9/4

9/4 1:25am Beijing Time aka China Standard Time

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_3?authkey=Gv1sRgCIHb0YmxwIC9JA

Landed. Pretty wild to be back in China. Weather seems good. We got two meals on the flight, which I wasn't expecting. As we flew in, I also noticed what seemed to be a two exit roundabout. Which seems like the most wastful thing. I'm gonna go get my luggage and meet up with my parents.

A note about the airport: at 1am local time, the international wing is eerily quiet. We are the only passengers milling around in the empty building. The lights are all cut low (or maybe they're like this all the time). For a nation as frugal as China, it's easy to be green. I hear a couple of crickets coming from some of the potted plants. Not sure exactly what that says. When I walk on the jetway from the 777 to the terminal, I see below a squad of airport employees, each smartly wearing a reflective uniform and actually mustered in rows, standing at attention. A foreigner might liken the sight to that perceived stereotype of Japanese orderliness. I'm sure it's not to the same level, but already I can tell I'm in a different country and a different world.

Right before customs are signs advising us to walk slowly, through these infrared scanners. I can see that the machines are set to 35 degC, where 37.4 is body temperature. I imagine 35 is pretty hot for a scanner measuring the skin or just below. Obviously an anti-SARS/flu measure, but there's a very 28 Days Later feel about it. I pass through customs with the slip handed out during the flight. I wrote down in my 4th grade penmanship that I was visiting my Aunt in Tangshan. It doesn't really let you get specific, so I don't think I could have written it any better. After that, I go out the No Customs Declarations line (not that anyone was doing inspections) and find my dad and some other Beijing acquaintance at the terminal exit. They've been there a while since the delay had only been posted at the last minute. We take a taxi and head to our hotel. The roads are pretty deserted at this hour, but I still spy a riced out red and black Saab 9-5 with no plate and a Tahoe, of all things.

Apparently my parents had booked 3 rooms at this place. It must be kinda cheap. One for me, one for them, one for our friends who'd be helping ferry us around. I take a couple pictures of my room just for flavor. I didn't realize this beforehand, but my iPhone is tuned for 60Hz light, and China is on 50Hz. So that buzzing may show up in indoor shots.

The computer is charging up nicely, so at least I know my adapter works. I had a bit of trouble getting my travel adapter to work, though. Who knows what the situation will be as we ride the train to Tibet. Hopefully I'll manage.

Going to check out the hotel room's computer a bit. It's on a network.
Well, without reporting anything else, it seems that Gmail works from here. Handy.

9/4 8:47am CST
Couldn't sleep. It's like being inside of a conch shell. The hot water heater component of the water dispenser in my room roared up a few times. I had no idea what it was at first, but it kept waking me up. The voices outside the paper-thin walls started up early in the morning, and I got sick of trying to tell if any of them belonged to my parents. Jeez, some rooms away there's a pop song playing. There should be morning light, but urban packing the way it is in Beijing, it still looks like midnight out my window.

We'll be doing some quick visits around Beijing today, and leaving some luggage with friends. Later in the afternoon, we're boarding a train bound for Tibet. The weather's about to get dry and cold, over a 2-day train journey. The first memory I have of riding on a train is going down to my Dad's hometown. He was teasing to keep quiet, telling me about an upcoming geographical feature called "Rooster Mountain." So I piped down and kept looking for it out the window. It never came up, of course, so when I finally broke down and asked, he looked outside and picked 3 mounds in a line on the ground passing by, and said, "there, that's it!" I might have have been 4 at the time, but I knew it wasn't even a mountain and got angry and sad. The point here is that this time around, I'll keep my eye out and look at everything. Not sure when I'll be back online. On the outside, probably a few days.

My parents are up. To give you an idea of the quality establishment we're at, I go over and the handyman is trying to figure out why power is not working for the room. It seems to be going in and out. Can't shower in complete dark, so a hotel employee brought up a single candle to light the room up.

9/4 9:30am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_4?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-zqoTsoprmyQE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9VPLn0wC6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEOuzKrCVI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOo6t-s_H38


We go to our old family friends' new apartment in Beijing. Hugely assisting us is my mom's cousin, who had a Buick Regal of his own. Beijing is built around its concentric Ring Roads, sort of like Detroit. When we left Beijing in 1989, the outskirts of the city were just passing 3rd Ring Road (which is about where our apartment home was), which is about a 5km radius from the center of the city at the Forbidden Palace. Now in 2010, the city is developing between 6th and 7th Ring Road. So it's certainly gotten much bigger. Anyways, the problem with travel is that outside of the ring roads, nothing is regularly laid out. So if you're looking to avoid public transit, the only way to get around is to spend quality time on the ring roads, and the only way to do that is to have a friend with a car.

So we pack all of our luggage into Uncle Biao's car and head out. While I'm sure a lot of new buildings have gone up, there are still two traits to the Beijing landscape that haven't changed much. The first is the "small flats" that still crop up here and there. These are the original buildings that made up the city. They're one-floor buildings with walls surrounding them, built of stone, look pretty handmade and are very worn down. A lot of these walls are finished with upright glass shards as a security measure. So these small flats are the oldest parts of the city, and some of them are historically meaningful and may stay around for some time. I should find a picture of one, but it's pretty much like where Jackie Chan lives in the new karate kid. The other are the Communist-style block apartments. They don't look much different from a project apartment, but are still very characteristic of a Chinese city. Every floor has the windows and balconies and AC units in the same position. The regularity and lack of flair are in a way, charming.

Driving around the city, you see a mix of the above and some taller business buildings. The tallest building is only 330 meters, as Beijing is no longer interested in getting into any sort of famous building race after the Olypmics. I have some video of us driving around, partially to illustrate the unruliness of traffic, and partially to illustrate the look and feel of the city. I never got any of the crazy 3-way melees we had with other cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians on film, but they wouldn't be for the faint of heart anyways.

So eventually we get directions from our friends on how to reach their new place. They'd only been there a month so they weren't that familiar with their surroundings yet. This was a nice big apartment, but still utterly typically Chinese in its styling and upkeep. I think my photos will tell the whole story there. These friends I had known since my childhood in Beijing, and they are our oldest and closest friends in China. We didn't get to visit with them for long before we had to get on the move. Of course getting going starts off with eating, so we just go over to a local restaurant. Not a good one or anything, but I don't think anyone is concerned about the quality of food. Inside the place, blown up pictures of the specialities dont the walls. Every other dish is covered in diced red peppers, as the restaurant's specialty is apparently Chongqing food. But my mom and one of our family friends are both avoiding spicy foods for health reasons, so we stick to more traditional foods. We order among other dishes sliced donkey meat and a steamed fish. I thought the donkey meat was interesting and distinct, but probably no worth trying than deer meat. But I had to have it. The steamed fish was very good. Some average restaurant in China with no effort had handily destroyed any steamed fish dish served in any American shop. It was just a combination of freshness, flavoring (which was very subtle), and tenderness. As a side note, the Mao family style red-roasted meat was superb, but I wasn't really surprised by this.

We say goodbye after eating and head out to visit the Olympic site. I don't have too much to say on this. The buildings looked about as they did on TV, and it was as I expected a big-time tourist trap. It shouldn't surprise anyone that even two years after the Olympics, people are stil pouring in from all parts of China to visit the place. The shorthand for referring to the Bird's Nest and Water Cube in Chinese is Bird Nest - Cube, and all the signs and parking referred to them in that unit. I thought the buildings themselves still looked good, but it wasn't worth the 50 yuan to go look at empty stadiums inside. One thing I'll note is that things are getting run down and dirty looking, which is a little quick but again what you'd expect in China.

After a quick runthrough of the Olympic site, we get back into Biao's car and head to our final Beijing destination -- a dinner at the famed Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant. This is pretty much in the heart of the city, and thus is packed away in some serious traffic, even on a Saturday afternoon. Biao comments a bit on the 10-day traffic jam that had only just happened in Beijing, talking about a street food vendor that had made over 6000 yuan thanks to it. We don't face anything nearly that bad, but it still took 2 hours of stop-and-go traffic and circuitous navigation of the ring roads. I spy just a couple elite cars on the road. Beijing is not really the city for that. Anyways, we finally get to Quanjude and sit down at the table my cousin and her boyfriend have already reserved for us. I wouldn't say there's anything to-die-for at this place, but because our home has been in Beijing, and we'd already eaten there once in 1995, it's become a family tradition to come back here when we can. The experience has certainly changed over the years. When I last ate there, it was a sedate affair. You went in there, ordered, the chef came by with the duck and sliced it up for you. This time, there are guards helping you park the car, several hostesses in matching red dresses and white gloves, waiters in gold and black frog shirts, and even a steward in the bathroom handing you paper towels with tongs. I don't know if it was a gradual change to reflect the changing times, or a conscious decision to upgrade the experience, but I can tell everything has been revamped with Westernized marketing. There's a moment late in our meal, after we've already eaten half of it, when our waiter comes by and says, "let me explain briefly how the duck is prepared at Quanjude. The ducks are hand raised to 70-80 days, cooked for 60 minutes, until the color is golden brown and the skin is crisp." That's the sort of pump-up line that you wouldn't have heard in China in the past, at least not at the table.

Anyways, the food is great. We just order a 6-person set meal for the 6 of us. Among the appetizers are: duck liver (almost pate quality), fried duck hearts, and sliced duck gizzards. I liked all of those organ meats. The chef wheels his cart out and starts slicing up the duck. He expertly lays out slices of meat and also separates out the special bits of skin. These are places where most of the fat is rendered out and only a scaffold of tissue remains under the crispy skin. When you bite into it, it melts like a foam would. That's the specialty around which the whole experience is based, and that is certainly something that's hard to get right elsewhere. So the key dish is hoisin sauce, green onions, a dough wrap, and the slices of duck, put together like a burrito. In addition to that, some of the other main course dishes were duck soup (a side dish made in preparing the roast duck) a mushroom soup, a sea cucumber salad, and fried duck liver. The mushroom soup really stood out. There was no ginger, which I like, and an incredible extraction of mushroom flavor. The pictures should do this meal more justice.

After the whole meal was wrapped up, we give the leftovers to my cousin to keep and hop into the subway (another reason we ate at Quanjude -- it is very close to a subway station). We leave some gifts with Biao and are thus able to ditch a bag this way. Getting to the Beijing West train station was a bit arduous with all the stairs and luggage, but we eventually make it into the station and wait. After about 30 minutes, the harpy station announcer screeches out the call for the Lhasa train. They switch up at the last moment where they want people to file through, so there is a massive human wave rushing from one side of the hall to the other. My only complaint is that the station is not organized in any way to smooth out human traffic. There are some ridiculous bottlenecks that could be fixed, but probably costs too much. The station was also where I catch my first sighting of indoor spitting. It would be too much to hope for that that could have been civilized out of China so soon.

On the train, I really want to drop dead asleep, but there's some paperwork run by the conductor, as well as some important recorded announcements. The big thing about Lhasa is that it's very high elevation. Some people do not adjust well, even when the altitude increase is smoothed out by a train ride. So the train cars are equipped with oxygen outlets that people can use in an emergency. In addition, they'll start pumping in oxygen as part of the air conditioning. When that happens, people are not allowed to smoke on the train anymore. We'll see if that happens.

Two interesting alliterations I saw: The Killers: The Kai Le Si Band. I suppose actually translating The Killers would be a bit extreme. Citroen: Xue Tie Long, Snow Iron Dragon
The best Engrish: someone was wearing a shirt that read Qiaodan Basketball, in the Battlestar Galactica font. Qiaodan is the transliteration for Jordan.