Day 2 - Part IV Venturing out - the park...

And into the park...


But we did, at last, arrive at ChaoYang Park.  It struck me as Central Park if Walt Disney designed it, but wasn't so picky about the architecture - or it lasting.  The Sino-Thai friendship pavillion is already crumbling at the ripe 'ol age of 6 years old. 

All this damage, despite the signage.

     Specifically aimed at children (and seniors), you pay admission, there is a map of ChaoYang park at the entrance, and lots of direction sign pointing your way to attractions.  The landscaping is "naturalistic" and yet, is signed for, among other things, a place for people to gather in the event of mass disasters.  Yes, the government permanently has signs up showing you where they've made plans to set up emergency shelters.  (I know all my emergency planning friends are a bit envious)

There are a few pieces of cool IKEA like (yes there is IKEA Beijing, no we didn't go.) exercise equipment.  Tavin demonstrated all the ones he could figure out how to work.  This included the "Gazelle" of late-night infomercial fame, a treadmill that makes you think of the rollers at the front of those X-ray machines at the airport, A largely resistance free "eliptical runner," sit-up benches, some round things, some things for stretching on, some other things, and a ladder of sorts.  

From there we went to seek out "ice skating," as we were told it did exist.... 2km away at the south end of the park.  Undaunted we started off.

With the winter sun bright, but low in the sky it was easy to keep track of whether or not our path was leading us south, since "ice skating" was listed nowhere on the signs.  And with 2 km to go we might as well do some sight seeing along the way.  

We saw the "Wedding Palace," and it looks just about like what it sounds - if you want to have as ostentatious a wedding as you can afford for 500 or so of your closest family and friends in the gaudiest place you can conjure in a Vegas meets Atlantic CIty sort of setting.  This is it.  
    At least from the outside, built in classical georgian victorian federalist english-country roman gothic style (really) it moslty comes down to a 3 story cube with a dome on top with more or less appropriately placed fluted columns, and porches leading out of the corners of the four corners.  A horseshoe shaped  trellis garden leads out to 2 piers into the frozen lake.  

What can I say... it screams Wedding Industrial Complex.  Now there's an area of know-how we could export.  I've seen some of the wedding shops, and tons of the ads, including the ones projected on the walls of the subway tunnels outside the car windows (Yes - even if you attempt to avoid the commercial onslaught of the subway car by gazing at the dark, blank walls between stations - that is no longer an escape.), and Modern Bride has a market wide open and waiting.  Though Martha Stewart has made her way into Japan.

We left that monstrosity and crossed a cool little draw bridge.

  There Tavin and I saw something neither of us had ever seen before:  A fish frozen in the ice.

answering, sort-of, an age old question....

  Since someone had already wiped the Beijing dust off the ice earlier, we were not the only ones fascinated by it.  

On the other side of the draw-bridge was a copy of a Roman-style arcade.  

An impressively hardy couple was taking advantage of the clear, sunny, but cold (-4C) weather for some wedding photos.  Whether they were models for advertising or a real couple I couldn't say, but the guy's white tux with black accents was eye-catching.

 Next - the amusing amusement park.

Day 2 - Part III Venturing out.

Step Four - ready to go our for real

Re-energized and with extra clothing on the outside and hot food inside, we hit the streets again.  Much more confident of our direction, we headed to Chaoyang Park.  It is STILL hard to fathom just how big the darn blocks are.  It didn't look that far on the map.  Was.  

So we had a great chance to learn more things about this fairly recently built/rebuilt corner of Beijing.  There is a focus of fancy cars in this section due to the high concentration of embassies and diplomatic staff.   So Tavin got his picture taken in front of a rather fantastical contraption out side a mechanic's shop & car wash.

Horns to spare

There is definitely a "new modern bunker-style" architecture that dominates the entrances and other visible parts of the embassies.  The Israeli embassy looks like the front could withstand a major storm surge.  We couldn't tell what this one was to become, but it sure looked like something.

Tavin got to demonstrate the hazards of being a pedestrian where it appears at lease 6 committees were involved in the the design, evolution and construction of a sidewalk.

Sidewalk will be the correct width, will contain the right number of trees, with correctly sized wells, the correct number of signs, light posts and etc.  At least everyone got what they wanted.

We walked past "Dining street" or "Lucky Street" (apparently answering to both names) which contained a rather impressive selection of restaurants hailing from all over the world.  Italian, South German, American South (Nashville) Thai, Japanese ("No Tavin, we are not eating Japanese food in China.) And several regional Chinese restaurants. (pix)

We got to see a river under construction,

 an "Information Island" of ironic proportions

,

and an intimidating poster of Chinese Youth (just what does the red minidress with white gloves, white go-go boots, white pistol holster and black sub-machine gun say to you?). 

Next - we actually make it into the park.

Day 2 - Part II. So we are in Beijing, but where are we?

Step Two - getting our bearings inside

First we explored the hotel, getting our bearings inside.  We learned that this hotel actually connects through a low building to the largely identical tower of apartments?(I think) next to it.  This short-cut came in handy a couple of times on just  our first day out.  Immediately, it allowed us to see the exquisitely carved 130kg mammoth tusks in the adjoining lobby. (Yes, mammoth tusks, not elephant).  The first one was a carving of 500 major saints of Buddhism.  The blurb next to it said it had taken a master carver and 10 assistants, 10 years to complete.  And there ARE 500 completely individual figures, with expressive faces, and their own little name placard on shoulders or around necks, including the monk who is said to have brought Buddhism from India,  to China, with his legendary companions Piggy and Monkey, and his faithful horse, all riding on the back of a dragon. And Sakyamuni.

The other tusk what another carving of nearly equally mind-boggling complexity and detail depicting the blessings of Fortune, Longevity. Prosperity and Mercy.  Then, map in hand we went outside.  Cold.  Fortunately bright, clear and cold, instead of cloudy, windy and smoggy, but cold, and even colder in the shade.

[Side Note:  I beg your patience.  The above, like so much of what I want to say keeps coming out as a run on sentence.  However this grammatical bad habit is actually a good way of expressing the experience of Beijing.  I can't say "China" because I haven't been there, but I'd suspect that too.]

Step Three - getting our bearings outside

Since we started at the wrong spot on our map, It took us some dedicated walking and gwaking to figure out where we really where.   Starting lost like that is not as tough as it may seem since all the maps I can get my hands either cover a postage stamp sized area showing only tiny streets and a sliver of a large street, or are so big they don't have ANY labels (Chinese or otherwise) on the small streets, so I am unsure which small street forking off a main road I am dealing with.  The wander about proved useful in other ways.   We fot to see; How Beijingers use those long heavy plastic strips you sometimes see over freezer and refrigerated sections as doors to keep people from, "Foom!" letitng out too much heat each time a door is opened.  

          Amusing logos (Pac-Man knock off as the spokes-toon for a restaurant), and the true tininess and heavy turnover of shops. 

       And leaned how far it was to the Subway.  We found a place to buy hand lotion and some candy to suck on for dry throats, and broke my first big bill.

Well, the only kind of big bill.  Note on currency: Chinese Yuan, or renminbei, or RMB come in 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 Y denomination bills.  There are 1Y coins, which are supremely useful in the strange, control-freaky Subway System (more on that later), but are rarer than hens' teeth.  The Yuan is also divided into 10 parts called jiao.  There are bills AND coins for these in denominations of essentially 5 jiao  and 1 jiao (for sanity's sake I thought of these at 50 cents and 10 cents).  The jiao is then divided into 10 parts called mao.  So in 1 yuan there are 10 jiao or 100 mao.  Nothing that I found was priced down to the mao.  I bought a few things priced down to some number of yuan and 5 jiao.  For walking around purposes it was useful to think of the 100Y as having the buying power of $20.  (It actually converts to around $16, but moving on.)  Can you imagine a society where the biggest bill that existed was a $20?  

Alec asked, "So what do the drug dealers use as flash."

Silly Alec doesn't he know there are no drug dealers, or anyone else who needs flash in China.  The government says so.

Actually reading the paper back out in the real world a few days later answered that question... they use American dollars.  Duh!

After our initial reconoiter, Tavin and I realized quite rapidly that we needed something to bury our faces in.  Scarves were called for.  We picked up a hot, eggy, saucy pancake with fried tofu-skin filling - with fresh chopped herbs - from a street vendor, and headed back to the room.  (FYI, I learned this is called "jian-bing" if you want to try it.  You can get it with chili-oil if you want)

(Sorry these last posts have been low on pictures.  I'll make up for it in the next posts.)

Day 2 - Part I. Surveying the Jet-Lag Damage

We made it to Beijing and to our hotel.

And woke up at 3am.

However, since we want to keep early hours to go along with Alec's glob straddling work schedule... and the Chinese get an early start to their day (shops can open any where between 8:30 & 10), we just had a snack, drank some bottled water (since "Drinking water from faucets is not recommended" according to the hotel guide).  We flipped around the english heavy hotel TV selection, watched Dirty Jobs (Oh! Mike Rowe, where don't you go?) and generally fooled around while we planned out our day.

Step one - breakfast

Since I really had no idea what our position in the city really meant, and though awake, I still felt pretty stupid, I caved and opted for the hotel breakfast buffet.  In this instance, while the prices definitely lived up to the Grand Hotel (built hastily for the Olympics), thankfully so did the spread.  

There was the European side which was fairly standard (I'm gonna say the pastries were possibly even better than what I've seen elsewhere - if a tad mislabeled), and then there was the Beijing-er side, which I will describe in its staggering variety in a moment.

We started on the European, or "Continental Breakfast" side grabbing juice from the choice of 6 (orange, pineapple, grapefruit, apples, mango and guava).  On the 2nd trip back to the juice bar I noticed the flunky behind the bar furiously decanting 2L plastic jugs of "Tropicana" or equivalent into the fancy serving containers.  Interesting - but the mango juice was excellent.

We stopped by the pastries, and Tavin picked out a "plain" mini croissant.  The yogurt, cereal and fruit looked fairly standard (pineapple, underripe melon, muslei, coco puffs) except for a few notes that caught my eye - dried sugared sour plums with the cereal toppings, dried sour plums and something that looked like capers with the yogurt toppings.  Dragon fruit cubes with other fruit cubes (those were also a little under ripe, but not bad), so we headed for the Beijinger side.

First, ALL the Beiging style breakfast options - at least in the dead of winter are hot selections.  Seems only sensible.  Second, every last one of them was savory, putting the weight behind the assertion that Beijingers only eat sweets as snacks, and not at meals.

The first options were warmed (not chilled, warmed) hard boiled eggs, next to a braised dish of diced chicken and green leafy vegetables that looked and smelled pretty appetizing, next to something labeled, "Sausage Stew."  And when opened up that's exactly what it looked like - with a sweet tomatoey sauce, and a few green bits of a leaf or herb.  Two nearly meter high columns of dim-sum baskets (unlabeled).  One contained some sot of shu-mai, and the other contained a potsticker (jiao-zi).  I only know this because people kept opening the baskets and lifting out the contents to inspect them, and the dumplings inside where those distinctive shapes.  1 pan displaying "coconut paste balls," and another "fried cooked dough" (yeah... that means doughnut to me too.  And Tavin.  He snagged one.).  

Next came the noodle soup station.  A selection of noodles - mostly or all wheat based I think.  No rice noodles, I was sure of that.  Skinny, thick, really skinny.  then things to be cooked with your noodles.  Small pieces of raw chicken, raw beef, or squid rings, quarter sized slices of some sort of large wheat fleshed mushroom, 4 inch long pieces of peashoot and beansprouts.  The tongs among this selection was mix and match.  Cross contamination alarms are primed to go off, until you see that the selections you make and place in your bowl are handed to the cook across the counter.  He boils the bejezzus out of them in a huge pot of furiously boiling water with cute little noodle holding baskets around the rim.  Then, after the appropriate wait he tips the hot group back into a fresh new bowl, ladles over a light meaty broth (not even gonna try to guess at what it was, other than, "darn decent fancy hotel winter breakfast broth"), and hands it back for you to garnish with the flavor sauces of your choice; soy sauce, black vinegar, chili paste (dark red kind with the seeds still in it) and sesame oil.

The sight of this nearly made Tavin swoon.  Brothy noodle soup for breakfast?  Really!  So he made himself a bowl.  Grinned maniacally, and garnished his bowl with a teaspoon each of black vinegar and soy sauce.  I added a bunch of veggies to mine, and a few pieces of beef.  On our way back to our table we looked in at the "English Breakfast Bar"

Unlike those Europeans on the continent, the English also demand a hot breakfast (again sensible in a country where in some years a pleasant spring day hangs out in the 50'sF (10's C).  All the usual suspects were there.  Sausage, bacon, eggs, waffles, french toast, and baked beans.  All of these options were doing a lively business, though many of the fried eggs thus supplied were ending up over the vegetable and chicken dish, or with noodle soup.

At last we arrived back at our table and dug in.  Wonderful, warming, invigorating, 
      "Mom, my criossant tastes funny."

"What flavor?  Maybe you got an almond one by mistake?"

"No... I think it's coconut."

"What does it smell like?"

"Really coconutty"

"Let me taste.  {chew chew chew} Yup, that's coconut."

Small slivers of dried unsweetened coconut were all through the croissant.  When I went back for more juice , I double checked.  Nowhere are coconut croissants indicated.  And the batch had been refilled, and they were coconutty too.  Undaunted, I got a little "plain yogurt," since I had been told that as part of Northern China, there is some great yogurt to be had here in Beijing.  Nope.  Turned out to be over-sweetened vanilla yogurt.  Not plain at all.

This start to the day was good preparation for the rest of it.  Everything was really pretty nice - and using the tiniest but of flexibility, and simply looking out for ourselves we could get an extremely satisfying version of what we wanted, but it felt a little bit like walking around a house that isn't quite up to code.  Maybe all the stair risers are a little off.  The stair treads may be straight, but the amount you have to lift your foot from stair to stair keeps changing.  Or the door handles are all at different heights - not out of reach mind you, but when you reach for them with your body, without engaging much of your mind, you keep missing, so you have to actually look at them to find them.  The whole day was going to be like that.  Not a big adventure with trials and danger, just many, many micro adventures that added up to an evening of entertaining pictures.

From the Narita Airport, to Beijing Airport, to the hotel....

So, we left the kids play room and headed to the gate to leave for Beijing... 

On the way there, I, hooray!, found a luggage cart for our backpacks ("Mom, this is getting really heavy..."  We found a seat looking out the window.  I went back towards the hallway for just a second, and Tavin had already made himself cute.  In the approximately 15 seconds I wasn't looking, he managed to get a chance to play some video game on a friendly Japanese teenager's iPad for a few minutes.  Just use this power... whatever it is for good.  Please.  At lease while I am alive.

So... back on the plane.  And some people had WAY over the allowed carry limit - and polite redirection ensued.  And I'm not talking maybe a roll-a-board, computer bag and then a purse - which used to be OK, but is now a no-no.  I mean a roll-a-board, a garment bag, a full shopping bag, and then a purse.  Anyway.  Tavin with 1 back pack each were wave aboard cheerily.  I'm glad someone had the energy to be cheery.

At this point, we had awoken at about 7:30 am, and left home at 10am. Our flight left at 12:55.  It was now 6:50 pm the next day local time  (or 1:50 am back at home).  Japan is +17 hours from Seattle (well also -7 hours, but you need to account for the international date line).  What it comes down to, is we had now been awake for 19 hours and Tavin was fading fast.  We made it onto the plane, and Tavin curled up into a little bed of a jacket and a blanket at my feet until they got ready to close the doors.  (Dirty looks from flight staff ensued, but lightened as I asked, "how much longer 'til I need to move him?"  Doors closed &  then he had to get back up into his seat.  Thankfully, Economy Plus was all but deserted, so I was able to lay Tavin out over 3 seats and he slept the rest of the way to Beijing.  I got some sleep to.

Beijing Capital Airport is HUGE!  No, I mean you can't see one end from the other huge.  You could park the planes INSIDE huge.  And deserted a 10pm.

So we were able to simply stroll up to immigration.  Only after walking past the infra-red monitor cameras.  Checking for feverish people is my guess.  Could it be used to check for tiny animal smugglers as well?  I mean it was right next to the quarantine desk so I'm betting it was for illness only.  But couldn't it work for tiny animal smuggling as well?  All in all though, I bet it would have been more effective if the girl at the monitors wasn't texting madly at the time... or the time when Alec came in a day later.

Stumbled onto the train to baggage claim.  I do believe there was some graft and/or super speedy inspection or "just get it done in time for the Olympics well fix it later... and never did" there.  It was hands down the shiveriest, most chuddery airport train ride I had ever taken.  Interestingly, airport staff sweeps the car as it lets passengers off from getting there from the main part of the airport, before letting us on to leave the satellite gates.  Pretty much the first control freaky think we saw.  So many more to follow.

Yay!  Our bags came off quickly - so yes they did get them checked through successfully.

And they didn't even bother with customs (this is the flight you want if you plan on smuggling anything to China.  There were customs officials there, they were just standing around chatting).

There was our ride.  One of those times when, while I know could have gotten our behinds to the hotel SOMEHOW, there would have been tears and headaches.  It turns out, almost no one who lives in Beijing knows where the darn thing is, it is so new, and built so far out at the edge of town.  But instead, (choruses of angels here) the hotel's "car" was there to whisk us to our destination.

So we were attached to our driver (yes - in China, apparently "sign holder" is a different job from "airport driver."   We were handed off to the driver by the sign holder guy.)

Anyway, we collapsed into the car - it had little bottles of water - I was SO thirsty!

We finally got to the SHINIEST hotel we have ever stayed in.  5 Star Hotel (wowee zowee... but more on the hyperbole of that later.)

There appeared to be a mix-up over whether we were paying for the car.  I'll decided to let Alec hash that one out tomorrow.

The desk agent wanted to discuss special promotions.  I told her my brain was broken and I'd get back to her.

Tavin and I made the room.  It has a HUGE glass wall into the bathroom.  

Tavin doing a little number....

Happily it has blinds if you are sharing the room.

Privacy Function

Other than that it had a nice big bed.  And we headed straight for that.  And fell into it.

Fresh Start Detour!

I got a treat of a lifetime!  A 2.5 week tour through 2 major Asian cities:  Beijing & Tokyo.
Right here in the middle of it, I can already feel myself being overwhelmed.  


As a favor to myself - and to you all, I figure it makes the most sense to send this out as a serial, in little digestible chunks.  The set of blog posts are going to take much longer than the actual trip - but who has time to read pages and pages of 1 thing at a sitting these days.


And guess what - I don't forget the food.  And there are some good pictures too.  


The Beginning:


Day 1 (well it spools out... 
but we'll call the whole thing day 1)

Good Morning China.

We arrived here last night at about 11:00pm local time.  We landed at the airport right around 10pm, and my brain was approximately the consistency intelligent rice pudding (one that knows which way is down, and knows that it's in a bowl).  

The very best news - after a long series of trips where I've been delayed, late, reassigned, in danger of missing connections, this trip went like clockwork.  Every flight was on time, every layover was exactly what I expected.  

We were picked up by Super Shuttle, and dropped off at the Sea-Tac in excellent time.  The lines at the check-in counter were mercifully small, and since we had done our best to be excellent packers, we were well within the weight limit.  And they had no problem checking our bag all the way through to Beijing.

Tavin ready to head to Beijing

Our flight boarded, and took off from Sea-Tac pretty much, exactly on time.  Tavin and I had a pair of seat to our selves.  Tavin was bouncy with his pre-travel excitement, and managed to charm some serious play time out of the guy across the aisle with the coolest new fiddly toy around - Buckyballs - rare earth magnet spheres.  Between that and some serious video game time all went well.  Airplane food was... well... airplane food.

We arrived at Narita Airport just as the sun was preparing to go down so it shone in our windows in a chill and intensely bright fashion.  After walking off the plane and into Tavin's 1st Asian country we had about 2.5 hours to kill.    As we departed the plane and headed for International transfers, we looked for our flight information.  We were a little baffled as the screen of flights was small (about 2 TV screen worth),  though in English/roman letters as well as Kanji (Interesting note - the Japanese still use a version of "Pekin" for Beijing).  So I could easily see that my flight was not listed.  However, Narita is full of women dressed in a variety of uniforms holding signs and pieces of paper.  The information about my flight was not on the monitors, but with the woman standing next to the monitors.

So we went around the corner, and into a security screening.  Just like when you go to get on a plane (but we had just gotten off a plane!)  I guess when you have a variety of screening procedures feeding into your airport, you don't want to take a chance of feeding a risk factor into the rest of the air travel system.

       A few interesting notes - US screening arches are sensitive to RFID chips (beeps if you carry passports through), Japanese screening arches are not.  Their signs mention "acts of aggression" rather than "terrorism,"  and you get to keep your shoes on.  Apparently the Japanese have gotten tired of telling Americans they can leave their shoes on because we saw lots of people take their shoes off, but if you just watched - you could see that plenty of people left their shoes on, so we did too.

We also got to see the white gloves of the police in action.  As the "Express Access"  line emptied out, they let some people fill in that lane.  But they needed to fill in in both sides of the line.  The police officer directing the action was pointing people on their way with the white glove of authority - and he only had the one glove on.

Interestingly enough, the screeners, when dealing with the shoes of those strange Americans, also tend to wear cloth gloves - like the white gloves, but not bleached white. 

So we made it through the security screening to get back into the airport.

We had just eaten - which was just as well since I didn't really want to get any Yen if I could help it.  (Interesting note, except for the Duty Free shops, the stores and restaurants in the Airport still seemed to encourage the use of cash).

We wandered about in the airport, and did find the kids play area.  There was another family there, with grandfather, parents and a young elementary school boy (K or 1?) and a toddler little girl.  Tavin ran around in the small padded space leaping, sliding, and balancing on and rolling the large cylinder blocks - generally burning off steam, much to the delight of the younger Japanese boy.  The family finished their business in the family play area - and soon Tavin lost speed, so we packed up, and headed for our gate.

Just 1 more 3+ hour flight kiddo - you can do it!
(Tavin running out of Steam in Narita)

Bye-Bye CSA bag....

Well, my CSA (community supported agriculture) bag has petered out for the year.  The end of the season for Washington state grown veggies has passed.  Sigh.  And the nearby Farmer's Markets closed in October.  It is interesting how produce shopping habits have changed.

I still shopped for onions and garlic at the grocery store along with the occasional celery - but mostly just took what came.

I am still staring at a mole-hill of under ripe pears willing them to not turn into a mountain.  What to do, what to do...  Well the Christmas food season is coming - spiced-pear pate-de-fruit to go into a sugar cookie sandwich with a little Nutella?  Only time - and taste will tell.

I recently heard the thought that while a good savory-chef is always experimenting in the kitchen, they can usually taste as they go.  A pastry-chef on the other hand has to do more on faith, and just wait and see how it comes out on the other end, so they roll more in the 'Mad Scientist' mode.

I wonder which where on the spectrum I'll come up this time.