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Eating out in Beijing

Culinary delights in Beijing

  • There is, if possible, a higher density of restaurants than I’ve seen anywhere else, including downtown SF, the curry mile, and so on.
  • The duck is really good - the same basic idea as in the UK, but executed to perfection.
  • The hot-pot is the most fun ’self-assembly’ meal I’ve ever had - I find fajitas rather tiresome (alright, mostly I just prefer enchiladas) and fondue gets boring pretty fast, whereas the hot-pot is a great collection of flavours, especially given the bewildering combinations of sauces, bases and meats on offer. Tender cuts of beef, cooked for a minute, dipped in delicious sauce - absolutely delicious. It’s noticeable that the staff hover around after delivering the dishes, to provide some instruction, and presumably avoid idiot Westerners giving themselves food poisoning.
  • Middle-eastern dining at ‘1001 nights‘, good food (especially the falafel) and delicious baklava, accompanied by spectacular decor and cheesy belly-dancing. Not cheap, but fairly authentic (lacking a decent meze to start) and a welcome break from Chinese.
  • Szechuan, I was warned it might be ‘quite spicy’, but was actually far more flavoursome and less hot than I was expecting based on the dishes labelled Szechuan in the UK. I suspect the spice levels in the UK are either focused on to excess, or used to mask poor quality ingredients or inattention during preperation. Whatever the reason, my Beijing Szechuan experience was some of the most interesting Chinese food I had - I’ll try to find some good specialist places in Edinburgh and London now.
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2008 07 04 james travel Comments (1) Permalink

Wonderland

The Zhongguancun tech-plazas are a cavern (well, several caverns) of unearthly delights. Assuming one is any kind of hardware geek whatsoever. Finding the place was something of an ordeal, mostly due to my pig-headed insistence on trying to walk from the nearest metro stop - that will be a fine idea once line ten is open1, but encouraged by the essentially fictitious map the hotel supplied, I endeavoured to walk from the ‘closest’ line thirteen stop, which was, uh, a mistake. Much walking, a taxi ride, some more walking and increasing frustration later, I entered a building which sold laptops, and then gradually realised that actually there was five floors of goodies, and across the street, several more complexes along the same lines, but even larger. The setup is essentially a market - thousands of small vendors, between them purveying all manner of shiny. Phones, laptops, music players, camera lenses, processors, motherboards, it’s all here, each brand repeated fifty times over.

To my surprise there was a strong representation of the mothership, but absolutely no (that I saw) Sigma presence, despite boxes and boxes of Nikon and Canon lenses - very odd. The Hong-Kong based eBay retailers certainly have no problem sourcing the Sigma gear, so I’m perplexed by its absence.

The tragedy is, despite the collection of wonders, for me personally, there’s very little I could actually consider buying - phone-wise I’m waiting on the second incarnation of the JesusPhone, I am infinitely happier since I abandoned the PC hardware rat-race, and the video cards on offer don’t work in my MacPro2. I made do with some UV lens filters and escaped with my wallet basically intact - no doubt others are not so lucky. 

  1. about three days after I departed Beijing, apparently [↩]
  2. Which, as a loyal drone, I blame Microsoft for completely - why the hell couldn’t Vista use EFI? [↩]
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2008 07 03 james geek
toys
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Climbing the Wall

On a Monday morning, after three hours on a bus escaping Beijing and climbing into the hills, spent a few hours at Simatai walking on the Great Wall. I was delighted that the wall really does live up to expectations, and was almost deserted, even with a cable-car providing access to the top. Walking from tower to tower, over curving, twisty sections, some perilously steep and all balanced on ridges above plummeting valleys, you feel you’re getting a pretty good sampling of ‘the wall’, or at least the Ming dynasty version of it. In spite of the long ascent, there’s still people anxious to sell you their wares - whether it be cold drinks, postcards or carved seals, but compared to other sites, they are infrequent and pleasant.

Standing on the section at Simatai, which is in a good start of repair, the expenditure of effort and lives to create the wall is brought home - the wall snakes off to the horizon in both directions, plunging down hillsides and charging up again. One surprise was how closely spaced the towers are (again, on this section) - only a few hundred metres apart, and each a substantial structure with multiple floors. I’m somewhat motivated to spend a day or two exploring Hadrian’s Wall again (not having been since childhood), by way of comparison.

The weather even obliged by raining the night before, clearing to actual blue skies (escaping the Beijing smog may have been a factor as well) and holding that way for a three hour stroll, before turning back to overcast grey and rain as we boarded the bus back to the city. The first part of the road back was hindered by countless slow-moving, heavily laden trucks struggling up the inclines, and in many places broken down. This made for some exciting manoeuvres as our bus pulled out to pass a stricken lorry, only to encounter other lorries oncoming, or the driver of the broken vehicle would emerge into the road (from somewhere in the underbelly of his machine) right into our path. I would be extremely reluctant to drive any kind of vehicle in China.

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2008 07 03 james history
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雍和宮

Yonghe Gong, aka the Lama Temple, is the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in China - it’s an impressive, if predictable, site (tiled roofs, red columns, gates, halls) which somehow survived the Cultural Revolution without being bulldozed. The exact details of how this occurred seem to be slightly mysterious and not dwelt upon by the literature. The ancient Buddhist monks helpfully sited their temple next to a metro stop, something the emperors should really have paid more attention to.1

Architecturally, the place is large but not sprawling - a relatively dense collection of temples, courtyards and halls - there’s none of the vast open spaces of the Forbbiden City, instead there’s a succession of much more compact squares, each containing trees, shrines, statues and huge, smoking incense pots. Each hall contains multiple Buddhas in various poses, and despite being a tourist-trap many visitors are actively praying before them. The street outside is lined with shops selling large bundles of incense, and inside the air is thick with the smell - it seems that the efficacy of the prayer must be correlated to the tonnage of material being burned.

  1. We managed it in Edinburgh, as the apocryphal American tourist pointed out - “It’s great that they built the castle so close to the train station” [↩]
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2008 07 02 james history
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This city is not for you.

The Forbidden City is really quite big, and unlike in the films, full of tourists rather than ninjas. Sadly two of the largest halls were closed for rennovation, but it doesn’t really matter - it’s not the individual places that impress, so much as the continuity of style, repetition of elements and overall scale of the site that are spectacular. Each time you pass through a gate into another courtyard, or turn a corner of a passage, you’re met by another view of red columns, paved squares, carefully manicured plants, tiled roofs, and so on. This is aesthetically stunning, but also rather sterile (and rapidly becomes oppressive in the heat, despite making an early start). I think it’s the kind of place where a team of re-enactors could make a huge difference, and also provide great camera-fodder - a few ceremonies or processions being recreated would really bring the sights and sounds of the place to life.

Even without such lures, however, the place is busy with tourists of all kinds. Fortunately the scale means that off the main drag, there’s no real crowd pressure, and with a few turns down side-streets you escape the crowds altogether. It’s also surprising how completely the modern city is removed - I expected the ever present sounds of car horns and sirens, and the horizon dotted with skyscrapers, but this is not the case at all. Off the beaten track, in the east or west palaces, there’s peace and tranquility in abundance.

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2008 07 02 james history
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北京

Beijing is huge, and humid, and amazing.

Arriving on the train, there’s enormous high-rise apartment blocks everywhere, and in the centre, lots of glass and steel. There’s also Olympics logos and branding (and merchandise!) everywhere. Bizzarely, despite this high-rise grandeur, the centre is actually still quite open, since the combined space created by the Forbidden City, Tianamen square and the moderately-proportioned nearby buildings means there’s no sense of crowding (comapred to, say, Bangkok or Manhattan). Of course it’s easy to be moderately proportioned given the scale of the space - buildings that would otherwise loom fit naturally alongside the wide streets.

In contrast to the high-rise glass and chrome, the traditional hutongs are essentially single-storey, full of traditional courtyard based houses. From the outside, strolling along narrow streets and even narrower alleys, it’s hard to tell what an area is like - some of the houses have been refurbished with every modern convenience, others are little changed from a century ago. The strangest aspect was that having finally awoken to the cultural1 value of the hutongs, the area closest to Tianamen square was being rapidly gentrified and rebuilt, with pavements, relaid streets and new brickwork.

One major annoyance - none of the cash machines seem to like my bank card, despite all proudly displaying the Visa logo. Some reject the card quickly, others go through considerable clicking and whirring before aborting the transaction.

  1. i.e, lucrative touristic [↩]
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2008 07 01 james travel Comments (0) Permalink

Bzzzzzzzz

Caution! There are bees! Also, apparently we’re transporting bees around to pollinate crops? That’s got to warrant a new haz-mat symbol - the lorry ahead of you on the motorway could be filled with buzzing, stinging death! And also delicious honey.

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2008 07 01 james comedy Comments (1) Permalink

Cyrillic

After a few days of confusion, I’m starting to get somewhere with Cyrillic. Initially the issue was mental gear-changing; unlike some other scripts, your brain (mine, anyway) keeps trying to process Cyrillic directly, and then throws an exception. Now I’ve mostly turned it into a glyph substitution algorithm, which I’m sure a Russian language speaker would be appalled at.

Recognition is aided by shared letters (most of the vowels), plenty of trans-scribed names to compare, and similar language sounds, so after a few days of exposure, it’s possible to muddle through most street signs - it helps that the Russian sounds and words are very much in the north European language family. There’s plenty of words where the Russian is evidently based (in ancient, or recent times) on the same Latin or Greek root as ours. None of this is to claim that learning Russian would be particularly easy, but I don’t think reading would be the barrier to comprehension that it is in other places.

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2008 07 01 james geek
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Into China

The train from UB to Beijing was extremely new - still the same basic arrangement (four bunks to a cabin) but with excellent air-conditioning, DVD players, a power socket in the cabin, better sanitation and even a shower. Quite a change compared to the train from Moscow. The ride was also better, though maybe due to better Chinese trackwork.

Before China though, was a day traversing the Gobi desert - a surreal experience of watching a proper desert go by, with the information displays reporting an outside temperature of 37 degrees, as you sip beer in air-condition splendour. It’s hard to convince yourself the windows aren’t in fact a projection. During one brief stop in the depths of nowhere1 I was able to sample the outside air - I’d forgotten how pleasant a true dry heat is, compared to normal tropical humidity. At the border reality intrudes - there’s a rapid (only a couple of hours!) Mongolian departure, an arrival into China accompanied by speakers blaring out what I assume is the national anthem, and then … the bogie change. To accommodate the transition from Russian guage to standard guage, the entire train is pulled, ripped, apart, one carriage at a time (much shunting and jerking), each carriage hoisted up off its bogies, and in a dramatically rapid event, the old bogies are pushed out, and the new ones pulled in, before the carriage is lowered down on top. Then the whole train is re-assembled (more shunting and jerking), immigration completed, and finally (it now being 1am) time for sleep. The memory of watching the preceding carriage being shunted into us (to re-engage the coupler) will remain with me for some time I think.

The morning journey into Beijing was accompanied by some ‘real’ Chinese scenery; firstly a rural landscape, complete with rice fields, gradually turning more industrial, and then a dramatic section along a gorge, descending through tunnels, over bridges and along steep (vertical) hillsides. Finally plenty of time rolling into the suburbs and finally heart of Beijing. Along the way we passed through what is evidently a new main station, which ultimatley looks as if it will rival Waterloo in size, and an ICE test unit - apparently the Chinese are getting a high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai, which makes a lot of sense.

  1. The kind of place you feel exists to avoid a huge blank space on the  maps [↩]
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2008 06 30 james travel Comments (0) Permalink

Into the Hills

Took an overnight trip into one of the national parks to see more of Mongolia - including staying in a traditional felt tent, which are apparently called ‘gers’, instead of ‘yurts’. The setting was absolutely stunning, with green and brown steppe rolling off to the horizon. The afternoon included some ‘horse-riding’, but this was strictly a token gesture - no riding was required, just sitting atop a tired-looking Monglian horse (they’re tiny) while it did what the guide told it. We were looked after by a local family, who have four gers in addition to their own home - which was made of wood, not felt, and contains the rudiments of modern living - a sink, a tub-loading washing machine, and a PC running a 3D shooter. The mains power was visible, no sign of a phone line, but I had full GSM signal strength (so, better than my flat in Edinburgh, then) the whole time, so maybe they’re online as well. Scary.

In general, rural Mongolia looks like a terrain rendering demo. If you take a detailed height map, apply a generic, featurless green/brown texture, some nice, strongly directional dynamic lighting and a sparse covering of trees, you get Mongolia. If you want to get really fancy, add some sandstone rock outcrops. I’d love to return with some proper climbing gear - all around were places that looked climbable with some basic equipment - I ascended a couple of metres in a few places, but descending is trickier, and Mongolia is not the place to injure oneself.

Despite being pretty warm during the day, at night the temperature dropped fast, so the wood-burning stove in the ger was lit. This lump of cast iron rapidly became very hot, and combined with the insulating walls of the ger, and a thick duvet, a good night’s sleep was had. That night was almost a full-moon, which sadly precluded seeing many stars - but for the first time ever, I witnessed really clear moon shadows, beautiful.

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2008 06 30 james 3d
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