The weekend we didn’t go to Qingdao

Oh China… you’re a great country but your train ticket system is a MESS. (You can only book up to ten days in advance and it’s a complete scramble to buy tickets because it’s you vs the rest of the Chinese population – who, it must be said, know how to use their elbows and have no shame about doing so. Also, you can’t do any of it online.) Add this to Tomb Sweeping Festival, and Claire and I were stuck in Beijing rather than heading down to the beaches and beer of Qingdao with our friends Kat (German) and Rafer (Kiwi). So, since the office was closed Monday/Tuesday I decided to treat the weekend as a holiday anyway, albeit a holiday where Saturday counted as a normal work day. We’d threatened to make seagull noises while drinking cans of Tsingtao and paddling in buckets, but in the end we saw bits of Beijing I hadn’t been to before and quite a memorable staycation.

On Friday night, we went out for a few drinks which almost inevitably (since I had no intention of going out) turned into me rolling into bed at 5.30am and struggling to keep my eyes open all morning at work. Fortunately, I’d scheduled myself a day of catching up on admin stuff requiring zero brainpower. Ah foresight! Saturday night we had a quiet one and on Sunday, Claire and I went for our Usual at the Den. We’ve been there pretty much every weekend since the dawn of our friendship and always have the same thing so Susan, the waitress, is just going through the motions when she gives us menus. She knows it, we know it… one day I’ll surprise the world by NOT ordering a Sunday Roast with orange juice and tea. Not for the foreseeable future though. (In case you’re interested, Claire always has a bacon sandwich.)

After Bacon Saturday (belated) we walked down to Ritan Park, which is possibly my favourite place in Beijing. After cycling down and parking up Delilah and Bill (the bikes) we wandered around with the families in the sunshine. I’m going to write more about Ritan Park another time, but we sat for a while by the lake and did some people watching, strolled past the fishing ponds to see kids catching goldfish with lines and nets then toddling past with their catches in plastic bags and I joined the hordes of people taking pictures of the magnolia trees. No climbing on this occasion.

Kat and Rafer came back on the Sunday night train which arrived about 5am. Fortunately, they waited until 8 to pester us for entertainment. I left the three of them making a plan and went for a run down to Ritan Park (even awesomer in the morning) and by the time I’d done that and showered, after much procrastinating they’d decided on wandering around Yashow Market and getting icecream at Coldstone Creamery. The day passed lazily away in the sunshine – after icecream we wandered back to one of our staple eateries, known to us as “Turkish” even though it’s Xinjiang food and nothing whatsoever to do with Turkey. They do the best chicken wings this side of the moon though, have cold beer in the fridge and always say hello when we walk past so it’s quite a good place to hang out. We were there for a few hours catching up before heading back to the hostel and eventually deciding that two-for-one burgers at Blue Frog were the way forward. Blue Frog burgers, apparently, are the nicest in Beijing… unfortunately I fell asleep in/over mine (the burger was rescued before I face-planted it) so I couldn’t tell you. The others enjoyed theirs though, and had so much fun making fun of me that you wouldn’t believe.

After the laziness of Monday came the supreme awesomeness of Pedalo Tuesday. We headed out to Houhai (a lake in the north west of Beijing’s central area i.e. inside the 2^nd ring road) and straight to the docks. Kat speaks Chinese, but I ended up talking to the guy in the hut and managed to get us a four person duck headed pedalo with my carefully honed miming skills and a smattering of basic Mandarin. Proud? Me? Yeah! Well, you try miming pedalo and not looking mental!! Rafer and I “drove” first while Kat and Claire took in the scenery. 

Unfortunately weren’t properly prepared for the high seas – no picnic, no beer and no cutlasses or pirate hats for pedalo boarding antics. We still managed to have a good giggle though. Piracy another day perhaps… We went for a pizza lunch at The Hutong Pizza afterwards; awesome pizza according to the Beijinger and to us. We ended the day with a Leverage marathon and so endeth the weekend that we didn’t go to Qingdao.

Staycation in your hometown? Have you found something cool and new in the city you live in?

Spring Festival in Beijing

Spring Festival (Chinese New Year to you and I) is the biggest and most important festival / holiday of the year in China. For some Chinese people it’s their one trip “home” in the year, so this time of year the entirety of China is on the move. The nation went on the move in the first week of February, but Lantern Festival (Feb 18^th) sort of marks the end of the festivities, so Beijing is starting to get back to itself. Unfortunately, I haven’t done any travelling over the festive period. On one hand, there are far worse places to spend Spring Festival than Beijing and actually it was good to avoid the crammed trains and planes and all the stressed, sweaty people that go with mass migration. On the other hand, it seems like everyone around me is travelling, and I’m going nowhere fast.  Not home, not travelling, not even leaving Beijing at the moment! Thinking positively though, I saw a different side of Beijing too, and got to do some of the touristy stuff that I’ve missed around the city.

China is famous for fireworks. I know this, you know this; what I hadn’t realised is just how prolific they are. The entire week was like living in a fairytale warzone, bangs and glitter all over the city. Official statistics are that over Spring Festival there were 2 deaths, 388 injuries and 194 fires from fireworks – and that’s just the reported ones in Beijing alone! I’m pleased to report that I suffered nothing worse than surprise from a cracker falling on my nose, though a former roommate of mine wrote off a down jacket from cinder burns. For New Year itself there wasn’t an official firework display as we’d have it back home, anyone and everyone can buy them and set them off pretty much anywhere, so that’s what happens! The one that exploded down the drain was quite entertaining... At New Year (2^nd Feb) the hostel set some off at midnight – we all stood round, watched them explode and dodged the fallout of the crackers. All you really have to do to see fireworks this time of year though is look out the window. The hostel was busier for Spring Festival than I saw it at actual New Year and Christmas (mostly because everywhere was closed and backpackers have to have somewhere to party!) so it was a really fun atmosphere, and the fireworks literally just stopped going off yesterday.

For New Year’s Day (Feb 3^rd) we went to Chaoyang Park International Carnival. I can’t think what I was expecting (except for a throng of people, but it’s China – that’s a given) but the number of end of the pier sideshow “hook-a-duck” style games and thousands of stalls selling really weird tacky stuff wasn’t precisely it. It was a fun day though – Claire and I went with four guys from the hostel and we spent the best part of the day wandering around, trying to win stuff and sampling random food from the stalls. I could’ve done some jugglers or acrobats… lanterns, dragon dances – anything a bit more stereotypically ‘traditional Chinese’ than inflatable mallets, but heyho. 

The day after, in search of something a little more ‘cultural’ Claire and I went to Dongyue Daoist temple fair about a twenty minute stroll south of the Workers Stadium. 

Daoism is cool. It’s Buddhism with fire and brimstone – around the edges of the temple were rooms with statues illustrating exactly what will happen to you in ever department of Hell. ‘Department’ of Hell no less – you have to love how insidious bureaucracy is in every facet of Chinese life, both now and afterwards!! My personal favourite was the room with one poor guy having his tongue cut out by an astonishingly red demon and another guy whose intestines were just falling out of his mid-section. Nice. The temple fair was a funny combination of devotion – people lighting incense and reflecting quietly – and travelling show. We caught the second half of a puppet show, missed some acrobatics and were invited to try and win ourselves some manky looking giant cuddly toys. There were loads of souvenir stalls too; choice examples were posed cockroaches in glass jars, nodding dog style plasticine models of your face, and anything and everything with a rabbit theme. FYI, it’s now the Year of the Rabbit.

After that, we decided we’d had enough of culture for a few days, so the next thing of note I saw/did was go to the Temple of Heaven on the last day before going back to work. It was good to get out into some greenery for once – Temple of Heaven, apart from the temple, is a huge park all filled with cyprus trees. It was surprisingly peaceful, even filled with tourists. It just made me realised how much I need the outdoors in my life! Chinese people and parks have a wonderful relationship that I think I’ll muse on at a later stage, but the best thing about my visit to Temple of Heaven was just wandering round outside. I didn’t bother going into the temple itself – people watching is way more interesting! I think the best bit was chatting with a tiny old Chinese man who was writing English riddles on the ground in water.

I’m back to the grindstone now (as you can probably tell from how far away from events this was posted!!) – more to come as soon as I can!