A lot has transpired over the past several days. I met the Corporate Service Corps team, Kristy & Angie and I parted ways, I moved into my digs in Shijiazhuang, we met our clients, Phil gave me an insider’s whirlwind tour of Shijiazhuang before he went home to Shanghai, and I was thoroughly dominated in a late night game of ma jiang (or mahjong?). Meanwhile, I seem to have missed the point of a blog, which is apparently to report on things as they happen. So with this blog I’m going to look back on our visit to Beijing, May 6-7. Sort of like my retroactive NCAA Tourney updates, but instead of VCU causing us pain it was every single muscle in our bodies after our Cinco de Mayo Great Wall adventure.
Speaking of Cinco de Mayo, upon returning from The Wall we tried to hit a Mexican restaurant for dinner but it had apparently closed down, perhaps because there seem to be no Mexicans in Beijing. Instead we went to Tim’s for Tex-Mex. At Tim’s there didn’t seem to be any Texans or Mexicans, and there were no Chinese either. We did meet a Canadian who had gone to Fresno State. But in our state of mental and physical exhaustion we could get no finer than “Europe” in deciding what other accents we were hearing in the restaurant. And the food? It met our expectations for Tex-Mex in Beijing.
On Friday we slept in before dragging our weary bodies to Tiananmen Square. It was roped off. The first time I visited Europe I saw it this way: from behind a locked door that said “closed” in a variety of languages. We could see a lot of uniformed men marching up and down some steps, and then pondered the irony of moving on to the Forbidden City since we couldn’t get into Tiananmen Square.
But by the time we’d eaten a bowl of ice cream, the taste of which can only be described as "interesting," the ropes came down. In through a security check we went, along with quite a few people who must have known this was going to happen. The square is a really big slab of concrete with a couple of big monuments on it, Mao’s grave, the biggest flat screen TV this side of Cowboys Stadium, and a dizzying array of police vehicles. They have police cars, police vans, police buses, and police mini-buses that look like clowns may come tumbling out at any moment. They have police bikes, they have police golf carts, they have police scooters, and yes, they have police Segways. And for every policeman they have 10 military personnel.
More Bluth humor
We crossed the street to the Forbidden City. After buying tickets and walking in, we looked at each other and said, “This isn’t the Forbidden City.” So we walked next door and bought more expensive tickets and went in. What struck me about the Forbidden City was that it seemed infinite. Every time you got through a gate or a hall you came to another. And another. And another. The Lama Temple the next day was the same. Temple after temple after temple – the only difference from one to the next was that the Buddhas kept getting bigger. We assumed we’d made it to the end of the Lama Temple complex when we saw a Guinness Book of World Records plaque hanging on the temple door. The Buddhas don’t get any bigger than that.
A lot of China seems infinite. The Wall. The number of steps in The Climb. People on the Hongzhou bus. The Shanghainese appetite for honking horns. Chinese history – our West Lake boat pilot told Phil that he could study for 100 years and wouldn’t be close to knowing it all. The complexity of the Chinese language. The amount of food we would order for dinner, as was the case when Rebecca treated us to a wonderful Peking Duck dinner in Beijing.
Earlier I mentioned irony, so I should probably cut off my rambling examples of infinity right here. I’ll leave you with a picture of me eating my first bowl of DAN DAN NOODLES along a Hutong on our last day in Beijing. They were wonderful, which is lucky because I didn’t want to have to change the name of the blog.
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