This post originally appeared on Frontier Psychiatrist on October 12th, 2012.
The Airport Express elevated train flies past the stagnant Tuesday
evening traffic and I’m welcomed to the city by the corporate
offices of Mercedes, Caterpillar, and Microsoft. Through the haze and
rain shine the bright yellow lights of an Ikea. Did I take the wrong
plane? Nope. I’m in Beijing, back in China for the first time since
I studied for a semester in Shanghai over three years ago.
A few things quickly come back, the most
important being the pace of life. Everyone is rushing from the
airport onto the shuttle, fighting for a spot at the automatic ticket
machines, and rushing through security. The concept of a line is more
of a suggestion than an imperative. Off the train and on the streets
it’s very similar. Despite a little green man signifying its ok for
a pedestrian to cross the street, I’m nearly run over when a car
making a right turn doesn’t yield to my presence. More cognizant of
my surroundings now, and keeping an ear out for the ubiquitous car
horns and bike bells, I manage the rest of my two weeks without
further traffic-related incidents.
The best way to get around Beijing is on a bike. While the subways
are cheap, fast and cover essentially everywhere you want to go,
biking allows a more tremendous freedom across the 6,000+ sq mi
municipality. As a daily biker in Chicago, where drivers and idiot
editorialists are always complaining about cyclists, it’s
refreshing to ride in a more bike-friendly city. There’s a bike
lane on nearly every street, including the highways, although that
term itself can be quite vague. While there are more people on bikes,
there are also more people on motorbikes, bikes carrying wide-load
cargo, pedestrians, parallel-parked cars, and vehicles riding in the
opposite direction. And while road bikes and fixies are growing in
popularity, the most common bike is a slow-moving cruiser. Rarely is
anyone seen wearing a helmet or equipped with lights at night, and
while it is almost a requirement to run red lights, no one zooms
through them in the way many Chicago cyclists do.
How have I already written so much about this city without writing
about the food? For anyone amenable to Chinese cuisine outside of
Panda Express, the culinary possibilities are endless. There are
ubiquitous street food vendors, fresh fruit stands, vegetable
markets, and an unrelenting supply of competing restaurants. The
easiest place to begin on the street is with baozi (包子),
steamed bread often filled with meat or veggies: Super cheap and a
great way to start your day. Likewise, jian bing (煎餅)
is a crepe-like fried egg pancake made right in front of you. At Y4
(~$0.64), it’s one of the best things to take advantage of before
the RMB catches up to the USD.
While street food is great for grab and go, restaurants are a
totally different ball game. While the menus often have pictures that
make ordering relatively easy, don’t expect an American level of
service. I would sometimes find myself rushed to order, as the
waitress would hover right over the table as I perused the menu.
Other times I was completely ignored and had to call over the
waitress. Don’t be offended or think your getting the shaft on
service because you’re an obvious outsider; everyone has to do this
to get drinks, the bill, etc. Then again, in the service industry in
China, the average restaurant waitress feels no need to deliver
quality service or try to upsell. As a waiter in Chicago, it was hard
for me to get used to not tipping. When we did have particularly
helpful service, I left a bill on the table, only to be chased down
after I left by the waitress thinking I had forgotten my change. I
told her it was for her but she still insisted I gave it back.
The last time I was in China, I wasn’t quite the culinary
adventurer as I am now. I did try snake, which was pretty delicious,
but I neglected the duck brains. This time around, I was ready to get
weird with out. Just east of the Forbidden City (which marks the
central point of Beijing) is Donghuamen. Dozens of stalls line the
street luring in more tourists than locals willing to try something
weirder. While the seahorses, centipedes, and silk worms didn’t
look too appetizing, I did indulge in some deep friend scorpions
(crispy) and regretfully took two bites of a starfish (utterly
disgusting). Luckily I found a restaurant a block away that offered
more enticing, if not too far out dishes like garlic spinach, grilled
eggplant and potatoes, and the Sichuan classic Mapo
Dofu (麻婆豆腐).
While beer culture isn’t as intense as it is in the States, a
simple meal is often well complimented with a Yanjing or Tsingtao. My
major splurge was dining at Da Dong for Peking Duck. Served with
slices of cucumber, cantaloupe, creamy garlic, pickled vegetables and
a pancake to wrap it all in, the 12-hour cooking process produces a
bird that is almost perfect on its own. For simpler meals, don’t
write off cashew chicken or sweet and sour pork as not “real”
Chinese food: they’re just two more dishes a Westerner can count on
when the salty taste of starfish just won’t leave your mouth.
If you’re really feeling homesick in Beijing, it’s not that
hard to get a good (gasp!) non-Chinese meal. True, it can be hit or
miss (I’ll pass on a Chinese Bloody Mary in the future), but I did
find fantastic crepes at the French-Vietnamese bistro Little Saigon,
a delicious bacon cheeseburger and fries at the Vineyard Café, and
the most pleasantly surprising of all, a footlong veggie burrito
that’s on par with any I’ve had in Chicago (where we take our
Mexican food very, very seriously). Led here by a few friends
in the know, the Wudaoying Hutong is a great place to discover what
expatriates can bring to a historical Chinese neighborhood. The
hutongs are one of the best attractions to Beijing. The historical
alleyway neighborhoods have been some 80% demolished to make way for
drab, bland, skyscraper apartments that seem to dot the skyline of
most Chinese cities. I’d never been impressed much by Chinese
architecture outside of the dystopian future looking Shanghai, but
the hutongs give Beijing an architectural individualism that
separates itself from the rest of China. While they tie Beijing to
its centuries old history, some architects are looking for ways to
modernize the hutong.
It’s this appreciation for its past as well as its fearless
embrace of technology and the future that has made China the power it
is today, not just economically, but in the arts as well, as
evidenced by the fact that Chinese author Mo Yan just
won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work is regarded as
containing a classic Chinese poetry and drawing on his upbringing in
rural Eastern China, but supplementing it with ideas of magical
realism and Even the badboy of China’s art scene, Ai
Weiwei, wouldn’t desecrate a historical urn with a Coca Cola
logo if he didn’t recognize the importance of the past.
Likewise, a trip through Beijing’s 798 Arts District shows that
their contemporary art scene can be just as creative, inquisitive and
controversial as anything New York produces. The dragon created from
oil drums was the standout for me, again combing the appreciation for
classic Chinese themes with a modern twist. Coincidentally, there was
an art and design festival happening, and many galleries were
presenting their work in the former industrial area, complete with
abandoned factories and railroad tracks.
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