China 2004

Back

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

Meeting in Beijing

I actually arrived at the Haoyuan Hotel on Sunday before Ted did, so I went out for a walk and found him napping when I got back. For the first couple days he has been here, it’s been raining, which meant that mercifully the heat has let up.

Pace-wise, we haven’t been pushing ourselves as hard as I did as the hostel. On Sunday we went to bed early; Monday (yesterday) we took an exploratory walk through some hutongs north of Tiananmen, browsed the foreign language bookstore on Wangfujing for history and econ books, lunched at the China food court in the Dong’an Mall, and met Katie Beth and her father for dinner at Tian Wai Tian, the duck restaurant I frequented as a summer student at the Normal University. I’ll have pictures of this uploaded as soon as technically possible.

I’ve been instructed to write more stories on this weblog, but I forgot to ask how. Until I figure this out, and likely even after that point, the best stories can be found on Katie Beth’s xanga.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.27-15:05.00

Oops

The day after I tell John and Dwight that the Spanish don’t travel, I help a couple Spaniards find the USB port on a hostel computer.

Uncle Ted arrives today. We’re going to meet at the Haoyuan Hotel, just east of Wangfujing.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.25-10:39.00

Random Photos (Tianjin version)

Do we have California Beef Noodle King in California?

Channel-V VJ, Beijing mag columnist, and random Tianjin shop advertisement model.

New store fronts on old colonial-style building on Binjiang Dao.

Me, Eileen and Kathy.

Eileen’s daughter is da cuteness.

Miandi.

permalink | Micah/Tianjin | 2004.07.21-13:39.00

Random Photos

Technology Enters Into Our Lives

Kathryn and Lou

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.21-13:25.00

Saturday

I know I’m slacking on these entries, so I’m making up today.

Saturday morning I was planning on doing something with John, but he was out during the morning so I took the subway up to the Yonghegong, Beijing’s official, still functioning Tibetan lama temple. The neighborhood is full of incense shops, I wonder how they all survive. Margins must be high, and costs low. I had a bean-paste shao bing while I waited 10 minutes to make yet another call to John’s place. The temple was nothing much to see (hence the lack of pictures), the only item worth mentioning is the giant statue of the Maitreya Buddha, which is three stories tall and carved out of a single tree. I’m sure the fact that it has a narrow building built around it makes it look more impressive as you can only see it by looking straight up.

The subway whisked me away to Xidan to purchase the Chinese guidebook for five bucks USD, and as it was lunchtime I stopped into the Korean place in the Times Square food court for an iron bowl of Korean bibimbap goodness (no picture, I was feeling very “watched” and a little self-conscious). As I left, I walked past the line of people waiting to go into the cinema to catch Zhang Yimou’s latest. I wonder how soon it will be available under the Jianguomen underpass.

Back at the hotel for an afternoon nap, I picked up some toilet paper at the corner store, got my clothes back from the cleaners down the street, and met Catherine, our new roommate from Canada. I finally got a hold of John, and so invited Catherine to go along with us to a concert that night. First, we met at the Wudaokou subway station for a Korean dinner which was absolutely fantastic. It’s great to dine with John, he’s a great conversationalist and ultra-polite. The ghostly hand in that last picture was our waitress, who did us the kindness of grilling and cutting up all of our meat.

We caught a taxi to the western gate of Tsinghua and walked about 200 meters straight south to a little alleyway where the Loup Chante cafe was hosting Jimo Xiari in concert. Kaizer Kuo had recommended them, so I wasn’t disappointed, and John really liked them too. But mostly, we were pretty happy to discover this little cafe right next to the Tsinghua campus. The staff were excited about the music, and had plans for the cafe (live music, Tarantino films), and the atmosphere was very homey (used furniture, low couches, local art). A few of John’s friends ended up swinging by near the end, they had been at the Zhang Yimou film showing.

I stepped out for some fresh air at one point, and realized that the fresh air was inside the bar. It was pretty humid outside.

Conversations

• Heard on the bus a conversation between an old Western-Chinese man who had joined the People’s Army decades ago, and a few recent immigrants from Western China. The conversation was half in Mandarin Chinese, half in the Uighur dialect. They all agreed that the reason to be in Beijing was that the money is here.

• In the Yonghegong temple museum, a conversation between two girls:

  • “Who is that person?”

  • “That is lama so-and-so.”

  • “What about that American…?”

  • “That’s the Dalai lama.”

  • “Oh, right.”

Food

• Breakfast (small shop outside Yonghegong)

  bean-paste shao bing (fried cake, donut sized).

• Lunch

  Don’t remember?

• Dinner (Korean barbacue in Haidian)

  Pork chop, lamb, beef; Korean pancake with dipping sauce, random sides, melty milk pops for dessert.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:33.00

Friday

I decided to postpone my trip to Tianjin because I heard Katie Beth was leaving town soon. We met at Wangfujing at lunchtime, Katie Beth, her dad, and me, in the map section of the Wangfujing bookstore. Lunch happened at the Dong’an Shichang shopping mall, in the same food court where I got my curry chicken. After lunch, we took the subway to Jianguomen for a look at the astronomical observatory. Katie Beth’s father had done navigation for the air force, so we talked a bit about the sextants and armillaries, and how they would have been operated.

Beihai park was our next destination. We were approached by a friendly sidewalk calligrapher who traced a message of Sino-American friendship for us on the ground. Hopefully our friendship will last longer than the water stains did. While Katie Beth’s dad chatted with the calligrapher, she and I climbed to the top of the hill, the base of Beihai’s lama temple.

We reached our next destination, Houhai, by a whirlwind tour of the the hutongs on rickshaw. Houhai was nice, it has been very developed, so that the waterfront is bounded by bars and restaurants. After a little dancing, we split up and headed back to our respective hotels. I stayed up a bit to watch a movie with Cindy and Isaac on his laptop, then fell asleep.

Man reading the bus stop list.

I like the idea behind Araz’s weblog. It’s a weblog written by other people, about Araz. I’ve considered starting an “interview weblog”, where I interview people. What better to interview people about than one’s own self?

Food

• Breakfast

  I might as well stop including this one.

• Lunch (Dong’an Shichang food court, on the 5^th floor)

  octupus-arm fried “leaf” rice (it’s cooked in a lotus leaf first), and suan mei tang.

• Dinner (S’Silk restaurant on Lotus Lane, Houhai)

  spicy beef in “special tea sauce, Kunming-style mushrooms, fruit tea.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:08.00

Thursday

I really can’t remember what I did on Thursday. All I can think of is that I missed my intended bus stop that morning, ended up walking through much of Beijing, and met John for dinner up at his place on the Tsinghua University campus, and then we went out for for a Japanese tonkatsu dinner

Food

• Breakfast

  Lost in the fog of memory.

• Lunch (a small food stand in the souther half of the city)

  a styrofoam box full of different dishes: stewed pork, green beans, tomato and eggs, potatoes in broth, something involving carrots and peanuts; a box of rice, and a couple steamed buns filled with meat and carrots (I gave away the carrot bun). Total cost: 6 RMB (about 75 cents)

• Dinner (Hanri Japanese restaurant, in the Haidian district)

  Japanese-style tonkatsu (breaded pork steak in broth, topped with pickled radish), miso soup, tea.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:03.00

Beijing Linux Users Group

I’m in several pictures in the photo album for the July meeting of the Beijing Linux Users Group. In case the link goes stale, I’ve archived them here.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.16-23:06.00

Wednesday

…was a day on which I went looking for several things I remembered from Beijing in 2000 and 2002, and found them gone.

Spent a couple hours on the computer this morning trying to get photos uploaded, journal entries written, and e-mail sent out. It’s so frustrating to use the internet here, I think Brainysmurf’s recent post on reverse-culture shock (he’s in the USA for his wedding) does it some justice:

Talking to the computer reverse cultural shock: “Heh. My dial up connection in the US is faster than my broadband over there.” “Wow BBC News formats their website pretty well.” “Instapundit is even more of a doofus when you’re reading it from the US. Sweet.” “Hmm. I wonder if the authorities will do a search for this keyword. Oh wait.”

GMail has been very inconsistent, the uplink from different internet cafes varies widely in quality, and the computers around town are in creative states of disrepair. The one pleasant surprise is that every computer so far has let me install PuTTY for encrypted SSH access to my UMich and Freeshell accounts.

The first disappointment came when I walked through Liulichang and couldn’t find the store where the people had been so friendly to me when I lost my backpack in 2002. It must have been sold, or remodelled, but I’m not exactly sure so I’ll probably end up going back one more time. Second, I took the bus to Ditan, the temple of earth park, and found that the old Beijing restaurant just outside the east gate had been flattened, along with the neighborhood around it, to make a (pleasant little) green strip just outside the park walls.

I hopped on the bus back to Wangfujing for lunch, only to find that the cafeteria style food-court at whcih I had intended to eat (behind the big shopping malls) had been torn down into a parking lot. Amusingly (and I’ll upload the picture I took tomorrow), instead of tearing down all the buildings and putting up a fence around the lot, the builders chose to tear down all but the store-front walls, leaving them to enclose the lot. As a result, when you walk along the street you are seeing a false facade, and if you look in through the store windows and glass doors, you see not merchandise, but cars parked in a field. It is very surreal.

Back at the hostel, I napped, showered, and hung out with Isaac and Cindy. Isaac is studying Chinese in New Jersey, but he’s into Japanese pop culture so we shot the breeze about anime, drama and music.

For dinner, I took a taxi (felt uppity!) to meet Helena and Max at the Jazz-ya restaurant in Sanlituan. Travelling around Beijing with Helena is fun because she really got around the city back when she lived here, so she can tell you everything that has changed and the way that it used to be. It’s sad, but it’s also exciting. After shopping for shoes at the Yashuo market and square-dancing with the old folk in the cool evening, and snacking on raisin popsicles, we hit up Club Max in front of the Workers’ Stadium to catch Kid Koala in his exclusive (exclusive!) Beijing appearance. It was a great night, he played a bunch of danceable stuff, and did some more experimental tracks like a composition featuring Louie Armstrong’s trumpet, another of his mom’s favorite old movie music, and one that he dedicated to DJ Krush, which totally had DJ Krush’s moody feel. Martin, from the BLUG, was at the club so we did the whole “shout random stuff at each other, nod and smile because the music is so loud” thing. Maybe it’s just me.

Food

• Breakfast

  The Breakfast Association would be ashamed of me.

• Lunch (Wangfujing Dongan Mall Chinese food court)

  curry rice with chicken, and too-sweet suan mei tang (“tart” plum punch).

• Dinner (Jazz-ya)

  tamago omelette appetizer, the creamiest macaroni au gratin, and raisin popsicles for dessert.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.15-17:35.00

Tuesday

Went shopping in Xidan, which fffor me means the giant bookstore. They still have copies of my favorite penmanship book (Chinese penmanship, of course), my copy of which is wrinkled and water warped from overuse. I picked up a wuxia kung-fu magazine, which I’m having a very hard time getting through, it’s chock full of classical language and expressions that I just haven’t learned.

For lunch, I called up Dwight and we ate at the Be There or Be Square (BTBS) cafe in Times Square on the south side of Xidan. The cafe was pretty nice, and the hot honey lemonade was delicious, but I noted that the drink alone cost more than my entire dinner of the night before.

At that point, we met up with Helena and Max for some shopping in the Xidan clothes market, trying on watches and examining the Counterstrike T-shirts. It was so nice to see Helena again, she’s been working with Albert in Gansu province and really learned a lot from the experience. She’s really into her element in Beijing, and her excitement about the city is infectious.

At six, I ran off to Alfa, a small bar/club north of Workers Stadium for the Beijing Linux Users Group’s monthly meeting. That night, they sold BLUG t-shirts and gave away copies of Red Flag Linux developers edition. Also, there was a demo of some Oracle database software running on the Red Flag distro—they gave us a copy of the Oracle DB too. I talked with Bruce, whose wife is an IT consultant; Martin, a German journalist who runs a small agency here in Beijing; and with David, who released of Yggdrasil Linux back in 1995, the first Linux distro to appear on CD. He’s in China now, studying the language. My first run-in with a kernel hacker!

Dinner was along (my roommates Isaac and Cindy had already eaten) at a small restaurant down from the hostel.

Food

• Breakfast

  erm, forgot (to eat).

• Lunch

  crispy pork on rice, hot honey lemonade (the best drink ever).

• Dinner

  la pir (wide transparent noodles with veggies) and yang rou chuar (pork kebabs).

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.15-17:11.00

Photo Comments

New photo album, including:

la tiaozi - my lunch the other day, pulled dough strips in tomato sauce.

name board lists who has private rooms reserved at this restaurant. Mr Zhu has the Rolling Streams room today.

The Natural History museum’s emphasis on evolution carried it dangerously close to eugenics, but justified its conclusions about birth control.

Minty Fresh Sprite tastes like spearmint.

Respected readers: the newspaper is for everybody to read, please don’t take it away.

Bill Gates gives Chinese students 11 guidelines for life.

Two sections of books on Matlab. Two whole sections!

Dwight and I at the Be There or Be Square cafe.

Helena and Dwight drive a hard bargain.

Beijing Linux Users Group.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.14-00:06.00

Into the Swing of Things

I’m getting into the swing of things: this morning while I was walking to the internet cafe, I was halfway across a big intersection before I realized I hadn’t looked at the pedestrian crossing light.

But seriously, walking in Beijing takes some getting used to. Most of it is mental: increasing the look-ahead range to account for bicycles, lowering your annoyance threshhold for having to stop, wait, or change directions, overcoming the fear of crossing intersections just feet away from speeding, seemingly out-of-control taxis…

Yesterday, Monday, jet-lag had me up at 7 AM, out on the streets looking for an Internet cafe. Because it was so early, most shops were closed, including the wang ba I had intended to check my e-mail at. After walking all the way to Wangfujing, I hopped on the subway to Xidan, the commercial downtown of Beijing. I picked up the long-anticipated jianbing breakfast, an egg pancake with green onions, chili sauce, wrapped around a square youtiao, a block of fried dough. There was a small net cafe filled with kids playing Counterstrike off in a small alleyway, 3 RMB per hour. As it stands, users now have to show their national ID cards to use net cafes - foreign nationals get to keep their anonymity.

OK, this is getting long. Allow me to summarize. I spent the morning at the Beijing Natural History Museum. Their dinosaur exhibit is impressive, but their human exhibit is a little disturbing (think graphic vivisections in a ‘NO PHOTOS’ room). Another visit to a net cafe, checked trains timetables at the station, and a few phone calls later I hooked up with John for dinner at a Brasilian restaurant on the Snlitun strip. We dropped by this tiny little martini bar hidden behind a construction site—the new Beijing is full of these little sturprises—and then grabbed a taxi back to Dongzhimen station, where we parted. An hour of chatting with roommates (including panda pictures from Chengdu—cute!), a little reading, and I was out for the night.

Food

• Breakfast (at a small stand in Xidan)

  hot jianbing in a plastic bag.

• Lunch

  (Mom, don’t read this) skipped.

• Dinner (Alameda brazilian restaurant)

  toasted pumpkin salad with cheese and croutons, tiger prawn and coconut rice, tonic water.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.13-09:54.00

Public Notice

I’ve begun to upload a small number of photos, starting with the Korea and Beijing albums. Note that future photos won’t be announced, but links to them will appear on the right-hand side of this page under the Photography heading.

Korean album note: Check out the kid playing on the free Playstations.

Beijing album note: the last few pictures at the moment are of the rooftop of the Beijing Saga Youth Hostel (formerly the hostel behind the Jianguomen International Hotel). The hostel actually moved right down the street from where I will be staying with uncle Ted.

I got an e-mail from Katie Beth, hopefully we can meet up soon.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.11-17:15.00

Incheon Airport, South Korea

The flight over was uneventful, but several things are remarkable (in the literal sense):

• The Chinese characters in Korean for “exit” are fei chang kou, something like “super opening”, or maybe “emergency opening” if you stretch it. It reminds me of fei chang ke le, a Coke competitor.

• I sat next to a nice Korean ajuma who was returning from visiting her daughter in Seattle. She gave me her extra tube of go chu jang, spicy pepper sauce. I ordered the vegetarian meals, so my food came sooner but I felt bad about eating earlier than my row-mates. In the end, I waited for their meals to come, and ended up eating inferior (though not bland) food. Next time, I eat with everybody else.

• The plane was a 747-400. Some people like that kind of trivia.

• Incheon airport is as nice as people talk it up to be. I had heard a rumor on Sleeping in Airports that the bathroom have signs with the janitor’s phone number; in fact, it’s true, and I took a pictureto prove it.

• I caught most of the Spain-Ireland Euro2004 game on an LG Plasma big-screen in the waiting area.

Food

• Dinner (last night on the plane)

  Vegetarian penne pasta, veggie (cucumber, squash, lettuce, tomato) salad, orange juice, roll, butter.

• Breakfast (on the plane today)

  omelet, orange and grapefruit slices, apple sauce (and my neightbor’s leftover rice and go chu jang).

permalink | Micah/Korea | 2004.07.11-01:00.00

Airplane Ticket: Reserved

Trip Plan for: Mr Micah Sittig

Flight Reservation Number(s): Korean Air: XZ6IHU

Reservation Number: ZPW29G

Total fare for flight reservations: 644.70 Dollars (U.S.) including tax

Flight reservations:

Flight: KE012

From: Los Angeles Int’l (LAX), Los Angeles, USA,Terminal: B

Departing: Saturday, July 10, 2004 00:30

To: Incheon Intl (ICN), Seoul, Korea Republic Of,

Arriving: Sunday, July 11, 2004 05:00

Status: Confirmed

Flight: KE851

From: Incheon Intl (ICN), Seoul, Korea Republic Of,

Departing: Sunday, July 11, 2004 10:40

To: Beijing Capital (PEK), Beijing, China,

Arriving: Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:40

Status: Confirmed

permalink | Micah/Preparation | 2004.07.06-06:54.00