From Banquet to Tiananmen Square

Today's our first day of no class, and we're done with our big group outing for the day, so time for an update. This'll probably be a long one.

Wednesday night we had a banquet dinner in another district, apparently known for its bars and clubs. We ate at a restaurant with outdoor seating that overlooked a lake. The food was pretty good, though some of it I definitely couldn't make a meal out of. The first two dishes that came both had this same pungent smell and taste, but one's texture was mush and the other's was rubber. It was looking like we'd all leave pretty hungry, but after that the food was fine. My favorite was actually a sort of fish soup, again with the full fish laying across the bowl, scales, fins, head, and eyes. It was delicious.

After dinner, we went for a boat ride on the lake once half the group was done haggling street vendors for laser pointers. Our group of about twenty split into two boats, each with its own driver steering with a massive wooden oar in the back, and musician playing traditional Chinese instruments in the front. Our drivers, or captains perhaps, kept our boats side by side for the ride, so the musicians played duets as we moved across the lake. Eventually, we came to this bridge which was wide enough for about a boat and a half. Our two boats were hardly the only two on the water - we were sharing the lake with hoards of those little boats that are powered by pedaling - so as we approached the bridge, it turned into bumper boat chaos. After ramming into several smaller boats, our driver, likened to Mario Andretti by some on the trip, threw his whole body into moving that oar in the back and proceeded to plow through the paddle boats and finally pushed us to the other side of the bridge. After some more music and cruising, it was time to go back under the bridge again, so we did so in much the same way.

Once we were back on shore, most of us headed to this club down the street called "Sex in Da City". We couldn't pass it up, for obvious reasons. It wasn't very exciting, more surreal than anything. Most of the people there were Chinese, and the DJ was playing rap music from the States. After some not-quite-recent songs, one of the girls in the group requested the classic "Fireman" by Lil' Wayne, which was hilarious. I think everyone in the place was pretty confused as to why we were all so excited. The only other song I can remember specifically was Khia's masterpiece "My Neck, My Back". Joe Malunda, if you're reading this, you better be peeing your pants.

After having a drink, three of us decided to head out since it'd been a long day. We hopped in a cab on the main street nearby and showed the driver our hotel's business card. After watching him stare at it for a few minutes, we figured out that he had no idea where the hotel was, so we thanked him, hopped out, and tried another cab. Apparently this is pretty common in Beijing since it's so spread out. The second cabbie knew where we wanted to go, so after about twenty minutes, we were back at the hotel, and I crashed for the night.

Thursday was pretty uneventful. We had two guest speakers in class - one was the first female to receive a PhD in Communications in China. The second was Dan Guttman, a lawyer and law professor who worked closely with Clinton during his presidency and is now teaching at Tsinghua. He had some interesting things to say, but he managed to mention that he was a Fulbright Scholar at least ten times in about thirty minutes, after bragging about his Peabody Award, so that was a pretty big turn off.

Once class was done for the day, some of us decided that we needed a break from Chinese food, so where did we go? Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is classy as hell in China. There was a thirty minute wait for a table! The place has this fancy foyer with a spiral staircase that leads up to the second floor dining area where the eight of us sat down and ordered way too much pizza. The menu listed nine-inch personal pizzas along with twelve-inch pizzas, but our waitress told us that they didn't have the nine-inchers. Whether she was lying or not, I'm not sure, but regardless, we ended up with an enormous amount of pizza after each of us ordered. We couldn't have been happier. That is, until we noticed that the people hovering around the fruit and veggie buffet were making huge sculptures out of the food that they were piling into their bowls. It was insane. We asked our waitress what was going on, and she explained that each person only received one bowl, so they had to fit as much as they could into it. The results were highly entertaining. One woman was going at it the entire time we were at the restaurant. Eventually I think one of the waitresses gave her a time limit because things were getting out of control. Below is the fruit bowl of the guy at the table behind us, some shots of our table, and one of Stephanie in the foyer.




We all went to sleep pretty early on Thursday so we'd be ready for our early morning today. At 8 AM, we piled onto a bus and headed to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. We all got Forbidden City audio tours which didn't work so well, so I didn't learn much about the place, but it's size was certainly impressive. When the audio tour did work, the commentary was all about concubines. Go figure.










Once we made it through, we walked over to Tiananmen Square. Between the two locations were tons of vendors, all of which were selling random knickknacks that included Mao pocket watches, along with wristwatches that featured his torso with one arm waving back and forth as the second hand ticked around. The Square was basically just a big open space with lots of people walking around and a big obelisk in the middle. No displays or text, of course, about what happened there in '89. The incident is essentially censored out of the Chinese collective memory, or at least that's what the government has tried to do. Near the square is also Mao's tomb, which I didn't have time to go into because half the group was reconvening for lunch. We ended up walking about two or three miles to find a place to eat, and we finally settled on this place with a window display advertising their "charming" English-speaking hosts. Our waitress was indeed charming, but it wouldn't have mattered either way - I was too hungry to care. I'd have to say the highlights of lunch were this delicious sweet potato dish (best thing I've eaten on the trip thus far) and the fact that the bill was 198 yuan - a little over $2 per person. And the fact that Penn is covering that $2.








I guess the last exciting part of the day (so far) is that I rode the new subway for the first time to get back to the hotel. It was way better than Septa, so I hope to be using it more pretty soon. Observation for the day: there's new construction across the entire city, but it's not just new buildings going up - a lot of the construction (at least in the area we were in today) seems to be various walls that were put up to hide parts of town that look a bit run down or generally unattractive. So while the Olympics are bringing all sorts of changes to Beijing, they're not necessarily lasting changes, and don't necessarily run any deeper than the surface.

Okay I lied...I wrote that before we went out to dinner tonight. The last exciting part of the day is as follows: a group of us took the subway out to a German restaurant (supposedly a beer garden, but I didn't see any outdoor areas) which featured live music by The Perfect Mates, aka the best band in the world. Three possibly Malaysian girls were up on stage in matching outfits, along with a male keyboardist, belting out US hits such as Shania Twain's "Honey I'm Home". Just when I thought things couldn't get much better, I start to hear "...jambalaya, crawfish pie, file gumbo..." YES (anyone from Louisiana). That song "On the Bayou" or whatever it's called. They were singing that at a German restaurant in Beijing. And then AGAIN when I didn't think things could get better, we managed to convince one of our group members to request some Bon Jovi and get up on stage with the lovely ladies and sing "Livin' on a Prayer". What a night...