The other day a foreigner who I've been playing pick up basketball with, David, called me up and invited me to come on a motorcycle tour of Beijing. He was doing some promo video for the motorcycle tour company and they wanted some more foreigners to fill their motorcycles (don't worry, I wasn't driving). These tours are usually hundreds of yuan so it was a pretty sweet deal. I met David the next morning at a bus stop and we bussed for 10 minutes to a random high school where they were going to pick us up.
We heard them before we saw them. Their loud roaring engines were audible a couple blocks away, and the actual motorcycles themselves did not disappoint. They were 100% black and looked like they were transported from World War II. The sidecars (yes, we rode in sidecars) were also 100% black and had batman logos spraypainted on them. One of the drivers had a huge silver batman elblem on his belt, I'm still unsure of their affinity for batman. Anyway, we got in and started on the tour.
The tour was 4 hours long and we saw a lot of famous sights and tourists spots. The best part for me though, was just driving all over Beijing and seeing parts of the city that I would have no reason to visit. We stopped at the Beijing olymplic birds nest stadium, the forbidden city, some areas around the forbidden city that I can't remember the names of, and some hutongs. Driving through the hutongs on motorcycles with sidecars was tricky to say the least, and gave me respect for the drivers and security in my livelihood knowing how artful the drivers were with their rides. At one point, we had to get off and lift the sidecar on top of some construction stuff so the motorcycle was at a 25 degree angle so the drivers could make it through. We also didn't just drive around the forbidden city, we drove through it. When I say drove through I mean that literally, I think we weren't supposed to be on a vehicle, much less a batman and robin esque motorcycle roaring through a huge, vast courtyard filled with tourists. Some of the looks we got ranged from hilarious to frightening. I got a video of this too, which I will upload once I get the cord to connect my phone to my computer.
After the tour, I walked around part of East Beijing with David to meet his roommate. East Beijing is nothing like West Beijing in that it seemed more Western than the actual West. We passed the American and German embassies and saw tons of brand name shops and luxury hotels. It also seemed like there were also almost as many foreigners as Chinese. We met David's roommate at a Fatburger, which I was pretty surprised exited anywhere outside the U.S. It was not surprisingly, delicious. I took the subway home after and coached a camp.
I have a general feel for West Beijing and I know I haven't seen a lot of the city yet, but this really drove home that there's a lot of Beijing left to explore.
After work yesterday, which consisted of a two to three hour meeting with the two Chinese guys I am working with (you could say we are the basketball camp curriculum department), I was very hungry. The 30 minutes busride back seemed to drag on forever and so when I got off the bus I went to the first place that looked decent. It was a Shanghai restaurant that I recognized and I had noodles with beef. Plain, but delicious. I realized I was still hungry so I went across the street to what looked like a Chinese Chinese fast food restuarant (just to be clear, that is not a typo, it's a Chinese version of a Chinese fast food restauarant). I ordered my food (chicken and rice with vegetables), and sat down at an empty table.
As I was waiting for my food when I heard someone talking at the table in front of me, and since there was only 1 person sitting there, I assumed he was talking on his cell phone. After a while though, I noticed he kept repeating similar Chinese phrases and would make odd intonations that weren't normal for Chinese people. The kicker, though, was that he was not holding a cell phone. Near my house in Seattle, there was a group home for several mentally handicapped men and women. I would see them walking along 15th sometimes or at Victrola, and for the most part that was about it. But it was enough to see that there were some remarkable similarities between this man sitting in front of me and those men and women in Seattle - the shifty eyes that looked all over the place suspiciously but without any reason, the repetition of phrases that always had the same low-high-low intonation. I had the feeling that he was mentally handicapped when I saw him, and as I furtively watched him, it was became dead obvious after about 15 seconds that he was. Oddly, he was by himself. I kept expecting someone (family member, a care-taker) to show up but none ever did. He didn't appear homeless and he obviously had the money and state of mind to be able to order a meal for himself. There wasn't any apparent stigma around him either. People acted like they do in America around mentally handicapped, they just kind of ignored him. I kind of wish I would have followed him out and seen where he went and what kinds of reactions he got on the street. Instead, I went to McDonalds and got a McFlurry. Goddamn it it was delicious. It was the first western food that I've had in the almost 2 weeks I've been here. I don't plan on eating at McDonalds or KFC, but a McFlurry every once in a while... I'm only human.
If there's one thing that continues to surprise me about Beijing it's how large it is. I've taken some 3-4 hour walks where I feel like I've covered a large amount of distance, but when I get back to the hotel and google maps it, in the giant checkerboard of Beijing I would have walked only one square. The checkerboard analogy is mainly a reference to just the metropolitan area. To stick with this analogy, the entire city of Beijing is like the table that the checkerboard is on.
I held my first camp on Sunday, where I had only about 8 kids (the usual is between 15 to 20 campers). They ranged from not being able to hit the rim when shooting to being able to dribble between their legs on the run and only messing up half the time. In short, the skill levels were all over the place. We got through the 2 hours without too many bumps. We'll see how it goes next week, I'll probably try some new things and keep a few of the old ones. Also, the gym that the camp was held in is located in one of the really good sports/martial arts schools in Beijing. There was this huge mural sized plaque that was full of names of Olympic participants and champions who attended the school, as well as national champions. One of the names happened to be Jet Li, apparently this was the school that he got trained at before moving on to become a Chinese martial arts champion.
Yesterday Sun Qiang (or Jonathan, his English name - he's been helping me out by meeting me pretty much every day and taking me to eat and showing me around the city) brought me to the office where I met my coworkers as well as the big boss man. They were having their weekly meeting when we walked in and when Sun Qiang introduced me they all started clapping and cheering, it was a little awkward. After the meeting, Sun Qiang showed me to my desk and told me that we were going to play basketball later that night. I had to go back to the hotel to get clothes, then come back to the office. I surfed the web for a while as there was no work for me to do, and then we went to Ren Da (a shortened name for People's University). There were 4 or 5 other Lao Wai (foreigners) there, some Chinese guys (include big boss man), and some Chinese girls who must have been Sport University students because they were pretty good. We had some good 5 on 5 full court runs and I got some exercise which felt really nice. Unfortunately by the end I was sweating like crazy and dreading the bus ride home. Afterward, big boss man invited me and some others to go eat and drink, and I got my first taste of what going out drinking with Chinese people means.
My t-shirt was sweaty and I had taken it off to play, and since I didn't want to put it back on, I just zipped up my shell jacket bare chested and went to dinner in that. Big boss man and his friend ordered enough food for at least 12 people, and lots and lots of beer. In China, they drink out of small glasses (maybe 4 oz). I think this is because they just enjoy cheersing a lot and enjoy downing their drinks and refilling them. Also, there is no break. You must keep drinking, and if a Chinese person sees you have no beer, they order you more. This goes on through the whole meal, however long that is. We went through a lot of beer and great food and big boss man told us stories about Beijing, the origins of the camp, and Chinese culture. By the end I was stuffed and full of beer. I took a taxi home and went to bed.
I'm not sure what my plan is for the rest of the week. I have to go into the office tomorrow, and I should be moving into my apartment in the next few days (I think Sun Qiang said that they have the place finally and are just changing some furniture). I haven't hit the tourist spots yet (i.e. Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven etc...) but I will in the near future I think. I should probably get back to studying Chinese, I have a loooong way to go. Bye bye.
I arrived in Beijing yesterday at around 2:30PM. My boss, Sun Qiang, met me at the airport and escorted me to the hotel where I will be staying at until the company finds me an apartment. The journey to the apartment was a good welcome back to China.
We took a train from the airport into the city proper, then transferred to the subway. I had with me 2 large suitcases, my backpack, laptop bag, and a box that I purchased at the United check-in at the Seattle Airport that served as a third suitcase so that I didn't have to pay the egregious $400 overweight fee (one of my suitcases was 13 pounds over, the other was 3 pounds over. There's a $200 fee for each bag over the 50lb weight limit if you fly international). So, with Sun Qiang's help with my bags we climbed up and down a bunch of stairs and got on the subway, then got off and walked up and down a bunch more stairs and transferred to another subway line, then we climbed up and down a bunch more stairs and surfaced somewhere in Beijing proper to get a cab. Getting a cab in Beijing during rush hour is chaos, and it took over an hour to finally get one.
We made it to the hotel at around 6:00PM. I dropped my stuff off in my room and went outside to get some dinner and walk around. Beijing is much more modern than Chengdu was when I was there 5 or 6 years ago, but the same feeling of walking the Chinese streets washed over me and I caught some serious flashbacks to my Chengdu days.
I slept through the whole night without waking up. I'm a little tired today but it's not bad considering Beijing is 15 hours ahead of Seattle. I walked around some more today and it's hard to imagine that I'll ever get to know the lay of the land here, the city is just neverending.
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