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!

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.

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? 

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.