TIC: Late February- Settling in Beijing

2-17-10New Years day has passed here, but the Chinese celebrate the whole week. All the stores and restaurants are closed and Beijing still sounds like a warzone at night. Justin just left for Paris to meet up with Claudia, so it’s just Scott and I until school starts next week. Scott and I took the skateboards out exploring and ended up taking a little alley that popped out right here. I finally found an open store that would sell me a SIM card so I could use my cell phone in Beijing.

It’s still really cold here, but we got some great blue skies for the new year. This area is called Houhai, it has a lot of history, but now it’s mostly bars. Scott and I took our skate boards out on the frozen pond and had some fun slipping all over.

2-18-10Scott and I decided to take the subway out to the boonies of Beijing. We got off and just skated but didn’t see much. The fireworks people are still out in full force, even in the more desolate areas. We found a little park with a soccer field and played soccer against some guys for a couple hours. It was really fun.

I’ve been trying to find a place to live with Chinese roommates and I stumbled upon a classified for a homestay so I went to check it out. It was just a middle class man, wife and kid. The place was really far so I’d have to think about it, but it did have this great vegetable market down the street.

I came back and Scott had made a nice big batch of tortillas. These are worth their weight in gold here.

2-19-10Some of Scott and Justin’s Chinese friends brought us to this restaurant over by Houhai for dinner. It was ridiculous- a line of 50 people or so to get slop shoveled on the tray. The slop soup was the worst- a gelatinous mixture of fat chunks, flour, blood and intestines. I tried my best but I couldn’t get through two spoonfuls. Here’s a picture of the soup and some funny reading on how to eat it- http://en.beijing2008.cn/spectators/beijing/food/list/n214257951.shtml

An old watchtower in the Houhai area. The Chinese friends wanted us to go with them to some underground music show so we walked and walked…

We made it to a random door in an unmarked building and went in for the music, the ticket was expensive and the music was terrible. They did have a cool bathroom sign though.

2-21-10I took a random subway and ended up getting off at Qianmen which is just South of Tian’An Men Square. This is a cool old walking street with lots of little alleys.

Here’s an old wall to the city. There used to be a perimeter around the center, but it was torn down and all that remains is the guard tower portions.

2-22-10I haven’t found any apartments with Chinese people closer to school, so I called Mr. Wang and told him I’d move in. The deal is I teach their kid English an hour every weekday and they give me a room and cook for me. This is Mr. Wang making some carrots and potatoes.

The onions on the right were the best. The rice was really good too, I’m not sure what their secret is, perhaps its the super cool pressure rice cooker.

Xiao Xiao is 4.5 years old, but he goes to school every day from 8 to 6 PM! Including Saturdays and Sundays. It seems like Chinese kids don’t ever get time to play.

2-24-10Well the one good thing about living so far from school is I get a lot of chances to meet people on the subway and practice Chinese. I met this group while we were waiting, they’re students from Hebei who came to take some standardized tests.

I had to go, but we met up later that night to explore a snack street. The street was all closed, but an arcade was open so we went in an played some video games. This guy smoked me at the fighting game, but I smoked him at the racing game.

I met up with the gang the next morning to get brainwashed.. errr see the Chinese Pledge of Allegiance in Tian’An Men Square. There were tons of people here to watch it.

I was supposed to register for school today, so I headed back home and got some stuff ready. I went out to get some copies on the way and met some cool people at the shop. We chatted and ate lunch together while I waited for my pictures and what not to print out.

I finally made it to school with my things, registered and took a super hard placement test. Scott and I met up with the Hebei students and went out for some dinner. This guy’s name is Big Bird. These masks are a pretty common sight here.

Speaking of masks, there’s a couple ways of welding in China- One is to cut holes in newspaper and attach it to glasses frames, while the more common is to point the welder, look away and blindly spot weld. No wonder all my things are falling apart.

I met up with Scott to show him Qianmen.

This crazy dog lady started pointing and bumbling at us.

Nearby was a little kid on a leash.

We rode out from Qianmen to see what we could find.

Here we found a nice ground zero. One of the guys walking through explained that the gvt. here paid the people living here virtually nothing and forced them to leave so they could knock the place down and put up a building. It’s really sad, but in defense of the Motherland, the houses are in the city center and horrendously dilapidated. They should at least implement a relocation program to provide the families with new homes.