I'm alive, just terribly jet-lagged and still fighting off some sort of intestinal bug I picked up on my trip. I've been waking up with stomach cramps for the past two nights at 2am, then staying up for the remainder of the night in a stupor, so blogging obviously hasn't been very high on my list of priorities.

UPDATE: I slept a solid 8 hours last night, and my stomach has settled down considerably this morning, so I think I've over the worst of it. Actual blogging may occur later today depending on how big a pile of crap is awaiting my tender ministrations at work.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:32 PM | Permalink

My last full day here is done. I'm all packed up and there's nothing left for me to do but write the final chapter of my story for you. I've really had a wonderful time, and until today I managed to stay healthy.

I was feeling a bit queasy this morning after my dinner at Xiangyang Tun, but I felt better after meeting my fellow instructor and eating a little breakfast, so we headed over to the office. Along the way, I imparted to him the deep mysteries of hidden Beijing taxi knowledge. I introduced him to everyone at the office, then we tore down my equipment and set up his.

At noon, we hopped into my student Loney's minivan and drove over to a restaurant called Ya Wang (King Duck); it's apparently the most famous roast duck restaurant in the city, and I wasn't disappointed. We ate duck feet with wasabe sauce, deep-fried duck liver, sweet-and-sour duck, duck soup, a little fresh fish thrown in for variety, and of course, heaping plates of tender roasted duck covered with thick, crispy-brown skin. The roast duck was dipped in a sweet sauce then rolled in thin pancakes along with sliced onion and cucumbers, or pushed into one end of a hollowed-out sesame roll like a miniature duck pita. At the end of the meal we were served bowls of sweet rice porridge with nuts and berries. Omifreakinghod, it was the greatest Chinese meal I've ever had in my entire life, and after all the outstanding eats I've partaken of this week, that's really saying something!

Unfortunately, soon after I finished, that queasy feeling from the morning returned, followed by a couple of minutes of severe stomach cramps. They passed, and I felt better, so when Lin Tzu volunteered Loney to be our "shopping tour guide" for the afternoon, I accepted rather than returning to the hotel.

Loney is a really nice guy and his english is superb, so having him drive us downtown was a treat. We headed into South Beijing and parked at a market called Hong Qiao Shichang, a huge building with 4 floors packed full of purveyors of all sorts of goods. We headed up to the fourth floor where the pricier jade and pearl shops were located. I found some nice coral and jade jewelry, but was a bit surprised by the high prices and unwillingness to haggle shown by the salesclerks, so I didn't buy anything. Eventually, we wandered down a floor to a livelier scene of lower-quality jewelry and touristy crap, along with antiques both real and fake.

In the latter category, I was ecstatic to discover that I'd hit the motherlode of Cultural Revolution kitsch in the form of propaganda posters, Chinese Communist Party medals, windup alarm clocks with revolutionary scenes painted on the faceplates, and stacks upon stacks of the Chairman's Little Red Book in every conceivable language. There was even a pair of porcelain figurines showing two nude Red Guards doin' the nasty! Must've been from Mao's personal pr0n collection.

Loney advised not to accept anything more than 30% of the initial asking price, so I got to work haggling for a couple of souvenirs, and came away with some very nice items. With a grin, Loney told me that no matter how good a deal I thought I'd cut, it would never be as low as the price they'd negotiate with a local. Given how little things cost to begin with compared to what they'd cost in the West (if you could even find them), I still thought I was getting a relative bargain.

As time passed, I was beginning to experience more and more frequent bouts of severe cramping and nausea. I suppose I could've visited one of the squatting loos in the market, but I hadn't brought anything to use as toilet paper, and I was definitely concerned about my aim, so I figured that I'd better try and hold off for as long as possible.

When I told Loney that I wanted to buy some tea for my wife, he said that he lived only 100m from Beijing's biggest tea market. What serendipitous fortune! We hopped back into his van and he took us on a hellacious journey down the backalleys of his neighborhood, parting the seas of humanity in an unbelievable display of audacious steersmanship that left us all white-knuckled and quivering with fear. I just wish that I had a video camera with me, because words fail me at this point in describing just how amazing it was that anyone could've driven through that crush of pedestrians and bicycles without hitting a single thing.

At the tea market, Loney introduced us to a doll-like Taiwanese woman who sat us all down at a carved-wooden table and proceeded to brew about 12 tiny pots of various teas for us to sample. We had green tea, flower tea, black tea, red tea, and the king of teas, oolong. She held out the dry leaves so we could inhale the delicate aroma, then she carefully measured out a scoop into a little glass of hot water to steep, and poured a thimbleful into little white cups for us to sip. She told us to hold each mouthful and savor the taste before swallowing, which reminded me a bit of wine tasting. With the exception of the potent oolong, the flavors were so delicate that it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. The oolong was a little out of my price range, so I settled on a half-kilo of the fragrant jasmine and a stronger black tea. Since he was a regular customer, Loney was able to negotiate an excellent price for us. My colleague and I decided to split the cost and each took a quarter-kilo. The tea lady gave us each a couple of nice, stamped-metal cans to put our stash in, free of charge.

Happily, the tea did a lot to relieve my stomach cramps, and I was feeling pretty good as we headed back to the hotel. Loney dropped us off and we gave him our profuse thanks for doing such a fantastic job of shepherding us around. Afterwards, I went back to my room, and promptly shed about 5 extra pounds, ifyouknowwutImean. I dug out my Cipro prescription and got started on the antibiotics right away just in case I had picked up some local bug, rather than simply eaten too much. There's nothing I want to do less than spend 17 hours on an airplane tomorrow while suffering from the runs.

Well, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. Hope you all enjoyed it!

Wan an (good night),

MrBaliHai

Posted by MrBaliHai at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hi All. Just got back from a fantastic night on the town with two of my students, Ronnie and Kelvin. I'd been jonesin' all week to go to a homestyle restaurant near the Summer Palace called Xiangyang Tun that serves up Northeastern Chinese cuisine and features a nightly cabaret of Errenzhuan...a sort of peasant opera. Tonight, I got my fix.

Pictures are here.

We took a short cab ride over around 6:30pm. The restaurant is in a huge building across the street from some sort of space museum that's got a full-size replica of a Mercury/Redstone rocket and the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft sitting in the parking lot. Wish I'd had more time to check that out, but I was on a very important mission to overindulge all of my senses with too much food, drink, and raunchy entertainment. The outside of the building was anchored by a giant wooden gate festooned with lanterns. The entranceway was lined with cages filled with various types of birds that I assumed were destined to be on my plate. The foyer held a pyramid of aquariums that contained a multitude of tasty fishies in various shapes and sizes.

The waitress, who was dressed in traditional northeastern garb, led us to one of the bright-red picnic tables that filled the large interior of the restaurant. The walls were covered with old propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution along with yellowed newspapers, also from the 1960s. I was pleased to note that the table had an unobstructed view of the stage.

I put myself at the mercy of Ronnie and Kelvin and let them get busy ordering a wide array of dishes with the help and advice of the friendly waitress. While they pondered our dining options, I played with the friendly white cat that was frolicking with what looked to be a small dead animal underneath our table. I think that all restaurants should have a cat, but I could've done without the deceased critter.

We had some tea and munched on the sunflower seeds that were in a bowl on the table. Our dinner began arriving within a few minutes. We started off with a bowl of smoked beef in a sweet sauce and a plate of sliced cabbage and tiny, orange needle mushrooms in a very light dressing that was faintly reminiscent of coleslaw. We then were brought a very odd looking dish of greenish-yellow globs of some gelatinous substance that tasted vaguely like Elmer's Glue. Ronnie informed me that this was boiled "cow foot". Ummm, bovine hooves! Fortunately, our beers had arrived by then, so I had something to rinse the taste out of my mouth. This was followed by a large plate of ribs coated in a crunchy, spicy batter and then lightly fried. I'd never eaten ribs with chopsticks before, but I managed. After that, we were served some kind of roasted bird that I first assumed was duck, but eventually I noticed the tiny, severed head of a pigeon lying on the plate. Finally, a boiling pot of perch and tofu stew brought our feast to an end. The price of all this gluttony, you ask? A mere $22.

At 7:30 sharp, the lights on the stage came up and a gentleman attired in a mandarin's robe and skullcap came out and warmed us up with a few jokes. Kelvin informed me that he was a classic Chinese comedic character. He was soon joined by a lovely companion who regaled us with song in an incredibly shrill Betty Boopish voice, while accompanied by the comedian on an equally high-pitched coronet. The volume of the PA system was earsplitting and crackled with distortion. The combined effect of her voice, the horn, and the PA gave me an instant migraine. Fortunately, it was soon over, and the two of them proceeded to perform an elegant fan dance followed by a sad song about a woman forced to marry a blind beggar. They finished up the show with a wicked lampoon of Japanese soldiers in WWII. Long memories, these folks.

We were totally stuffed and feeling a bit tipsy at this point, so we settled the bill and walked across the bridge over the busy highway to the taxi stand. The restaurant was beautifully lit, so I snapped a picture. We caught a cab, and I said goodby to my colleagues at the hotel. What a pleasant evening!

Tomorrow is my last full day here. A fellow instructor arrives from the US tonight, so I'll bring him with me to the office on Friday to show him the ropes. Lin Tzu is taking all of us out to lunch at a Peking Duck restaurant, then I'll have the afternoon off to do some last-minute shopping downtown in the Wangfujing area.

This has really been a great trip, one of the best of my career. I'm sorry to see it end, but I miss my family.

P.S. I had an especially odd moment of cross-cultural cross-ideological, cognitive dissonance today when riding in the taxi on the way back from work. A old, green, military motorcycle with a sidecar pulled up next to us at a stoplight. On it, were two women wearing gray Mao jackets and black leather pants, with designer purses slung over their arms. Rammstein was blaring from the stereo!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 11:38 AM | Permalink

It's Wednesday in Beijing, and my trip is almost over. Things have been pretty hectic the last couple of days at work. I've been dealing with an almost constant barrage of technical obstacles, most of which have been self-inflicted by my students who aren't terribly good at following directions...a problem which seems to cross most cultural boundaries, I'm sorry to say.

I'm hoping to get done with class early today, so I can take the subway into downtown Beijing or the foreign-embassy neighborhood, Chaoyang, to see a few more sights and maybe find a good Peking Duck restaurant (or visit the intriguingly named Banpo Primitive Hotpot Beer Hut). However, the way things have been going, I'm not holding my breath.

Oh yeah, here's a few more photos from my trip to the Ming Tombs.

Taking a taxi to and from the office every day has been a bit of a pain, which I've dubbed the "Taxi Ride of Terror". In addition to the life-threatening traffic manoeuvres and lack of seatbelts, the drivers can't seem to figure out where the office is...they usually have to stop several times to consult the badly photocopied map that I'd been given, or ask directions from one of the ubiquitous, official-looking men in uniform who guard apartment complexes and banks. Maybe they're just trying to pump up the fare by keeping the meter running, but it only costs around $2.50 each way, even with the constant stops, so I don't really care. In any case, I've been practicing how to say "Turn right/left" and "Straight ahead" in Mandarin so I can tell the driver how to find the office, that seemed to help with my trip this morning.

I tried walking back to the hotel on Monday afternoon, it took 45 minutes and I was catcalled constantly with cries of "Helllloooooo" like I was some sort of exotic parrot being offered a cracker if I responded correctly. When I finally got back to the hotel, I was totally drenched with sweat, had a huge blister on my heel, and my shoulder was sore from toting my bulky flaptop. I won't be doing that again!

My evenings have been mostly devoid of any major sightseeing or cultural excursions, although a couple of my students got together with me at my hotel for dinner at a Korean restaurant. We had the usual assortment of pickled veg and kimchi to start with, followed by braised shortribs cooked on a hot plate in the middle of the table. We also had a "Korean pizza" which was actually a huge omelette chock full of oysters, crab, and scallions. Finally, we were served a mixture of rice, eggs, and more seafood in a sizzling stone pot. The waitresses stirred the eggs into the mixture until it turned into a sort of fried rice. It was delicious. They gave us fresh fruit and a sweet, cold soup with puffy fried rice kernels in it for dessert. The entire meal only cost about $40 for the 3 of us.

I'd like to see the Peking Opera or an acrobatics show before I leave, but the concierge at my hotel won't book it for me, and told me that I have to take a cab to another hotel in order to arrange it with their concierge. I don't know if it's worth that much hassle.

And on a final note, when I went to breakfast this morning the restaurant was full of ugly Americans wearing dirty t-shirts, wrinkled khakis, and Tevas sandals (both with and without socks). I suspect that they're all scientists who're here for the nanotechnology conference I mentioned previously. The hotel conference area is plastered with presentation posters that say, "Experiments With Self-arranging Quantum Dots" and "Production Methods of Carbon Monofilament Nanotube Fibers". Mah brains hurt just readin' them thar words.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's Monday morning on my side of the world. I had a good, nutritious breakfast and now I'm just cooling my heels before heading into the office to start class, so I thought I'd try and finish the final installment of my weekend tour for your reading pleasure.

Pictures are here.

I had a pleasant enough time sightseeing yesterday, although at first the pouring rain outside didn't bode well for a day of climbing on the Great Wall. Lulu was our guide again, but the group was much smaller and not quite so lively. I struck up a nice conversation with an older Scottish lady who works for Strathclyde University in Glasgow; she was on a big swing through Asia that included Seoul, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Nepal. There were also a Malaysian couple and 3 men from Canada onboard, along with two Chinese gentlemen who apparently felt that the floor of the minibus was their personal spitoon. Ick!

Lulu repeated much of her schtick from the first day, so I just tuned out and read my guide book. Our first stop was another state-owned store, a jade factory this time. We received another "informative lecture", shown a few mineral samples along with a couple of bored looking workers without any eye protection grinding jade on high-speed drills, after which we were turned loose in the retail outlet. I bought a couple of small, inexpensive things to give as souvenirs, but eschewed any large purchases.

We then stopped at the largest of the 13 tombs of the Ming Emperors. The architecture was quite similar to that of the Forbidden City. Since the main tomb chamber has never been excavated, we were shown to a large hall where replicas of the treasures from a smaller tomb were on display. None of it was terribly interesting, and we only stayed there for 45 minutes or so. As we left, we made our way through a lovely, peaceful garden courtyard. At that moment, the tranquility was shattered by an old lady behind me who let out a tremendous wet belch that reverberated throughout the whole area. Apparently, "why fart and waste it when you can burp and taste it" is a saying that the Chinese take to its penultimate expression.

After climbing back on the bus, Lulu announced that we were in for a special treat, we were going to be taken to a famous Chinese-medicine clinic where actual doctors would lecture us on the benefits of herbal remedies and give us a free diagnosis. I knew right away that this was yet another attempt to pry me away from large amounts of RMB, but what are you gonna do?

At the clinic we were all shown into a little room and asked to sit down. An assistant soon arrived and gave a 5-minute talk about the pulse points on our left and right wrists, then an elderly gentleman, who I presume was the doctor, entered the room and proceeded to give the hard-sell to one of the Canadians. He took about 1 minute to check the guy's pulse and look at the coating on his tongue before pronouncing him to be suffering from lower-back pain, stomach problems, and an incipient spleen condition. The doctor prescribed about 600 RMB (~$70) worth of herbs (along with the internal organs of a couple of endangered animal species, I suspect) and promised that this would cure all of his medical problems, clean his floors, and make a great dessert topping. Quite frankly, I felt like I was watching a gypsy at the carnival read palms.

I had seen enough by this point, so I got up and left the room. After waiting by the bus for a few minutes, I was joined by most of the other folks on the tour. The Canadian emerged last clutching a shopping bag full of "medicine". I whispered to the Scottish lady that any relief he got from his lower-back pain would probably be a result of the dramatic thinning of his wallet, rather than any beneficial effect acheived from an infusion of grizzly bear gall bladders.

Finally clear of all the mandatory fleecing stops, we heading over to a giant cafeteria-style restaurant with 50-75 tour buses parked around it. We were served a rather mediocre lunch, then headed off to Ba-da-ling.

The drive to the Wall took us through some very dramatic mountainous countryside. I was also quite pleased to see the rain stop and the clouds begin to part as we approached.

Ba-da-ling was the first section of the wall to be rebuilt, and it's also the most popular with tourists. The parking lot is a riot of tour buses, street vendors, and fast-food joints; the place had a really unpleasant Disneyland kind of vibe to it.

Lulu told us that we would take a "chair lift" up to the 4th watchtower along this section, where we would be turned loose for 2 hours of hiking on our own. The price of the lift was not included in the tour, so we had to cough up an additional 60RMB apiece for the privilege of climbing into a wet little plastic bucket on a rollercoaster track that took us, grinding and squealing, up the side of the mountain. No doubt this was exactly how the original wall workers reached the top during ancient times!

Once at the top, I pushed my way through the crowds of tourists and started the long scramble towards the 8th watchtower along the paving stones that covered the top of the wall. I was really grateful that the rain had stopped because attempting to negotiate those slippery stones was difficult enough when they were dry, and would've likely been life-threatening when slick with water.

It's also a good thing that I'm in shape because getting to the 8th tower was no picnic. The angle of climb was very steep and the steps are uneven. I really felt the burn when I reached the end of the section and I was sweatin' like Tom Jones after his midnight set in Vegas.

There were even more vendors situated along the top of the wall; they were calling out and thrusting tschotkes in my face at practically every step. I was quite amused to see pictures of Jesus being sold next to pictures of Mao.

After snapping a few pics, I headed back to the bus. Riding the chair lift down the mountain was actually kind of fun, if somewhat scary due to the obvious lack of maintenance on the track. I waited on the bus and chatted with the Scottish lady. Every few minutes one of the ladies from a nearby souvenir stand poked her head into the bus with some new, must-have item for us to purchase. I put my limited knowlege of Mandarin to use by practicing saying "Wo Bu Yao" (I don't want) at least 20 times or more.

We finally headed back down the mountain and returned to Beijing at high speed via some winding back roads that took us through several picturesque little villages.

When I got back to the hotel, I encountered a huge crowd of scientists registering for a nanotechnology conference that runs through tomorrow. Joy!

Better go flag down a taxi and head off to the office for my first day of actual work. wish me luck!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 10:02 PM | Permalink

I slept the sleep of the dead last night until I was unexpectedly roused by the jangling of my telephone around midnight. I picked up the receiver and groggily said hello. The heavily-accented female voice on the other end simply inquired, "Massage?" I slammed the phone down rather violently at that point and went back to sleep. I was awakened again by more ringing at 5:30am but didn't answer. I finally arose at 6:30 to face the gloomy, rainy day outside.

Tonight, I don't care if Catherine Zeta-Jones shows up at my door with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a Massey pre-nup in the other, I'm pullin' the plug on the phone and gettin' me some shuteye!

Anyhoo, here's the skinny on my tour of Beijing. Photos here, here, and here.

My room includes breakfast and the hotel puts on a nice spread of Asian and Western de-lites every morning, so I've been mixing it up Pacific-rim-fusion stylee with Dim Sum, French toast, kimchi, and shredded wheat. They've got an omelette chef too, but I haven't felt brave enough to order one yet. I'd probably get pickled octopus and scorpion jerky instead of mushrooms and ham.

The Dragon Tour minibus picked me up this morning around 8:30 and we headed out to the Summer Palace. Our guide was a very smart and funny young lady named Shou Yew Yew, which she informed us, translates into "Slow Clear Jade". Funny, my Mandarin dictionary translates that as "Jade Shoe". Well, it's her name, so she can translate it any damn way she wants. She told us to call her Lulu.

Lulu had been working as a guide for 4 years and her english was very good. An only child, a product of China's controversial "One Child" policy, she informed us that consequently, she was the "little empress" in her family. This meant that she never had to do housework because her parents wanted her to spend every waking moment fulfilling all of their dreams. She quizzed us on our knowledge of Mandarin and told us that regular Chinese don't say "Hello" when they meet...they say, "Have you eaten yet?" The Chinese are all about not starving.

There were 14 people in our group which apparently is yet another unlucky chinese number, very inauspicious beginning! There was an older Dutch couple, two young Brit couples on their honeymoons, an Indian guy from Sillycon Valley, and two youngish Chinese women with very severe hairdos and thick makeup that made them look like dragon ladies-in-waiting. Rounding out this motley crew was an Australian Scotsman, an older Cockney gentleman, and two Japanese women.

The old Dutch guy was a hoot, he kept cracking jokes and reducing the two Dragon Girls to intense giggling fits. I don't think they understood a word he was saying, but it didn't matter. They were a couple of little pistols, cackling incessantly into their cellphones in screechy voices and flirting with all the men on the bus, married or not. One of the young honeymooning couples had come all the way from St. Petersburg on the Trans-Siberian Express which I thought was indescribably cool.

We arrived at the Summer Palace after about 30 minutes of navigating through yet more awful traffic. The palace was the home of the dowager empress, Cixi, who ruled China for 48 years. The grounds are huge, you could spend days in there, and it's situated along a gigantic lake with a mountain behind it (as with all Chinese construction, Feng Shui and lucky numbers figure prominently in its layout). Lulu described its history in great detail, and I used my guidebook to vett her presentation, making sure that it was free of the usual state propaganda which typically blames all of the cultural destruction wreaked by Mao's fervent cadres on "foreign invaders". To her credit, she told the tale with a minimum of invented history. However, she did lie to to me once; when I asked her where I could find old propaganda from the Cultural Revolution, she said that it was unpossible since it had all been destroyed. My guidebook told me otherwise, and a street peddler approached me a few minutes later wielding a fistful of nostalgic Maoist literature!

The bus was waiting on the other side of the palace grounds to whisk us away to the next stop...a state-owned pearl outlet. All Chinese tour agencies apparently work deals with state or privately owned shops to deposit fat, dumb foreigners with wads of cash at their doorstep where they can systematically strip them of all working capital. The tour guide usually gets a cut of the action as well.

We were then given a brief presentation on how river oysters are seeded. When the presenter asked if anyone knew how to tell real pearls from fakes, I drew gasps from the shopgirls when I suggested rubbing them across your teeth to see if they feel gritty or smooth (real pearls are gritty). I also knew of three more ways to gauge authenticity, but I figured that revealing them probably would've caused these poor young ladies to swoon over my superior knowledge of pearl-wrangling. They followed me all over the store, plying me with offers of face cream made from ground pearls, pearl earrings, and pearl necklaces (the ones you wear around your neck). Since these state shops are priced 10-15 times higher than normal, I kept my hard-earned yuan to myself.

We then spent another half-hour trekking over to the Temple of Heaven, essentially another huge park full of massive pagodas and brobdingnagian altars, where the emperors offered up their yearly sacrifices for bountiful harvests. Lulu tried to keep us all together, but the Scotstralian and the old Cockney gent kept lagging far behind, so she started referring to them as the Turtle Men, a name that stuck to them for the duration of the tour.

We stopped at an old restaurant on the temple grounds. Lunch was included in the tour price, so I wasn't expecting top-quality grub, but I was very pleasantly surprised when they served up a delicious 12-course Cantonese feast that made the chinese food at home seem quite bland by comparison.

Finally, we ended up at the Forbidden City. Our bus couldn't get near it, so we had to ankle about a mile to reach the main gate. Along the way, we were acosted by an army of incredibly obnoxious and pushy souvenir peddlers all selling the exact same wares. The grounds of the palace were packed with tourists and many of the structures were not visible due to being swathed with canvas while undergoing reconstruction for the Olympics. Nevertheless, we managed to walk the entire length of the place while Lulu kept up a running commentary on the life of the emperor and his 3000 concubines. She attracted quite a bit of attention from other natives wherever we went. Apparently hearing someone Chinese speaking the laowai's barbaric language is still something of a novelty here.

After wending our way through another queue of surly peddlers, mothers with children trained to cry miserably on cue, and forgers pretending to be poor students hosting "special art exhibitions", we finally reached the bus and were taken back to our respective hotels.

Although I saw a plethora of wondrous sites today, I have to say that I was most impressed by the miniature mountain built out of stone with a temple on top that was constructed to permit the emperor and the empress to climb to the summit on certain festival days during which mountain-climbing was required.

Damn, it's good to be the emperor!

Next: The Not-so-Great Wall

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ni Hao, everyone! Finally got my internet connection to work after some pantomime with the hotel's IT guy. Here's the account of my first full day in Beijing, along with a few photographs for the visually inclined.

More tonight after my tour of the Great Wall.

I finally found the internet connection in my room. It was hidden under the desk and the guest information folder makes no mention of it. It assigned me an automatic DHCP address the first day, but now it seems to require a static IP address. Weird. I was greatly entertained by some of the Chinglish instructions in the fire-safety section of the guest info like "Nip the bud after smoking" and the title of this post.

My first full day in Beijing has ended. I'm utterly exhausted from an afternoon of walking, so I'm going to write my activities down while it's fresh in my mind, then go eat something before I hit the hay. I've got to get up early tomorrow for my tour of the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and the Summer Palace.

My company contact Lawrence (Lin Tzu), picked me up at the hotel about 8:30 this morning and drove me to the SGI office. It's only 10 blocks away, but it took us almost 20 minutes to get there. When the guide books say that traffic in Beijing is horrible almost beyond comprehension, they aren't exaggerating! The roads are a mad conglomeration of pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks...all jockeying for position and paying no attention whatsoever to traffic signals. The Lamaze breathing exercises that I learned with my wife before our son was born are really paying off!

I spent a couple of hours at the office checking things out. My systems hadn't cleared customs yet, so I'm hoping that I'll have some hardware to teach on come Monday. I suspect that they're even now being frantically retroengineered in some dank Beijing basement. Poor bastards, that'll set the country's computer industry back at least a decade! At lunchtime, Lin Tzu rounded up everybody and took us to a nearby Hunan restaurant for lunch. He introduced me to everyone. They had names like Jacky, Bronson, and Victor. I think it's amusing that everyone picks such dramatic western names rather than "Bob" or "Don".

The food was excellent. We had about 15 different dishes that included spicy pig trotters, lotus root, steamed buns, smoked beef, assorted veg, and boneless duck feet. I ate a bit of everything although I went light on the duck feet as they were quite gristly. Everyone was impressed by my mastery of chopsticks. I used waterless antiseptic wipes to clean my hands afterwards. So far, I don't feel ill.

Lin Tzu brought me back to the hotel after lunch. As it was still quite early and the day was sunny and warm, I decided to trek over to the subway station that we passed on the way to/from the office and visit an area behind the Forbidden City called the Back Lakes region. It was only about a 5-minute walk to the station, and I managed to get there without being creamed by a truck or rammed by bicyclists. Tickets cost about 5 RMB (~75 cents) and the trains were clean and new, albeit jam-packed even at 1:30 in the afternoon.

Let me stop the narrative at this point and mention that I feel very alone and out of place here. There seem to be very few foreigners in the city right now, so I stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. No one has been rude to me, but I do get stared at quite a bit. I do plenty of staring back though, it's kind of entertaining to look at these people and visualize them a mere 25 years ago wearing baggy Mao suits, quoting from the Chairman's Little Red Book, and happily carrying buckets of manure up the hill to increase the harvest of the glorious People's Collective Pharm.

The Back Lakes is a series of small man-made ponds and canals that were created to bring supplies into the Forbidden City. It's one of the few areas in the city that hasn't been bulldozed into modernity, and it still retains the twisty-turny, narrow streets and tree-lined neighborhoods known as hutongs that used to be ubiquitous in Beijing.

First I walked over to Desheng Men Jianlou, the Arrow Tower, which is a fragment of the old wall that surrounded the city during the Ming Dynasty. There was a coin museum inside, so I spent some time looking over the various types of money on display. It was interesting, but you can only look at so many coins with square holes in the middle before your eyes start glazing over. I prefer paper currency. I walked up a flight of stairs to the upper ramparts and was rewarded with a wide vista of the endlessly changing skyline of this smoggy Asian metropolis. Inside the tower there was a small exhibit of contemporary art.

I then walked along the shoreline of Xi Hai (West Lake) and Hou Hai (Back Lake). It was very shady and pleasant and the locals were out fishing in the dirty water, playing Mah Jhong, and ping-pong. Old men were standing around in their Speedos slapping their saggy skin and jumping into the filthy lakes (I'd slap myself too if I got any of that filthy muck on my bod). Couples were canoodling on the benches and clipping each other's nose hairs...must be some sort of primate ritual like monkeys picking bugs out of each other's fur.

I stopped at the house of Soong Ching-ling (AKA Madame Sun Yat-sen) which is supposedly where Pu Yi, the last emperor was born. After that, I was pooped, so I stopped for a beer at one of the many little bars that line the lakeshore. The first word I learn in any foreign language is "beer".

Occasionally, I turned off the main drag and wandered through the alleyways of the hutongs where I saw ordinary Chinese doing ordinary things like washing cats, children with slit pants squatting to take a dump in the gutter, and old folks bent almost in half from lifetimes of hard work nodding off in doorways. The pedalcab guys hectored me constantly. The hutongs are their main turf since the streets are too narrow for taxis. I preferred walking and waved them off

I finally reached the far end of Hou Hai and tried to locate an old mansion listed in my guide as having gorgeous gardens. I was unsuccessful in finding it among the twisty alleys, and my feet were starting to ache, so I decided to turn back.

I got back to the hotel around 6pm and was ready to pass out by 8pm.

Next: touring Beijing with Lulu and the Mad Old Dutchman.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I leave for Beijing tomorrow morning, so I won't be posting for a while, but I'll put up photos and a travel journal when I get a chance. I'll arrive in Beijing late on Thursday night after enduring a 17-hour flight in Northwurst cattle class. It's really frustrating to me that despite having a gazillion frequent-flyer miles, I never seem to be able to get booked on international flights with upgradeable seats in biz class.

I'll be free for the weekend, so I plan to concentrate on seeing the major sites through my hotel's tourist agency. Monday, I have to start working, but I hope to be able to arrange some nice dinners with my students during the week, along with a visit to the Peking Opera.

And I'll be on the lookout for Maoist artwork to bring back with me, of course.

Zài huì (see you soon)!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've been swamped for the past couple of days...literally. My water service sprang a leak last Friday and left my front yard a soggy mess. Crews from the city water department spent all day Saturday digging up my road frontage with a backhoe and left a huge, sodden pit of mud lined with uprooted shrubs. They eventually fixed it, but not before finding a second leak on the line running under the road to my neighbor's house. Apparently, the city decided to get rid of some closeout stock when they originally installed the line back in the 1960s, because the crew chief told me he thought they stopped using piping like that about 20 years earlier. Since the leak was in the city line, they're on the hook to clean up the mess they made, but I'm not exactly sure when that's going to be.

I've also been attending a class at work. I'm supposed to become a backup disk instructor, so I've been sitting in on a colleague's class.

In addition to all that, I'm still sorting out all the details for my trip to China next week, so I was pretty happy to find the Oriental Historical Architecture site which has an excellent section on Beijing and its environs. Once I finally figured out where my hotel is, I could then take a look at some of the more notable sites near the Haidain District like the Summer Palace and the Drum and Bell Towers. I also had fun looking up some of the places I've visited in Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 11:15 PM | Permalink