First Impressions

At least right around here, if you removed all the Chinese characters from sight it could be a city in any number of places; there is nothing particularly Chinese about it until you look more closely and see some of the decorative motifs in restaurants or businesses. There are many many little shops, all crowded to the last inch with stuff. Funny how recognizable a box that holds a tube of toothpaste is, even if it’s covered with Chinese characters instead of the word “toothpaste.” On the other hand, lots of goods have labels in both Chinese and English -- some of the toothpaste says, among other inscrutable (to me) things, “Colgate.”

There are lots of little hole-in-the-wall places that sell fresh-cooked food, either as the entire enterprise or as one corner of a more varied enterprise. We bought some bottled water in a tiny shop -- not much bigger than a big closet for a lot of Americans -- that sold a mix of grocery items, and in one little corner of it there was a round griddle, and the woman made me a wrap on the griddle, broke an egg on it, got it all cooked, then filled it with ... I don’t know what, but it was very tasty to eat while walking along the street in the gathering dusk, my first meal in China. Jamie got something similar from another hole in the wall which was literally a guy crouched behind a glass-fronted opening between two stores, cooking and selling a variety of stuffed wraps. There are places that sell what passes for sweets -- pastries, cakes, stuffed things -- stuffed with what, I have no idea. But they’re tasty too.

We spent a couple of hours walking around, eating, and window shopping last night, then, having had all of maybe eleven hours of sleep in the previous 2½ days, I collapsed into bed at about 7:30 last night and slept, with almost no breaks, til 8:30 this morning.

We got up, went out again, and ate in a place that I can only compare with let’s say Panera -- cheap decent food ordered at a counter. Very tasty again. I had wonton soup (of a sort) and pot stickers.

We walked and talked and walked and talked -- and I was back in bed by 12:30 and slept the afternoon away. In other words, 18 of my first 26 hours in China were spent sleeping. I am babying myself about it because I have a sore throat, and I want to try to keep from getting sicker. So whether I’m still tired because of a virus, jet lag, or just travel exhaustion, suffice to say I don’t have any energy.

Though -- after a really nice dinner in a sit-down restaurant, I am feeling a little better at last.

We had Peking Duck for dinner, and dumplings, and a dish that was a pile of spinach with peanuts in a sweetish sauce. The menu had stuff like tripe and many other body parts of ducks and cows and pigs that have never been seen on any American menu I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Also, the names of things are not always revealing: what does “Three Fresh Wontons” mean? It doesn’t mean 3 wontons, it means 3 ingredients inside them, but which 3 ... I don’t know.

It was snowing when we got out of the restaurant.

*****

This is pretty random, but it’s a day’s worth of first impressions. It’s too early to make this judgment, except that based on what I’ve read about Beijing it will probably hold true: there’s no sky. One of the reasons I haven’t just picked up and moved to Cambridge in the years since Maddy went off to college is that there’s no night sky to speak of. In Cambridge there’s a dark gray bowl overhead with about 6 faint stars in it, at best, and occasionally you get a glimpse of the moon. But the sky can be gorgeously blue in the daytime. Here, there seems to be no blue sky at all, at least by my standards, just a gray-brown haze. And of course, no night sky either. As with Cambridge and the night, I doubt many people who live here notice much, or care. There are other things to pay attention to.

[Update a few days later: we have had some “sunny” days, when the sky was sort of blue, at least you could tell that behind the mix of thin clouds and air pollution there was some blue. Nothing like home. I said something like this to Jamie and he said that he reckoned he would have to rethink his ideas of blue sky when he went back home again.]

Sunday 2/7/10, almost 9 p.m.

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and haven’t been back to bed. We had breakfast at the same place as yesterday, called in English “Fastest Tastiest.” (Yes, there is a big sign outside with that name on it. I’ll try to post a picture.) We went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. (Whew. More on that later.) We walked and took the subway. The air was thick and hazy, it was a white world all around after last night’s snowfall. Later we had hot pot for dinner and did a little shopping, by which time I was ready for more sleep.

The nearest thing I can compare hot pot to is fondue. There is a big vessel/bowl of water in the center of the table, and in this case there was a metal “tower” in the center of that, kept warm by some method (charcoal?) that we couldn’t figure out. Jamie says this is not the modern method of doing hot pot that he has seen elsewhere, which makes sense since the restaurant was called “Old Beijing” and all the staff were dressed in Manchu (?) style. I’m just guessing, but the place was obviously trying to recreate someone's idea of the old days.

When we came in, the greeter shouted something toward the upstairs level, and Jamie suggested that he was saying, “Hey, some foreigners are here.” But he did that whenever anyone came in, so it wasn’t just for us.

Jamie ordered 5 or 6 things off a menu that I couldn’t read -- fish balls, thin slices of mutton, sliced potatoes, big leaves of some kind of cabbage, another vegetable that I couldn’t identify. We dropped bits of everything into the boiling water, waited for stuff to cook, ate all of it with a very spicy sauce that had a mix of flavors: peanuts, something fishy, some scallions maybe, other things I couldn’t identify. (P.S. I even liked the mutton. That was a big surprise.)

After that -- long overdue bedtime.