Chillin’
It’s only 2pm. (Photos now uploaded, and another paragraph at the end.)
Today Beijing has smiled upon us once again, putting on a beautiful blue sky that (except for the snow) makes the city look like spring (and no sign of pollution). It’s colder than yesterday, though – the forecast was -9 to -16. Now THAT’S refreshing. But my feet didn’t get wet, so I was fine. This photo is from yesterday, when it was still snowing:
We planned to go and see the Great Wall, but the train to Badaling (the section we planned to go to) was “a little delayed”. We chose to wait an hour, then give up (we gained no information of any kind in that time – for all we know, the entire stock of Wall-oriented trains had been eaten by yeti).
I just did a super basic google search and discovered this article http://www.globaltimes.cn/www/english/metro-beijing/update/society/2010-01/495913.html saying that, on Sunday, the buses to Badaling were stuck on the expressway for twelve hours because of heavy snow. To me, that indicates that the snow is heavier to the North (which is where rain and snow always come from), and it stands to reason that the high levels of snow also stopped the trains (but will be melted enough to get through by tomorrow).
A pretty building:
At a certain point last night, my initial manic joy suddenly vanished and my mental illness popped back up. It’s always a surprise when I’m having fun and then suddenly want to throw myself out a window. My body isn’t 100% happy with me walking around in the snow, so I decided to look after body and soul and go home. Best of all, I sent the boys off to see the art galleries (I can live without seeing that) and went home – by myself.
Photos my partner took at the galleries:
That was excellent. The boys dropped me at a train station on line 2 (the line that goes to dongsishitian, which is the closest to Bil’s house) and my partner hugged me goodbye in an especially endearing manner (evidently not sure we’d ever meet again). I walked up to the station and was immediately refused entry. The man spoke no English, so it was MY language skills – MINE, I tell you! – that gained me the information that it was closed, but the next station entrance along was fine. I spoke to a Chinese lady (all in Chinese, because I rock) along the way, and double-checked she was heading to the station. She was.
And then I went home, as easily as if I was travelling in Sydney (easier actually, because the trains are better here).
Before that, I came perilously close to successfully ordering a delicious and very cheap and healthy (ish) lunch for the three of us. I established that we wanted chicken, understood the server’s explanation that it was served in bread, and that it was spicy. I was able to say, “We don’t like spicy food” but not strongly enough (I needed to say, “We don’t have spicy food” – a word that I already knew). Bil took over for me, and the meal was very nice.
I now communicate as well in Chinese as I did in Indonesian after five years of studying (at which point I went to live with Indonesians for six months, and became properly fluent). Fundamentally, with the friends I already have here, I could move to Beijing to live, and would be able to get around on my own. Except of course that only REALLY stoic people can survive here.
All the same, I’m sure that once I’m home I’ll miss the gentle Siberian breezes. If only because. . . well, okay, I can’t thing of ANY possible reason to miss Beijing’s wind.
—–a bit later in the day—
We went to the same local Chinese restaurant (as Friday) for dinner, and ate much deliciousness. The taste for today is pumpkin chips (the same size and shape as fish and chip shop ships), battered in egg yolks and fried in something delicious – again, perfectly crisp and buttery. I’m definitely going to attempt to make them when we get home.
One mroe gallery photo, just for fun:
That’s not a Christmas card, THIS is a Christmas card
Yay! Photo o’clock:
It snowed again last night, and it kept snowing all day. The snow is more than a foot deep all over Beijing, and transport has ground largely to a halt (a huge number of taxis simply refused to take any passengers). But it’s not reverse global warming causing the wacky weather – it’s the government’s cloud seeding program (one girl told me there’s a “Winter Wonderland” set up in the olympic stadium, and that’s why snow was considered a good thing). All the snow is covered with tiny sparkles, like glitter scattered throughout. The whole city is hushed under a white blanket.
People are describing it as “fake” snow, which is perfectly accurate – it just happens to be fake snow that falls from the sky and is made of frozen particles of water. Other than the telltale glitter, it was also too powdery – not matter how much fell, it didn’t hang together like snow does. Even in Canberra (where it snows about once a decade), if you can gather a handful you can make a snowball. That was pretty much impossible today.
Nonetheless. . . snow! Great soft drifts of it! Interestingly, none of the roads were snow-ploughed. The thick snow was salted, turning it to a thinner brown sludge, and that was all. The footpaths were tended by sweepers with brush brooms and pieces of cardboard attached to sticks.
My feet got wet around midday when we went to meet some other Australians for lunch, and my boots, socks and feet stayed wet until we came home – just now, at 4am. (Which is why I shan’t be posting photos until tomorrow. Or later.) The temperature varied between -6 and -9 degrees, and I was cold. As we came home, I was shivering the whole way. But I’m fine now, and I hope the new day will bring (a) no more snow (b) a new shot of excitement.
I is dead.
Our main activity today was the relatively gentle one of socialising, most importantly at the Lush bar in the Wudaokou area. The bar has a lot of students (American, Korean, Chinese, South American, British, Australian, Danish and Swiss – at least, those were the ones I met while sitting at my table), and an artsy atmosphere. It is a genuinely warm and welcoming community.
Seeing Bil (Brother In Law) play was incredible. It always is, because he’s an excellent musician – the kind that not only plays well, but has a joyful psychic connection with other members of his band. I think genuine masculinity is about the most wonderful thing in the world (I LIKE men. A lot), and a band with that kind of connection is one of precious few examples of a healthy expression of masculinity. (“Healthy” sounds so unexciting. A better phrase – and I mean this as an observer of truly fine art – is “an utterly attractive expression of masculinity”). My husband also played bass – and sang “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”. Watching Bil, I felt that he was destined to make his musical home in Lush. He’d already told us it was the highlight of his week. Despite his low (and totally unreliable) income, I am insanely jealous.
Mine is the one on the left:
At around 2am (people from the crowd were still getting up and singing, and every single one could sing), a big guy brought in a guitar, sat down, and began to play – with the quiet smile of someone who has been playing for twenty-five years. He was Korean, and didn’t speak much English OR Chinese – but he made everyone else look like kids with plastic toys. When everyone else stopped playing and begged him to continue alone, he did. When he finished, one of the other performers (an American) said (haltingly) in Korean, “I want to have your babies.”
Everyone in the room did too.
Today’s taste sensation is a toss-up between a cocktail I had there – a mix of vanilla vodka, creme de cacao and chocolate shavings – and a lolly called “Piratos” which was like licorice, but condensed and made salty. (Luckily I was able to get rid of the taste with a margarita. Then I found myself wanting another. Such, perhaps, is the lure of Chinese candy.)
January 4: Chinese Phrases (contains swearing)
January 3: Bind Your Mind
Welcome to your new theme and new story, “The Spy Who Shoved Me”. (The actual tweets will appear late tonight, since my parents are posting them – China doesn’t allow twitter at this time.)
Our hero is Jimmy Bind, the lovechild of James Bond and someone even prettier.
He speaks thirty-two languages fluently (and none of them are Klingon), can shoot a thread through a needle at three hundred paces, and is so handsome 33% of women who observe him on the street faint instantly.
His tools include:
Sleeping gas pen.
Blow-up gum.
Two matchbox cars (including matches and gunpowder)
Piercing blue eyes.
A whole lot of high-quality duct tape (or gaffa, as we call it in Australia).
Oh Nose!
Beijing is not the greatest place to live. It’s bitterly cold in Winter (but almost never snows), and boiling in Summer (apparently it officially never gets up to forty degrees, but sometimes it stays at 39 degrees from early morning to late afternoon. Suspicious? Nah, who on earth would lie about the weather?!) The whole city is filled with dust storms in Spring, and it has the world’s shortest autumns (which are apparently rather nice – almost always). But it’s a really excellent place to visit. A million times nicer than, for example, Jakarta or Port Moresby. And last night – sometime before 6am – it snowed.
We were going to visit a gallery but because the city was being so pretty we went to the Temple of Heaven instead. Beijing still has all its Christmas decorations, so just walking along was like being in a Christmas card. (An incredibly slippery Christmas card, where the wind burns your face until it’s red and painful to touch – despite the fact I STILL didn’t feel uncomfortably cold, and I wore less layers than yesterday.) Beijing is filled with trees (and birds, and incredible ramshackle nests wherever you look), including a lot of silver birches which do look barren, but in a beautiful way.
It’s also worth noting that the public transport is truly excellent (except for the ten minutes we spent on an intensely crowded bus – too crowded to remove our jackets – when the heat and closeness made me feel like throwing up), with an efficient, clean and organised train system. I also love walking around in Beijing, because there are so many unique skyscrapers wherever you look. One of them is called “the underpants building” because it’s roughly in the shape of a person’s legs if they were sitting in a chair with their knees as wide apart as possible (since only the “feet” touch the ground, no-one seems very confident it’ll stay up).
And now to our feature presentation: The Temple of Heaven.
We’re staying in a flat on the sixteenth floor (or at least, roughly the fifteenth, since there’s no 4th or 14th floor – the word “4” sounds like the word for “death” so is often left out). A million people live within a mile of where I’m sitting.
Which made it even more startling when we walked through the West Gate of the Temple of Heaven area and discovered a park-like area of 273 hectares. We spent a lot of time today strolling along stunning avenues (like the one above) lined with snow-covered conifers, birches, and ancient cyprus (some apparently 900 years old, and all of the old ones heritage listed).
The Chinese are really serious about their architecture. It boggles the mind to see such huge structures made with such intricacy. You probably have a fair idea of what a Chinese roof looks like – sweeping tiles with an elegant upward swing on the lowest part. You’d also be able to imagine such a roof dusted with snow as fresh and fine as castor sugar, highlighting each tile with its own layer of white icing. It’s probably not too hard to imagine dragons carved on the corners, or the bold red, gold, blue and green paintings filling the eaves (and often the inside ceiling). But it’s impossible to put it all together unless you walk around and see it for yourself.
We walked South (past the palace of imperial fasting – the emperor didn’t do ANYTHING, including any work, for three days before peforming the annual sacrifice), to the circular altar mound (three massive circular tiers of carved marble, with stairs up – marble stairs, especially after snow, have slightly less traction than the smoothest ice you’ve ever seen) and looked at the beautiful green stone of the nearby altar.
After that we looked at the Imperial Vault of Heaven (effectively, a fancy-pants storeroom; round in shape, and carved and painted absolutely everywhere), which is surrounded by a wall with the fun acoustic property that a whisper from one side can be clearly heard on the other (this of course means that everyone somehow ends up shouting at a wall, which is even more fun to observe). The wall is also covered in ancient graffiti – Chinese characters carved into the stone. That graffiti is also now of historical value.
After that we walked on to the most famous structure, which is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest. The Hall is set on three circular tiers of stairs (marble, again), and is a round building three storeys high (each with its own rim of roof) that is held together by the carvers’ skill (rather than nails, glue, or anything else).
Long view of the Hall of Good Harvest (note the pillar things on the stair rail on the left; they’re everywhere):
The pillar things on the stairs look similar to this one:
Close view of the Hall of Good Harvest:
We couldn’t go inside these beautiful buildings, but we joined everyone else in looking through the open doorways. Even some of the (many) sets of stairs were blocked off. On one of the sets of stairs the snow lay perfectly still and even – except on the left and right hand side, where cat pawprints were clearly visible ascending and descending. Perhaps one of heaven’s creatures had been inside, after all.
The whole area was full of people, but (except in the most culturally important places) it felt perfectly spacious because it’s so much like a giant park. Ordinary Beijing citizens visit just to hang out – we saw many of them singing, dancing, and playing in a saxophone band. There were far more Chinese tourists than Westerners.
Right now both I and my partner are reading “Faith of our Fathers” by Chan Kei Thong, which is all about the Temple of Heaven. The author has an interesting theory about the ancient religion of the Chinese people. It’s impossible to know anything for certain when the buildings were made in the 14 and 15oos, and the religion itself is far older (and already getting mixed up with dragon-emperor-god stuff when the Temple was build). But it’s certainly interesting.
This is some of the Sacrifice song (you’ll see exactly what the author is getting at, along with far greater scholars, particularly in the 13th to 15th century) used in the temple:
Of old in the beginning, there was the great chaos, without form and dark.
The five planets had not begun to revolve, nor the two lights to shine. In the midst of it there existed neither form nor sound. You, O spiritual Sovereign, came forth in Your sovereignty, and did separate the impure from the pure. You made heaven, You made earth; You made man. All things became alive with reproducing power.
You did produce, O Spirit, the seven elements [the sun and the moon and the five planets]. Their beautiful and brilliant lights lit up the circular sky and square earth.
You have promised, oh Lord, to hear us, for You are our Father. . . With reverence we spread out these gems and silks, and, as swallows rejoicing in the spring, praise Your abundant love.
I don’t know much about the historian’s theory, but I know enough to be intrigued. Unlike the core of many other ancient religions, this God is seen as an invisible creator – not an object.
We obviously spent a lot of time outside today – my nose has been running all day, and hates me now – but I don’t feel particularly cold. I noticed when I looked at some photos my husband took today that my down jacket (which is blue and completely encases me almost to my ankles) makes me look rather like a caterpillar.
My Chinese (and my ability to recognise specific things instead of just being overwhelmed) are coming along so well that Chris and I went grocery shopping by ourselves. We bought milk, orange juice, Chinese lollies, some kind of frozen yum cha-ish meal (for me for my breakfasts), and tissues. None of them were labelled in English – or even pinyin (the form of Chinese that uses Arabic letters and lovely phonetic spelling). Hail the mighty adventurers!
My most frightening moment was when I went to the loo at home and almost forget myself and put the toilet paper in the toilet. That’s NEVER a good idea in Asia – there’s always a bin near the toilet (or no toilet paper usage at all). The plumbing just canna take it, captain. But I remembered myself and did the right thing.
Crisis averted.
We haven’t had dinner yet, but my taste sensation of the day was a red bean smoothie (which also contained honey, vanilla ice cream, and coconut milk). I’m sure red beans are related to lentils (sort of nutty and naturally sweet). The staff (the people in this flat almost never cook, because eating out is so cheap and delicious) served it in SERIOUSLY tall glasses – containing about 750mL – and it was very thick. I still finished it, and gladly. It cost about $3. (Just remembered I’m lactose intolerant. Smeg.)
Plus I had some cool Chinese candy while we walked the temple grounds -they were a little like round prawn crackers sprinkled with icing sugar (with a hint of salt making them even better).
Brushing snow from the dragon’s nose:
PS a couple more details and several more photos are located at http://twittertales.wordpress.com
The Spy Who Shoved Me: The Scenic Tour
“The Spy Who Shoved Me” doesn’t start until tomorrow, but it’s (mostly) set in China, which is (coincidentally) where I am right now. My partner and I are visiting my brother-in-law who is living in Beijing because of its thriving music scene.
I’m blogging in detail at https://felicitybloomfield.wordpress.com and I try to make it entertaining. Beijing is bitterly cold, but it snowed last night. We visited the Temple of Heaven today, which is inside an enormous park-like area.
To put the scale a little into perspective – the building at the end of this avenue is not a building, but just one of many gates between different areas within the “park”.
Here’s some roof detail (from a mere storeroom) – and no, I don’t know what the wire is for:
Some ceiling detail (from the Vault of Heaven – another store room):
Beijing is very polluted it’s true, and the weather is almost always hideous – but it’s a beautiful city, and strangely peaceful.
Ballgowns, Beijing, and Boots
So my husband and I are in Beijing.
I weigh too much now to fit any of my jeans, so I bought thermal and tracksuit pants before I left – but wore a massive velvet ankle-length ballgown my friend made me (years ago) for travelling. It worked great, even if it does make me look like a weirdo (if the shoe fits. . .). I also wore my boots, which I’ve had for years and which have been visibly dying this year – which made them perfect for Beijing, because it means I have warm footwear for a week, and can then throw them away when we go to Indonesia. Unfortunately the plan backfired when EACH boot had a catastrophic fail en route. Oh well. They’re holding together again now, and I’m optimistic.
The two things that most frightened me were: travelling (especially yesterday, with a twenty-hour journey, and more than half of it spent in one flight ie trapped with strangers – scary), and the cold (the average temperature at this time of year is between 0 and minus ten – I just asked the American guy beside me what it was, and he said, “Between mind-numbing and death”).
The travel was relatively okay – travelling with my husband dampens my panic by heaps. On our second flight, the guy in front of me had his seat fully reclined before the plane was even loaded. I hated him, his stupid big head, and his stupid toilet-brush hair. The flight attendant made him lift it back up when she was handing out drinks. Later, I was trying to sleep hunched over on my food tray when he suddenly went back again, almost trapping me between the tray and his stupid chair. I didn’t do anything violent (always an important plus), but cried like a girl.
When we did get to sleep in a real bed in Beijing, I was so exhausted (and light-headed, since it had been about ten hours since dinner) that it felt as if the room was swaying.
All good now though – that was our biggest travel day for this whole trip.
Oh! And we saw fireworks going off from the plane.
At Beijing airport, we witnessed the wacky sense of humour of the locals when our plane let us out-out. That is to say, outside. At midnight. With our big coats, naturally, still zipped up in our checked-in luggage (on its way to the distant terminal). Happy New Year.
It was great! We had scarves, jumpers, gloves (two pairs for me) and beanies with us, which turned out to be enough for a short slab of time outside. So that was the worst of my fears dealt with.
Today we spent quite a bit of time wandering around the local area (this time with borrowed coats made of down, which are BRILLIANT), and it was honestly fun – cozy, even (because the down jackets are SO warm). I did feel a teensy bit like my eyeballs were frosting over, but what’s a loose eyeball on such a nice day?
In an hour or so we’re going to a gig (my brother in law is a musician living here, which is why we came to Beijing).
In 2004 I studied double Mandarin at the Australian National University.
The instant we entered Sydney airport and joined a bunch of Chinese people in line, my Chinese language came flooding back (and, in places, expanding). It feels entirely superhuman to go from a cautious “hello” to “Oh, he’s my husband, that’s my brother in law, and I really like Beijing thanks. Please may I have two orange juices and some bread” in 24 hours. Being superhuman is a nice feeling. I’ll probably have a vocab of several hundred by the time we leave (in less than ten days).
I’m writing this from my brother in law’s sharehouse/flat, so I should be able to blog quite regularly.
We also ate (of COURSE) Chinese food. Everything we ordered was deep-fried (including the beans, which were wonderfully buttery and crunchy) and I am in loooove.
Felicity Banks 