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I’ve been busy, so no entries for a while. And still no pictures, because most of the internet cafes here are running Windows 98. For example, the cafe manager today had to boot into BIOS and enable USB support, and then the necessary drivers weren’t there anyway. However, I did realize a couple wang ba ago that most places have local fileservers streaming Realplayer streams of recent movies. As I type this, I’m watching Jeon Jihyeon’s latest film, Windstruck, dubbed into Chinese.
I didn’t mention that before Uncle Ted arrived in Beijing, I did a few things with John and his friends from IUP. For example, we went to the DMJ China DJ contest at the Yan club, where I met Dan from Chinese Triad; Dwight, John and I had dinner at the Bookworm on Sanlitun North, and migrated to Sanlitun south for drinks at the Hidden Tree; us three also had dinner at the Mosuke Canting, the Moscow Restaurant as seen in Cultural Revolution film In the Heat of the Sun.
Back to the near present, the pace of life slowed down once Ted showed up. We browsed Wangfujing and the Foreign Language Bookstore. We walked through the hutongs behind Tiananmen. We sat in a siheyuan and watched the rain fall. On our last night in Beijing, Katie Beth and her father met us at the Tian Wai Tian restaurant just south of the Normal University for Peking duck, knocking one of the last items off my list of Things To Do in Beijing.
Our pace for the last few days, for a change, has been grueling. We overnighted direct from Beijing to Hankou on hard-sleeper bunks, a trip made shorter by chatting with a group of English teachers coming back from vacation in Beijing. Wuchang (the city next to Hankou, where the travel agency for booking Yangtze river trips was located) was a steam oven, aggravated by my over-filled backpack; it’s like the opposite of wind chill, carrying it makes the day a few degrees hotter. The folks at the agency suggested heading to Wudangshan before doing the river trip, so we bought hard-sleeper tickets for that night. Before leaving, we checked out the Hubei Provincial museum, which was basically one large exhibit on a certain Zhou dynasty tomb. The prize find was a large set of bells, and the museum’s take on them was to give an example performance on a replica of the bells. Better than the museum was our drive afterwards around Dong Hu, the Eastern Lake where locals go to fish, swim and cool off in the evenings. We theorize that it’s the one redeeming feature of this oven.
The hotel gate closes soon, I’ll continue this at another time (and hopefully catch the end of Windstruck then too).
permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wuhan | 2004.07.31-22:48.00
