praise for your clever handiwork and then see how many baozi you can shove in your mouth at any one time. This will not get you as much praise as the teacher's handiwork, but it will be worthwhile nonetheless.

Post Script (24 June 2012): I made these at home and they were totally similar to the ones we did in class! My friends were super impressed :)

Things I miss most about home

There are a whole range of things that I thought I would miss from home during my time in Beijing—I thought I would be frustrated with the bustle of big city living, and I thought I would get sick of Chinese food, I thought I’d miss the clean streets and sanitised toilets of the West. But really, none of these things have bothered me too much! Living overseas is a fantastic way to get down to the things that are important to you.

So these are the things I miss most about home:

1. (this one’s a given, but worth repeating anyway) My wonderful family and friends, the laughs we have together, sharing their lives and experiences

2. Wine.
Oh how I miss the sweet popping sound (or slightly less romantic but more pragmatic click of the screwcap) of a newly opened bottle, and the first whiff of a succulent savoury pinot noir when I swirl it in my prized Riedel glasses. I miss lounging on my couch with a good book and a glass of red after work, and I miss catching up with my girlfriends over a glass of the local riesling. And don’t even mention the prospect of wine and cheese together! My twitter feed is constantly reminding me of the degustation dinners, harvest festivals and wine tours I’m missing out on while I’m here.

3. Cooking.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot break the barrier of comfort in a Chinese supermarket, much less in a Chinese kitchen. The foods that are available are so foreign to me that even a translator would make no difference. Despite being exceptionally willing to try new things (I’m munching on a punnet of bayberries as I type this), actually cooking them is a whole new level of challenge. I feel like I’m grabbing at a cloud that keeps disappearing through my fingertips. So I miss so much the experience of cooking at home—from being able to look up new recipes on my iPhone, to being able to find the ingredients I want in a supermarket, to having an oven and sizeable kitchen in which to prepared the food, to serving up a heartfelt meal to my friends and family (cf #1).

4. Being unable to communicate.
This one at least I can do something about! My Chinese lessons are going very well and my tutor is a little scared by the ferocity of my commitment to study. But still, every now and then I wouldn’t mind going into a shop and understanding what the assistant is saying. Just once or twice …

5. The natural environment.
To be truthful, my time out bush is limited even when I’m in Australia, so this one is definitely not a constant longing. It’s more of a surprising twinge I didn’t expect. Yesterday I was walking into my apartment block when I heard what I thought was the sound of a large bird. More likely it was the sound of a bike squealing or a gate swinging shut, but for a millisecond I was transported home to being awoken by the squawk of a cockatoo (which I have always hated). This made me realise that, in fact, there are no birds in Beijing (except the ones kept as ‘pets’ in miniscule cages that resemble torture chambers), and for the last month I have been awoken by a constant drone of car horns on the busy street. 

 
I have managed to get out of the Beijing city bustle for a few short periods of time in the last month. And they have been wonderful! Luckily for me, next month I will be visiting the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Plenty of natural environment for me there :)

6. (and this is a very distant fifth place) Work.
Not enough to want to go back to it, but just a teensy little bit.

Well, that's hardly anything to complain about, is it?

Illegal aliens and soft power

I want to pick up on a thread that's been weaving it's way through my intellectual life here in Beijing (which is somewhat confined due to my lack of Mandarin)—the Chinese sense of self identity and how that affects foreigners like me.

I posted earlier an extract from Simon Winchester about the self confidence of Chinese people as a society. Winchester's hypothesis is that the Chinese have so long and deep a history as a people that they exude a self-assuredness that is, at its most benign, unexpected for the unwary Westerner. Winchester describes this cultural phenomenon as 'frustrating' for visitors to the Middle Kingdom, but his tone leads to something slightly more sinister—self confidence can quickly become a kind of xenophobia in the wrong circumstances.

[beware inflammatory juxtaposition!] Beijing recently announced an action plan to 'Clamp Down on Illegal Aliens'—i.e. foreigners living in the city without appropriate documents. You might think this is an unintentional slight that really comes down to a simple misunderstanding of the negative connotations of the term 'illegal aliens'—surely it's just Chinglish? Yes, you might think that, except for the more detailed account provided by state television broadcaster CCTV's Yang Rui on national television:

The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash right now, arresting foreign scum and protecting innocent Chinese girls from them; but in order to do that, we need to focus on Sanlitun and Wudaokou, and target those who frequent the areas and its event organizers. Foreigners who can't find a job in their home country come to China and get involved in illegal business activities such as human trafficking and espionage; they also like to distribute lies which discredit China to persuade locals to move abroad. A lot of them look for Chinese women to live with as a disguise to further their espionage efforts. They pretend to be tourists traveling around the country while actually helping Japan and Korea make maps and collect GPS data for military purposes. We need to take action, first kick that crazy foreign journalist from Al Jazeera out of the country and close their Beijing office, and then shut everybody up, all the members of the foreign press who demonize China.

(The reference to 'protecting innocent Chinese girls', by the way, appears to be a thinly veiled allusion to either the recent attempted molestation of a Chinese local by a white male, or the ongoing rumour that foreign men are 'taking' many of the local eligible young women, or perhaps both.)

I'm not going to get into the political reasons for this move, as there has been a lot of commentary on the subject of why the Government is taking this action, and why now. But I am interested in what this tells us about the Chinese worldview and how I should behave in response.

Obviously, and I want to make this plain, nobody should be making any kind of extreme generalisations that attempt to confront racism with racism. Even on the China Daily website, underneath the publication of the above quote from Yang Rui, there are a few comments that allude to the fierce debate that rages constantly among Chinese locals about whether foreigners are to be welcomed or despised. It's certainly true that Yang is not representative of the opinions of all Chinese people. But it presents an interesting question that has been intriguing me since before I arrived here—how do Chinese people see foreigners? How do they see Australians? What should I be aware of in my interactions with Beijingers so that I can treat them with respect and humility?

As an amusing yet relevant anecdotal pause, I was recently discussing with my coworkers their travels overseas, what they enjoyed and what they didn't, and how these experiences compared to my own. Firstly, their experiences were much more limited than mine. I have been lucky enough to travel through many parts of Europe on a number of occasions, live and study for a short time in western Europe, see the US and parts of southeast Asia and travel a fair bit within Australia and New Zealand. That's not outside of the normal range of experiences among my peer group. My coworkers, on the other hand, have seldom travelled even within China. Some have been overseas with work for short (week-long) conferences, and very few have had the chance to study overseas. But none have been anywhere outside China for pleasure. I try to be conscious of my privileged upbringing and suggest that maybe this is because Chinese people have not been as wealthy as some Western countries, and therefore lack the opportunity to travel. My colleagues agree in part, but in general, they cannot understand how you could possibly exist outside China, where the food is so repulsive! Why would you want to go somewhere you have to travel all the way to Chinatown to get a decent feed?

Now I can attest to the fact that Chinese people have a lot to be proud of with regard to their food. It is, as mentioned previously, AMAZING. But I still like other types of food, too. What would the world be like without pizza, croissant, borscht, hummous or hamburgers? Food is not like an exclusive covenant, where you can only choose one cuisine and you're holed up in one type of food hall for the rest of your life.

What surprised me the most, though was their remorseless attack on the food of other countries. Foreign food was, according to my coworkers, 'disgusting'. On the few occasions they travelled internationally, they lost weight because they 'couldn't find anything edible'. Maybe food is just one of those issues that gets Chinese people really riled up. Or maybe it's a sign of a broader disinterest in different cultures that results from Winchester's self-assured 'Chineseness'. I certainly don't think my coworkers meant any harm, and they probably didn't anticipate that my reaction could be to take offence. Luckily for them, I come from a country without a strong identifying cuisine (unless you count Vegemite as a cuisine ...), so I found the whole thing more amusing than offensive.

Whatever the reason behind Chinese people not travelling much, the broader impact of this phenomenon is that locals, even in Beijing, which is incredibly globalised these days, don't expect me to have a different cultural background. They don't anticipate that I may not know how to eat a whole fish with chopsticks, and they can't see why I wouldn't know the etiquette rules of Chinese business meetings. This obviously leads to some hilarious situations as per my previous post. One thing they do know for sure is that I'm immeasurably rich. Rich enough to buy anything I want and rich enough to pay three times the locals' price at the markets. And they are right in some ways. I try to say that I'm on an allowance that just covers my living expenses with little to spare, and that things in Australia actually cost a lot more than China, or even than the US. But truth be told, i know I'm incredibly privileged to be educated and able to travel. My salary in Australia is many multiples of the most extravagant pay packets here. 

This brings me to the conclusion of my long and winding meanderings that began at 4am this morning. My insomnia led me to James Fallows' recent blog on the rise of China (a somewhat larger and deeper topic than this one!):

Soft power becomes powerful when people imagine themselves transformed, improved, by adopting a new style. Koreans and Armenians imagine they will be freer or more successful if they become Americans -- or Australians or Canadians. Young men and women from the provinces imagine they will be more glamorous if they look and act like people in Paris, London, or New York. If a society thinks it is unique because of its system, or its style, or its standards, it can easily exert soft power, because outsiders can imagine themselves taking part in that same system and adopting those same styles. But if it thinks it is unique because of its identity -- "China is successful because we are Chinese" -- the appeal to anyone else is self-limiting.

Fallows is clearly talking about China's ability to influence on the international geopolitical stage, but it makes me wonder: will I always, regardless of how hard I study my Mandarin textbook, be an outsider here? No matter how much I come to enjoy pork dumpling for breakfast, is it actually impossible for me to be a part of this incredibly exhilarating, stimulating and vivacious Chinese world?

Guess I'll have to wait to find out.

3 days in the life of a Chinese workplace

DAY 1: Asked counterpart if 9am meeting was acceptable. She says "10am is better, 9am too earlier". Then night before she texts me:

 "I'm in the suburb of Beijing .maybe I can't arrive at our office on time in tomorrow morning .could we meet at half past 11.I would like to treat you a welcome lunch first ,after that , we can talk about our working.how about that?"

I think this is a good situation. Plus I need to register myself at Big Brother foreigner registration in the morning, which takes 1.5 hours longer than anticipated of painful language barrier-ridden queuing. Arrive at 11.30, counterpart is running 15 minutes late. Meet counterpart at 12 midday and head to lunch. Yes! More fabulous food - this time salad (surprisingly similar to how Mum makes it), silken tofu soup, eggplant fabulousness and red bean sticky rice that is like crack cocaine on my palette. No of course I cannot pay, this is a welcome lunch! Counterpart takes me for a tour of the office, fills out a form in Chinese and realises she should have told me to bring my laptop. She tells me to go home and enjoy the lovely—only moderately smoggy—afternoon. Also to pack my bags for a work trip to nearby Shandong province starting tomorrow. Sum total 2.5 hours of 'work'. 

DAY 2: Supervisor rings my mobile a 4.56am. We are flying out to Dongying and he will pick me up in 20 minutes. Sleepy ride to the airport ends in breakky at the airport of Hong Kong style soup with dumplings and noodles. First chopstickful lands on my nice clean skirt, to my supervisor's immense amusement, then I realise my cup of water is freshly boiled only after pouring down my throat (reminder this is an indecent hour of the morning). After a very pleasant flight, we arrive in Dongying at a chandelier-laden hotel with the biggest rooms I’ve ever seen. I'm told that today is for xiuxi (rest) in the king-sized bed. Ok, resting it is! Fresh pair of clean men's underwear is in the bathroom but no iron? 

Phone call at 11.30 announces someone is taking us to lunch ... now. Ok! Clothes back on. Drive into a gated series of caul-de-sacs. What? Double storey houses with white picket fences? Are we in country USA? No it's a Chinese Western-style community, which apparently is a sign of wealth. Hauled into someone's living room, eat something that tastes like peanut and sugar but looks like a spider web wound into a little ball with chunks of tasty dead fly. Not too bad, actually. 

Get up again, we are going to pick caomei (strawberries) in the garden … I’m not sure why. Then back in the car (aha! We are not eating at the obsessive gardener's East-meets-West house) to a local restaurant. A man who looks like Santa crossed with Genghis Khan motions to us with his long stick. I realise there is a big plastic pool of fish next to him—this is a nice one? He's asking me. I smile politely and then the next minute BAM he's clubbing the fish with a rolling pin. Surprise surprise, carp for lunch. It's cooked in a hotpot in the middle of the table, boiled in front of us with Chinese cabbage and tofu. The waitress comes to stir the soup and carries a bowl of yellow dough. She is rolling it up into balls and slapping it to the side of the pot so that they become lovely carp-scented steamed maize breads. My suspicion is the hot pot is actually supposed to be spicy and they have left out the chilli (as a token gesture for the foreigner) which is why it's kind of bland. Two men eat almost a whole 40cm fish while I have a whole one piece before it becomes too much. Then back to hotel to xiuxi some more. 

Another phone call heralds dinner time! Walk into a private room hoping this will be a nice cosy end to a rather strange day. Instead, we find eight men already at the table standing, smiling, and waving us into three special seats they have allocated to us. I realise my boss is the distinguished guest of a group of local politicians. Wishing I read over that chapter on Chinese banquets! Oh memory, why do you only store useless pieces of information? Let's think: host faces door, 2nd most VIP to his right, 3rd to his left. Sit where told. Don't eat or drink until the host does. Only drink when toasted. Be careful of the dreaded baijiu. Cheers with lip of glass lower than the other person's. 

Food keeps coming out and I don't get a chance to eat because I have to stand up every 3.5 seconds for another toast. And for some reason I have to drink baijiu while everyone else gets wine. No fair! Ok so finished toasting, now I can eat ... oh everybody is getting up. What? We're leaving? It's only 7.30 and after all those shots I'm slightly more than tipsy. Back to dark room. 

DAY 3: 1am get to sleep dehydrated—turns out baijiu is not easy on the stomach. 2am wake to sounds of excited or angry female voice through the wall. Think my colleague may have a mistress ... struggling to accept cross-cultural difference while half asleep and suffering from hangover. Alarms screams breakfast. Then we meet last night's guests in the foyer and three black cars turn up. Incidentally, black is a bad choice in the most polluted country in the world, but it's a national obsession. The local politicians and their buddies get in the black cars in a fluid organised motion according to a set of rules that is plainly obvious to everyone but me. 

An usher quickly shoves a small flower onto my lapel before I get shuffled into a large lecture hall. My boss is on the panel in front of me, and I am seated in the front row. In the middle. By myself. Nobody seems to care that I can't actually read or understand anything the panel is saying. I don't even know the name of this conference or what it's about. Each panel member gets up and says about 30 seconds worth of (what seems like) stirring but serious speech. Then the audience claps for barely a few seconds after each speaker—for some reason this makes me uncomfortable, as if there were some international standard for applause that is not being met.

My boss is urgently motioning for me to get up and leave. I realise the introductory speeches are over, or there has been some hiatus. I leave the lecture hall but my boss stays in there to give his lecture. Now I'm stuck with a group of local officials who do not speak English and can't really understand why I'm there. Or maybe they do, but I don't? I find out shortly that we are doing a tour of some buildings—a university dorm, a LED light factory, a 'software park', a real public park, and some government offices. Each place has a dedicated officer with a headset and speaker to provide the tour. The head honcho seems to be disinterested, and I don't really blame him. He likes the 3D televisions, though. Then we are abruptly sitting at a conference table drinking lü cha (green tea). The two sides of the table—one side with local Dongying officials, and the other side with officials from somewhere else nearby—take turns in giving epic speeches while everybody else sits in silence, trying not to fall asleep. My boss (returned from the abyss) tells me they are listing their city's achievements. What the?

Then to lunch. By this time I'm savvy. Not the stunned mullet I was yesterday. Oh yes, you can't fool me, I know what to expect. I can do this whole banquet thing, you just watch me.

Walk into the most ornately furnished dining room I've ever been inside. A whole new set of people here. Head honcho from this morning is not sitting in the host seat—he is number 2 on the table this time. The host from last night's banquet is not even in a position of honour here, he's just one of the participants. Realise there is no lazy susan to distribute the meals like any other banquet in which I have participated. Waitresses start bringing out individual meals and Mr Host turns up. Lots of standing and bowing and chasing others' glasses to the floor trying to get my glass lower than theirs. Mr Host is apparently the 2IC for the whole city, which is why everybody is suddenly silent, solemnly listening to his ranting. More individual dishes come out—soups, sea cucumbers, things that look like prawns but are only a centimetre long, vegetables, fruit, unidentifiable pieces of fish. I lose count when the whole crabs start coming out. I have to ask my boss how to eat it—how embarrassing! Luckily you don't have to do that one with chopsticks.

Then Mr Host gets up and moves to a non-honoured guest seat. What's going on? Boss seems edgy, he tells me the 'most important man' in the whole city is coming to dine with us! More toasting, more standing up and sitting down, more listening to long rants from slightly tipsy politicians in Chinese. I wonder whether it's acceptable to just get up and go to the bathroom? Nobody else seems to be doing it, or maybe they're just subtle. Where is the bathroom, anyway? Did I ever learn how to ask it in Chinese? Maybe that waitress will tell me. Oh! Everybody is up again. Time to go. Shake hands with the 'most important man' and get shuffled into a car, belly aching and head reeling with new information.

What the hell just happened?

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.