It's been Wednesday for almost 27 hours so far, with another 10 hours still to go. Our flight from Beijing to San Fransisco had to be some kind of record, coming in right at 10 hours. (Testament to our new perspective that we consider it "only" 10 hours.) We had tail winds of 170 miles per hour, which put us on the ground here 90 minutes early. Ground speed topped out at 780 mph. The air was so clear and dark (nearly-new moon) that it was like flying through the stars.
That's been the best part of our trip so far. SFO was a cluster as usual, from rude Customs officials (eye-rolling when the Customs Declaration form wasn't handy), to clueless ticket counter reps (who couldn't seem to find Rick's ticket), to obnoxious TSA employees. (Can anyone say line management? No one here, apparently.)
The Baggie Approach to Airline Security
Permit me a rant on the ridiculous new requirements for carry-on luggage. The regulation states that toiletries and liquid make-up can be transported as long as they bottles are 3 fluid ounces or less, are packed in a quart-sized, transparent zip-top plastic bag, and that each passenger is only permitted one such baggie.
On the one hand, I'd like to say with confidence that the feds know more than we do about the UK bomb plot. They well may, but this smacks of overkill. (Much like the x-raying of shoes.) In the case of the UK bomb plot, isn't that sort of plan better foiled by data modeling? In the case of the Shoe Bomber. . . well, the best way to stop a crazy man is by the vigilance and action of a fellow passenger.
To bring this back to China: it is, for all it's modern conveniences and capitalist-lite economy, a police state. The government seems to know where you are and when you got there. They know where you live. They are paying much more attention to who, rather than what. There is no removing of shoes, or restrictions of liquids or gels, or gel-like liquids or liquid-like gels. One wonders if the security measures we implement here in the US would be feasible in a country with a population of 1.3 billion.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Hiatus
'Haitus': ORIGIN: mid-16th century (originally denoting physical gap or opening) from Latin hirare, ‘to gape’
An update on the last two weeks and three days.
We spent Thanksgiving with one of my American classmates and her antipodean boyfriend, who are here in Beijing doing internships. At the hotel restaurant, we had roast turkey (quite fine), mashed potatos and gravy, and yams. The buffet also included Indian (which we all avoided), prime rib, crab legs, sushi, and a stunning array of deserts. The flyer advertised pumpkin pie, which turned out to be half-dollar-sized mini-crusts, a tiny dollop of pumpkin filling and topped with a tiny marzipan pumpkins, with a clove for the stem. Tasty, but disappointing when you were expecting a big slice of creamy sweet pumpkin pie topped with fluffy whipped cream. We dozed off the tryptophan in our apartment, watching a buck-fifty DVD, which occassionally switched to black-and-white and announced that it was “property of Warner Home Video” and “If you have bought or rented this DVD, please call 1-800-NOPIRACY”.
Less than a week later, we had our first US visitor. Her journey, while uneventful for her, did not go completely without a hitch for us: I went to the airport and waited for about 2 hours after her flight landed, panicking when she did not emerge from the terminal. I finally called R., who called the airline. . . I was there a day early.
She arrived, the next day, after a 14 hour journey, looking tired but in good spirits. After a shower, we took her to our favorite local Chinese place, Xiao Wang Fu (pronounced ‘sheeaow wahng foo’). Located down an alley about a block from our apartment, the building the restaurant is four stories high and fully a block wide. Most of the width of the building on the first two stories are reserved for the kitchens, with small rooms at one end. The top to floors are the dining rooms. What strikes you is how many people, employees, there are: two or three at the door when you walk in, two or three in the hallways of the second floor, five or six in the dining rooms on the upper floors. You always have to make room on the stairs for servers carrying steaming plates of food.
There are a lot of westerners in this restaurant, still a minority of diners, but more than you typically see in one place (except outside the touristy Chaoyang Theatre where they have the acrobat shows). Their menu is in Chinese and English, and if you need more communication than pointing and sign-language can provide, they’ll find you a waiter or speaks a little English. And the food is excellent. We had chicken with green bell pepper in chili sauce, shredded pork with bamboo shoots, brown mushrooms and red chilis, and sliced beef with onions (my favorite). We also had one of their signature dishes: Dry-fried green beans. These beans are tender and savory; the pork and seasonings add a burst of sausage-y flavor.Here’s how the Insider’s Guide describes them: “String beans are first flash-deep fried, then fished out of the boiling oil and thrown directly into the wok with ground pork, ginger, chili and Sichuan peppercorn to be fried again.”
After dinner, our friend opened her luggage to reveal care packages from home: the Sunday New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer (with Ohio State’s win over Michigan on the front page.) This Old House (for R.), Real Simple (for me), GQ, Car & Driver and Mac World. She also brought a pound of Velveeta and packets of taco seasoning to make our favorite dip. (We managed to find some adequate tortilla chips at the import shop.) And index cards, which are impossible to find here, and hugely useful for making flash cards to drill on Chinese characters.
Art and Shopping
We spent a cold week hitting the must-sees of Beijing: Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, The Great Wall. We also checked out some of the lesser known sites, like the Factory 798 art district. (“Lesser known” is relative: it's apparently quite well known in international art circles.) Housed in an old Soviet-era electronics factory and covering 5 acres, Factory798 contains dozens of modern art gallery spaces for painting, photography and sculpture. It’s a perfect location for postmodern art: cold-war communist architecture co-opted for creativity.
We also experienced the full spectrum of shopping in Beijing. On day two we went to the Silk Street Market. Six floors of stall after crowded stall (each about 10-12 square feet) of clothes, electronics, toys, accessories and souveneirs. A haggler’s dream, but if you hate being hassled, this place will have you running for the exits, as stall keepers jockey for your attention: “Hello, lady, come look. Good price for you. Cashmere! Pashmina! Silk! Good brands!” Indeed, names like Columbia, North Face, Prada and Gucci jump out at you from the coats, sweaters and handbags hanging on the outside of the stalls. The stalls are so close together that the shop keepers must literally compete for your ears and eyes. Never mind that they’ve watched you walk quickly past every other stall; vendors accost you, draping your shoulders with their fabrics or clothes as you pass, or grabbing your sleeve and tugging you towards them.
We went to the opposite extreme by strolling through the Shops at China World, which could be any high-end mall in any major US city: Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and lots of expensive boutiques. I could feel my friend breathing a sigh of relief. I admit to a sigh or two of my own.
Finally, anxious to buy Christmas presents and souveneirs, we went to the Wangfujing, a wide boulevard closed to vehicle traffic, lined on both sides with speciality shops, restaurants and chinese department stores. In the alleys branching off the main street, you find open-air vendors, a la Silk Street, and more restaurants. The shops range from the pushy and obnoxious (giant speakers outside blare Chinese opera or, just as often, John Denver) to the sedate and helpful. The Wangfujing is also home to two large bookstores, one on each end of the street. At the far end is the Foreign Languages Bookstore, with 4 stories of, you guessed it, books in foreign (to the chinese) languages. While it has many more English titles, it also has much less ambiance than the massive Wangfujing Bookstore at the opposite end. It has six floors of every possible imaginable subject, from Chinese and foreign literature to educational books for all ages, to technical manuals on C++ and neurosurgery. Imagine a giant university bookstore combined with an educational book warehouse, merged with a Borders and you begin to get the idea. While 90% of the books are in Chinese, the floors and sections are also labelled English, so it is fun just to browse, guess what the titles are, and watch the hordes of customers. It is not a quiet place, like bookstores at home tend to be; like all non-western shops here in Beijing, the Wangfujing Bookstore is loud, crowded and vibrant. Maybe it was just that we love books more than clothes or handbags or fabric, but we went to this bookstore twice while my friend was here.
An update on the last two weeks and three days.
We spent Thanksgiving with one of my American classmates and her antipodean boyfriend, who are here in Beijing doing internships. At the hotel restaurant, we had roast turkey (quite fine), mashed potatos and gravy, and yams. The buffet also included Indian (which we all avoided), prime rib, crab legs, sushi, and a stunning array of deserts. The flyer advertised pumpkin pie, which turned out to be half-dollar-sized mini-crusts, a tiny dollop of pumpkin filling and topped with a tiny marzipan pumpkins, with a clove for the stem. Tasty, but disappointing when you were expecting a big slice of creamy sweet pumpkin pie topped with fluffy whipped cream. We dozed off the tryptophan in our apartment, watching a buck-fifty DVD, which occassionally switched to black-and-white and announced that it was “property of Warner Home Video” and “If you have bought or rented this DVD, please call 1-800-NOPIRACY”.
Less than a week later, we had our first US visitor. Her journey, while uneventful for her, did not go completely without a hitch for us: I went to the airport and waited for about 2 hours after her flight landed, panicking when she did not emerge from the terminal. I finally called R., who called the airline. . . I was there a day early.She arrived, the next day, after a 14 hour journey, looking tired but in good spirits. After a shower, we took her to our favorite local Chinese place, Xiao Wang Fu (pronounced ‘sheeaow wahng foo’). Located down an alley about a block from our apartment, the building the restaurant is four stories high and fully a block wide. Most of the width of the building on the first two stories are reserved for the kitchens, with small rooms at one end. The top to floors are the dining rooms. What strikes you is how many people, employees, there are: two or three at the door when you walk in, two or three in the hallways of the second floor, five or six in the dining rooms on the upper floors. You always have to make room on the stairs for servers carrying steaming plates of food.
There are a lot of westerners in this restaurant, still a minority of diners, but more than you typically see in one place (except outside the touristy Chaoyang Theatre where they have the acrobat shows). Their menu is in Chinese and English, and if you need more communication than pointing and sign-language can provide, they’ll find you a waiter or speaks a little English. And the food is excellent. We had chicken with green bell pepper in chili sauce, shredded pork with bamboo shoots, brown mushrooms and red chilis, and sliced beef with onions (my favorite). We also had one of their signature dishes: Dry-fried green beans. These beans are tender and savory; the pork and seasonings add a burst of sausage-y flavor.Here’s how the Insider’s Guide describes them: “String beans are first flash-deep fried, then fished out of the boiling oil and thrown directly into the wok with ground pork, ginger, chili and Sichuan peppercorn to be fried again.”
After dinner, our friend opened her luggage to reveal care packages from home: the Sunday New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer (with Ohio State’s win over Michigan on the front page.) This Old House (for R.), Real Simple (for me), GQ, Car & Driver and Mac World. She also brought a pound of Velveeta and packets of taco seasoning to make our favorite dip. (We managed to find some adequate tortilla chips at the import shop.) And index cards, which are impossible to find here, and hugely useful for making flash cards to drill on Chinese characters.
Art and Shopping
We spent a cold week hitting the must-sees of Beijing: Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, The Great Wall. We also checked out some of the lesser known sites, like the Factory 798 art district. (“Lesser known” is relative: it's apparently quite well known in international art circles.) Housed in an old Soviet-era electronics factory and covering 5 acres, Factory798 contains dozens of modern art gallery spaces for painting, photography and sculpture. It’s a perfect location for postmodern art: cold-war communist architecture co-opted for creativity.We also experienced the full spectrum of shopping in Beijing. On day two we went to the Silk Street Market. Six floors of stall after crowded stall (each about 10-12 square feet) of clothes, electronics, toys, accessories and souveneirs. A haggler’s dream, but if you hate being hassled, this place will have you running for the exits, as stall keepers jockey for your attention: “Hello, lady, come look. Good price for you. Cashmere! Pashmina! Silk! Good brands!” Indeed, names like Columbia, North Face, Prada and Gucci jump out at you from the coats, sweaters and handbags hanging on the outside of the stalls. The stalls are so close together that the shop keepers must literally compete for your ears and eyes. Never mind that they’ve watched you walk quickly past every other stall; vendors accost you, draping your shoulders with their fabrics or clothes as you pass, or grabbing your sleeve and tugging you towards them.
We went to the opposite extreme by strolling through the Shops at China World, which could be any high-end mall in any major US city: Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and lots of expensive boutiques. I could feel my friend breathing a sigh of relief. I admit to a sigh or two of my own.
Finally, anxious to buy Christmas presents and souveneirs, we went to the Wangfujing, a wide boulevard closed to vehicle traffic, lined on both sides with speciality shops, restaurants and chinese department stores. In the alleys branching off the main street, you find open-air vendors, a la Silk Street, and more restaurants. The shops range from the pushy and obnoxious (giant speakers outside blare Chinese opera or, just as often, John Denver) to the sedate and helpful. The Wangfujing is also home to two large bookstores, one on each end of the street. At the far end is the Foreign Languages Bookstore, with 4 stories of, you guessed it, books in foreign (to the chinese) languages. While it has many more English titles, it also has much less ambiance than the massive Wangfujing Bookstore at the opposite end. It has six floors of every possible imaginable subject, from Chinese and foreign literature to educational books for all ages, to technical manuals on C++ and neurosurgery. Imagine a giant university bookstore combined with an educational book warehouse, merged with a Borders and you begin to get the idea. While 90% of the books are in Chinese, the floors and sections are also labelled English, so it is fun just to browse, guess what the titles are, and watch the hordes of customers. It is not a quiet place, like bookstores at home tend to be; like all non-western shops here in Beijing, the Wangfujing Bookstore is loud, crowded and vibrant. Maybe it was just that we love books more than clothes or handbags or fabric, but we went to this bookstore twice while my friend was here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
