Week Two: Street Art & Fried Fish
On Adjusting
It's officially been two weeks since I arrived in Beijing, and honestly I feel like I'm more exhausted now than I was when I arrived. I've adjusted to the time difference for the most part, but I'm back to staying up way too late and waking up way too early, one of the things I was hoping would stop after the school year ended. I'm also reading about the same amount as I did during school, though thankfully this is all recreational. Since arriving, I've gotten through 26 books, and am partway through the 27th (I know, I'm boring, but it's tough living on the "outskirts" of the city).
The place I've been staying is nice - the building itself is a little creepy though. It's very industrial with lots of heavy, tan metal doors that have writing all over them and lights that you have to stomp your foot at to get them to turn on. It's almost like living in a bunker - if bunkers were 26 stories tall and had windows. Bikes are strewn across the sidewalk in front of the building, and throughout the hallways, and finding a parking spot is like finding a hundred bucks on the ground - highly unlikely. I'm anywhere from 30 to 70 minutes away from the city center by subway, which makes it tough to do things after getting off work. Most of the time, I just go home and read, or watch a few episodes of Netflix (assuming my VPN is functional and Netflix will even load). While it might be boring sometimes, it's also nice living on the outskirts of the city, in a way. I don't have to deal with rush hour on the metro, and the noise of the city is muffled by the distance. However, that's soon to change, as Annie bought a new house a few months ago, and provided she's done decorating it (I helped pick out one of the wall colors on Sunday), we'll likely be moving there. Her new house is in 朝阳区 (Chaoyang district), near 三里屯 (Sanlitun), a popular area for tourists, college students, and expats. With much better night life and a lot more things to do close by, I'm hoping my blog posts will get more exciting in the weeks to come. On the downside, this means braving an hour-plus subway ride during peak rush hour, crammed into tiny cars with dozens of other people. Not exactly my idea of a good time, but you win some, you lose some.
On Work
Work has been about the same - internet troubles interrupt my ability to do work, and at this point, I'm convinced that I'll be spending most of my money paying for extra gigs on my portable wifi device - Skyroam (an amazing investment if you're going somewhere you don't have reliable cell data, though). I've been put on a bunch more projects, and I'm honestly surprised at the amount of work they have for me to do, especially since my Chinese isn't the greatest. Right now, I'm juggling four different projects - writing up job descriptions for Zhicheng's latest project, CLIA, an NGO that will be based out of Geneva; creating a mock-up of an ECPAT overview of China's attempts to solve issues involving the exploitation of children; researching school anti-bullying laws in place in countries across the world, and going over a compilation of policy and legislation recommendations for ASEAN Member States, compiled by the Global Study on Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism.
I'm still the only foreign intern to arrive, but I'm hoping others show up soon - it'll be good to spend weekends or evenings hanging out with friends, instead of doing the tourism thing on my own. I have, however, started eating lunch in the cafe more frequently, when there's space. I still get free lunch every day, and it's been an interesting experience, to say the least. There's always fresh 馒头(mantou - a type of steamed bun/bread), and foods ranging from 凉面 (cold noodles - my favorite) to 烤肉 (BBQ meat), and 葱油饼 (scallion pancakes). There's some odder foods as well, for example, one of the things in my lunchbox today were fried whole fish. Yes, the whole fish, eyeballs, gills, bones, and all. I ate a bit of one, but I couldn't quite get over the sight of it's deep-fried eye staring back at me. Probably not an experience I'll repeat, if I can help it.
Exploring the City
This past Monday, I headed to a Mariott hotel not too far from where I lived - about 30 minutes by the metro during peak rush hour. There, at Casalingo, I met up with several William & Mary professors for a Beijing admitted student's and alumni event. Before I left, Professor Stevenson reached out and asked if I was interested in attending and I readily agreed - some of my good friends this past year have been LLM students from China, and I was excited to have the opportunity to answer questions that future LLM students had about life in Williamsburg.
There, I met a handful of admitted or prospective students, and another handful of LLM alumni. One of the alumni, Kevin, offered to meet up with me to grab coffee and explain the Chinese legal system a bit better. As it turns out, Professor Heymann was kind enough to reach out to him, and ask him to connect with me so he could explain how China's intellectual property system works, since he's an IP attorney at a firm near 天安门. One of the prospective students, John, spoke with me for a long time about my thoughts on the United States, and what living in Williamsburg was like. He was extremely excited about the opportunity to study abroad, as he told me he'd never left Asia before. Currently, he's a third year university student, studying law and English.
Casalingo is an Italian restaurant - the signs say it aims to be the best Italian restaurant in Beijing. The restaurant is small, but swanky, with dozens of varieties of wine stacked behind the bar, and an area for catering events just like the one I attended. There were almost ten different desserts, fruit, charcuterie, and tons of other foods I don't remember. By the time I left, I was thankful to be walking back to the subway, since I'm pretty sure I ate two days worth of food.
On Saturday, I went to 七九八, or 798 District, the main art district in Beijing. It's full of street art and graffiti, restaurants, local shops with handmade everything, and dozens of art galleries, both classical and contemporary. 798 is home to five sub-districts, A-E.There doesn't seem to be a theme to any of them, turning 七九八 into a massive labyrinth of narrow streets, shops, and restaurants. There's several main streets running through the district, but a majority of them are alley-sized. Unfortunately, most of the galleries cost something to enter, so I didn't walk into many of them, in an effort to save money. The place is full of a diverse spectrum of eateries and galleries - a traditional German restaurant, a gallery of works exclusively from Iran, another building dedicated entirely to Danish art.
It was about 100 degrees while I was there, so I took any excuse I could get to hide away in the shade. For a while, I sat underneath a sculpture of three T-rexes (is that the right plural?) in a three-story cage and watched people do impromptu photoshoots in front of a wall full of various bits of street art. If I had to pick my favorite piece, it's either the boy with the microphone, on the right, or another piece just outside of one of the first galleries in the A sub-district. In Chinese, it asked people to write down their "lost love" or someone they loved, but who didn't love them back, who didn't even know they existed. There were names from all parts of the world, from China to the U.S., to somewhere in Scandinavia, based on the name. I think, though, the funniest part of it was seeing the names of dozens and dozens of K-pop idols, and bands. BTS and BIG BANG were etched in huge, green letters, with Jimin, Jin, Jung-kook, T.O.P, and G-Dragon (members of both those bands) scribbled beneath it in various other styles of handwriting, and colors. I wonder if either of those idol groups has ever visited 798 and seen their names written on the wall, so big they almost look like the centerpiece of the whole thing.
I had finished both the water bottles I'd brought with me about halfway through my trip here, and I was starving, so I figured it was about time to stop for some food. Earlier, I'd seen a small cafe that offered watermelon juice and other refreshing-sounding foods, so I wandered my way back (it took much longer than I had planned - I had literally no idea where I was, and when you don't have internet, you don't have an accurate GPS signal in China, even when you download an offline map). When I finally found my way back, I ordered my watermelon juice and a fruit and yogurt platter. Unfortunately, the watermelon juice tasted (shockingly) like lightly flavored water. The fruit platter was good, although I had an unwelcome encounter with durian because of it. Durian, for those of you who don't know, is banned on most flights, because it smells awful. Some people describe it as smelling like something rotten, others describe it as smelling like a sewer. I personally think it smells like feet. If you can get past the smell (I honestly can't), it tastes creamy, kind of like butterscotch. I was still thirsty, after another twenty-minute trek back to the A sub-district, so on my way out, I stopped at Moxi's Tea. Next to a Haagen-Dazs, it was tempting to grab something I was familiar with, but I was determined to try something new. To be totally honest, fruit tea and boba aren't exactly new to me, but hey, I'd never been to a Moxi's Tea before so it counts, right? After spending too long looking at the menu trying to figure out what I wanted (I later noticed there was a book with pictures so foreigners could just point), I settled on 满满红柚 (it means 'fully packed red grapefruit‘ which makes sense, since the cup was filled with huge slices of ruby grapefruit as well as the tea). It was sour, but it was delicious. I almost got a second for the train trip home, but I decided to save the money (all six yuan) for some food later.
Finally, I had one last excursion on Sunday. I went with Annie and Ariel to 丰台区公园, a local public park, where we went to feed fish. It was a gorgeous area, and even had a tiny carnival-style amusement park for kids to play at.
The park, and all its bodies of water (there were two smaller ponds, and one much larger one) were all gorgeous, and it was nice watching people relax by the water. There was a group of older men on one edge of the park, all exercising. Now, this seems totally normal, but the odd part of it was their exercise consisted entirely of using bullwhips in an intricate, yet repetitive pattern. I gave them a wide berth. I'm sure they knew what they were doing, but I'm not sure I trusted myself to not get injured. Afterwards, we headed to KTV, a karaoke room in some corner of 丰台. I didn't sing much, mostly because they didn't have very many English songs, but it was interesting listening to some of the early-2000s to 2010s music that Annie and Ariel chose. All of it seemed sad, or at least very dramatic, in one way or the other.
Overall, it was a successful week, and I can feel myself settling in a little bit more. In a few weeks, it will be the Dragon Boat Festival, and I'll have a few days off, so I'm planning to trek up to Harbin (one of the northernmost cities in China) for some much cooler weather, and an interesting mix of Chinese and Russian culture. The province, 黑龙江 (Heilongjiang) borders Russia's Amur River Valley, and the cultures there have mixed so thoroughly that they even have their own "little St. Petersburg". A week or so after that, I'll be headed off to Seoul, South Korea, to visit a friend from college and explore!
See you next week!