Aside from work a lot of things happened during week 25. On Tuesday I started googling for underground live music in Beijing, and I read about Club 13, D-22 and a lot of other places. However, one thing in particular caught my eye: three German bands were playing at Yugong Yishan on that very Tuesday! Yugong Yishan is a reference to a Chinese proverb about a foolish man attempting – and succeeding – to remove a mountain. But that has very little to do with the actual club itself.

I got distinctive flashbacks to my high school years; the place was small and crowded, and the audio was decent but not brilliant. The bands were also decent and quite worth watching, even though I guess I won’t be telling my grandchildren about them in years to come. There were also lots of Germans present at the club. Apparently this was part of a Chinese-German cultural exchange thing.

I don’t recall the band names, but they were a pop band with a female singer, a pop-punk band with some young guys, and some celtic death metal to top it all off. Very interesting mix.

On Wednesday we decided to explore the Sanlitun bar area, starting with a visit to The Tree, a quite hidden and secretive little Belgian pub. They have an excellent athmosphere, cozy interior, good selection of beer and quite possibly one of the best stone-oven baked pizzas that I’ve ever tasted. And some quite expensive beer…

We moved on to the appropriately nicknamed Gauntlet – the tourist trap street of Sanlitun – where we got ripped off and ended up paying 80 RMB for a Heineken at one of the places. 80 RMB equals about 8 Euros. That’s one-a expensive-a beer-a! After that we learned to always look at the menu first. Another interesting thing that happened was that we got lured into a place that offered pole dancing. Unfortunately for us we forgot to check what gender…

Eventually a girl did go up on the stage as well, but by that time we were howling with laughter, thinking that we just had gotten screwed for the second time that night. Still, that pole dancing guy really was impressive!

A lot more restaurants and pubs followed that week, and we explored the Sanlitun area quite well. The 80′s night at Alfa is particularly worth mentioning! That place rocks. I also hadn’t had enough of live music so I watched a phenomenal reggae band at the MAO Live House, close to Houhai. Quite impressive – and well worth the 60 RMB entrance fee.

Afterwards I went on to Houhai, a bar district next to the lake from which it receives its name, and ended up chatting with a Danish troubadour.

“So, I guess you’re singing to earn a little extra at the side?”
“Oh.. Nah… I just get free booze.”

For some reason I decided to walk around the lake and ended up meeting a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) harassing a couple of guards.

I spent a couple of hours walking along with the banana, his wife and a friend of theirs, experiencing bad Vietnamese coffee and strange youths fishing for clams or something in the lake.

After a while I bade them a drunken farewell and made my way home.

The week ended with a trip to the Forbidden City. It’s a very impressive place…but somehow not as impressive as I expected. It’s a gigantic area covered with statues and elaborately painted houses; it’s strange to think that all of it belonged to the Emperor in days of yore, but it wasn’t varied enough to keep up my interest very long. Well worth a visit, but nothing compared to the Great Wall. I have high hopes that the Summer Palace will be more interesting, whenever I end up going there.

Some more shopping also ensued. 70 RMB for an 128 GB USB memory? Too good to be true?

Indeed, it was too good to be true. After filling it with 32 GB of data it crashed. I wonder what’s inside…

Hmm, looks like a USB controller chip of some sort. What does the flash chip say?

D’oh! The sneaky bastards! They removed all useful information from the flash chip!

Stay tuned for more Beijing stories in the following weeks.

Cynical Stuff has been perilously low on updates lately, and there have been good reasons: personal issues, social activities and a lot more to do at work. In fact, we’ve been quite busy preparing a partnership with a Chinese company – and I ended up getting to spend two months in Beijing this summer. This is the first post in which I tell of the adventures me and my two colleagues have in Beijing during June and July.

Upon landing in Beijing everyone gets their temperature taken even before getting off the plane. The fear of swine flu is rampant and no sick foreigners are wanted inside China. Unfortunately for me I traveled to China one day after I got back from a five-day hard rock festival, and I had a massive cold. I ended up examined by two doctors; they wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that I’ve been boozing and sleeping on the ground for five days, so of course I have a cold! But eventually I got to enter China if I promised to report to the nearest hospital as soon as I felt worse.

Yeah, I really planned on doing that.

The first night was spent at a vegetarian restaurant called Pure Lotus, owned by Buddhist monks. Very impressive presentation, but the food was nothing special. Still, that’s the first time I’ve seen something made out of mushrooms look like steak.

The following days were filled with bright sunshine, an unholy temperature, meetings and my first Peking duck. When Chinese people eat duck they don’t mess around – everything of the duck is eaten! Duck liver, duck feet, duck tongues…

I still feel ill when I think about it.

The hotel is located in the Central Business District of Beijing, in an area populated by foreigners and prosperous Chinese. The area is pretty enough, with a lovely view from my room at the ninth floor.

We did some brief sightseeing the first days, but a deep sense of desorientation is always present – Beijing is big with more inhabitants than the entire country of Sweden. Me and a colleague intended to go to the bar street in Sanlitun – but we somehow got completely lost and ended up walking around aimlessly for hours until we magically found ourselves back at the hotel again. We sure learned our lesson then: take a taxi when you want to go to a new place in Beijing!

On Saturday we were brought to the Great Wall by people from the company; a lovely experience that would have been infinitely more troublesome without their aid.

The Great Wall is impressive. There’s just no getting around it. Everything about it is impressive – the sheer size, the location, the surroundings, the history, the view, the crowds of hawkers trying to make you buy more-or-less useless trinkets. It’s also impressively hard work to climb the wall and its steep stairs. We were probably half dead after climbing to the top at the Mutianyu section.

But the view was worth it; excellent for posing and making an epic picture.

After all that hard work we still weren’t satisfied, so we visited Silk Market as well – a notorious tourist trap. You need clothes? Electronics? Trinkets? A locomotive? You can probably get everything there. We did some awful bargaining and stocked up on bare necessities like underwear and socks, leaving the major shopping for the following weeks. Then we decided to call it a week, and spent the rest of the time having relaxing stays at bars and restaurants.

A slow start on our Beijing trip, but stay tuned for exciting things – there’s a lot more to come!