At this time (end of June, beginning of July) I had been in Beijing for almost a month. Things were starting to settle down; the excitement was gone; the shining pearl of unfamiliar strangeness that was Beijing was starting to feel strangely familiar. It might have been due to my adventures the weekend before, or simply the fact that I needed to rest, but a few days went by without anything worthwhile to report. Up at 7 AM, taxi to work, sit inside the office for 9 hours, and then a taxi to a restaurant or bar for dinner. Then back to the hotel for a movie and some light reading before doing the same thing again the next day.

Sounds awfully dull. And I guess it was; but it was exactly what all three of us needed by now.

We frequented restaurants and bars around the Sanlitun / Gongti (Workers Stadium) area most of the time. There we could find English-speaking personnel and Western-style food; in retrospect I guess we might have had a slight case of homesickness, and we clung to the few Western things we could find. Sanlitun is a strange mix of outright tourist trap bars, expensive imported goods shopping malls (The Village), and cozy back alleys with pleasant restaurants, bars and small shops. It’s just a matter of finding the right places to visit.

This is not one of those, even though the statues are pretty cute:

Speaking of food, Chinese food ranges from extraordinarily good and cheap to…very strange. It’s a small wonder that we felt inclined toward familiar dishes after sights like this:

Looks just like a tiny baby hand, doesn’t it? It’s things like that that made us order pizza from The Kro’s Nest on Wednesday instead of going out to eat. That place has excellent pizzas but unfortunately for us we didn’t realize that a medium pizza is not really a medium pizza. It’s a gargantuan pizza that could feed a soccer team for two weeks! We cheekily ordered three medium pizzas (“Yeah, I’m pretty hungry. Let’s go for a medium each”) and ended up with pizza-stinking rooms for two days until we convinced the housecleaners that indeed, we were quite finished with the pizzas and we were not going to eat a single bite more of them, and they were very welcome to dispose of them.

Thursday we went to a soccer game. Beijing against…some blue team. I had never been to a soccer match before, and it was a thrilling experience to be present when 25 000 screaming hooligans shouted their joy as Beijing scored 1-0. But no matter how exciting it was, it wasn’t exiting enough to make me stay for the entire game. Me and a colleague went to The Den instead to have a beer and some dinner.

Ironically enough, they had the game running in The Den so we could follow the second half while sipping an ice-cold Corona. On the way home we had trouble getting a taxi so my colleague decided to call it quits and took the subway home. Let’s just say that taxi always wins, even if one has to wait for a while to catch a cab.

In the hotel I noticed that my ever-growing collection of complimentary water bottles on the toilet had come to a stop. It ended up at ten bottles – from an original two. The bottles are still there, and I really don’t know what the hotel personnel are thinking… Oughtn’t they have noticed that I prefer to buy tastier water in larger bottles?

Friday was a great day. I guess our brief bout of homesickness had left us, because we found our way to a large sports bar called Goose & Duck (since the owner is Canadian, he explained while we emptied our bladders next to each other, and his wife is Chinese). There we had a good meal, good beer and got treated to a free comedy magic show with magician Arthur Trace. Quite funny, and quite a good show! I think I’m going to watch it again one of these days.

But the fun didn’t stop there. We had some more beers and got to see cheerleaders and a Phillipino live rock band, and we ended up staying at G&D until the band had finished playing and most of the crowd staggered home in a drunken stupor. Go Friday!

Saturday we were all envigorated after such an excellent beginning of the weekend, so we went to the Happy Valley amusement park. It’s a very big place, very well-made and was full of Chinese people gawking at us whiteys. Four times we were stopped so that people could have pictures taken with us. Hm… Maybe we could arrange a deal with the park owners, and act as an attraction?

The rides were awesome. At lest two of them. The rollercoasters weren’t plentiful, but what they had sure worked well! Heard from one colleague: “why did you let me convince you to go on this one?!”

Sunday was quite slow after all that excitement, and I really didn’t want to go anywhere. “Come on,” they chided, “you have to join us for dinner at least! Let’s take a walk to Gongti!” I knew I should have trusted my intuition, because ten minutes out the door, the heavens opened up for us. And not in a good way. We were soaking wet by the time we got to Danger Doyle’s, ending a half-dull week in a very fitting manner.

This marks half of my time in Beijing. Four weeks to go and lots more to experience…

Tags: bars, beijing, china, gongti, goose & duck, happy valley, travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 7:41 am and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.