Typical Days

To clarify, I don’t spend all my time having amazing adventures around Asia. I spend most of my time at work editing copy for the English news, commuting to and from work (which takes about 50 minutes each way), and hanging out in my apartment, usually in my boxers, hardly the rockstar lifestyle.

Commuting is nice actually, as more recently I’ve been riding my bike. It’s a pretty straight shot down the west third ring road, and the weather has been great, mid 20’s during the day and high teens at night. And I feel like I’m actually doing Something, as opposed to just sitting around. I’ve noticed some cool places that are still open at 9 or 10 when I’m biking home, and one of these days I might stop to check them out.

Days off I’ve been spending wandering around mostly, and going to wudakou at night. Wandering around is always cool. Yesterday I went to the south west of Beijing, an area I’ve never really explored before. There wasn’t really much going on, but it was cool to go where foreigners normally don’t go—after all there’s nothing to see. I was looking, sort of, for the Muslim district centered around Ox Street. I’ve been eating lots of Muslim food recently (usually at XinJiang restaurants) and I had vague ideas about getting some lunch. There was also supposed to be a pretty cool mosque, though I never found it. What I did find was a huge green building with onion domes, which turned out to be an office, the official department of Islamic Affairs in China.

There are all sorts of quasi embassies around. The night before I went to dinner with a friend at the XinJiang Provincial Bureau compound. Each province apparently has it’s own embassy compound type of thing in the city, so they can keep up with central party policies I guess. A very strange idea.

My friend David (or Zhao Long really), is a good sort. He works for the sports news, and just became the guy in charge of weekly Olympic features. Apparently, CCTV9 is going to spend 7 minutes a week (minimum) for the next two years talking about Olympic developments. They’re pretty into the whole thing. But David is a good guy, 25, exceedingly modern. He has something like 4 cell phones and feels comfortable saying unpatriotic things about the Chinese government.

But he has big issues with Gong Li. Gong Li, the actress. She was Zhang Yimou’s muse for years (he has problems with Zhang Yimou too, for desecrating Chinese history), but last year she starred in Memoirs of a Geisha. This, according to David, is unforgivable. Not only did she portray a Japanese woman, but a Japanese woman of the Profession. I just think it’s funny, but David was deathly serious, and I couldn’t convince him that she was an actress, not a government official, and that her job was to be people she wasn’t, which is sort of the definition of acting. No dice. They’re still not on speaking terms.

But I’ve been eating lots of Muslim food, which is pretty much where the whole thing started. I could cook, and will cook, but in the meantime, I’ve become a regular at a restaurant down the street, where I’ve been having lunch at least three times a week. I always get the same thing, and while I feel I should probably branch out, it’s so good that I’m not sure if I want to. My lunch consists of a “small” serving of Chao Mian Pian, or, stir fried noodle pieces, a small grilled naan bread, and a pot of tea. The Chao Main Pian is an enormous dish, full of noodles, peppers, some lamb, onions, tomatoes, and Chinese Garlic Shoots (which we don’t have for some reason back stateside). The grilled naan is the closest thing the Chinese really have to bread, and it doesn’t even count because it’s not really Chinese. And the tea is tea. It’s great, and fills me beyond completely. The whole thing costs a $1.15.

Wudakou is the student bar district north of me about 15 minutes by bike (but only because of traffic). Situated between Peking University and Qinghua University, there are tons of bars and cheap outdoor food places. It’s much cooler and cheaper (especially with the lack of taxi fare) than anywhere else around. That said, I’ve been spending most of my time wandering into places and standing by a column, looking at everybody else who has classmates and wondering if the homework would be worth it.

I’ve been hanging out at D-22, one of the premiere rock clubs in the city, which would be great if I were really into rock and punk and all that. I started because my friend Lindsey, currently in the states for Halloween Season, took me there, and new lots of people, and it was lots of fun. Solo is slightly less so, but I figure if I keep showing up I might get to know some of the kids who hang around there, which would be fun, and besides, experiencing new cultures is the name of the study abroad game, right? Chinese culture I know, but not Chinese Punk Culture.

Yesterday, standing by the subway waiting to meet a friend for dinner (for all my whining I do actually know a couple kids in the city) I met Sam somebody, who saw my Moxie T-shirt and decided I might be me. He’s a friend of a friend, and the whole thing was about as random as it gets, so that was cool. I’m trying to decide if it was more random or less than meeting the same cute British girl 3 days apart in completely different locations in New York this summer, though to be honest, they were both free events. However, both days I was shat upon by inconsiderate birds, and since that didn’t happen last night, I think that the meeting with Sam was more fortuitous.

I might stop the random play by play style sometime, and try to write About China, instead of about myself, but we’ll see what happens. New pictures from this weekend’s wanders are up. peas and carrots. martin.