Return to Normalcy (or Escape from Beijing!)

December 15, 2006

“You can turn the city upside down/
like an umbrella/
but it won’t keep you dry.”
- DNTEL

Three weeks ago I walked into Shi’s office to discuss my departure. He’d heard it through my trusted grapevine that I had decided to leave Rong Cheng to move to Beijing and he invited me up to talk. There was an orchid placed in the corner of the room and he mentioned that it only blooms for three months out of the year. I can’t say for sure whether or not he was alluding to my four-month stint there on the edge of rural China, but I enjoyed the performance regardless. He made generous offers to procure employment for me at the local school of television and Weihai University, but he was also frank that these did not compare to Beijing. I told him I’d think about it, and I did, but the things I’m looking for presently are not there.

Over the next few days I sent out e-mails that were not replied to and made phone calls to non-existent numbers. The facts slowly dawned on me. In order to stay in Beijing, I would have to locate a job, renew my passport (7-10 days), obtain a visa (with letter of employment), secure an apartment (6 months rent upfront), and commit to a six-month stint in China—all in under 20 days. This isn’t impossible, but it would certainly be unpleasant.

My next to last week in Rong Cheng I taught my students who are going to America. After our second class we went to the Leisure Café. We talked about America and what they should expect when they go there. Fat people. The great abundance of stuff at the gas station. Dirty talk. They asked me if I had a gun. I told them that not everybody has guns, but most people are allowed to.

I missed my homeland. I missed the crazy people there, my family and friends, chocolate, good ice cream, milkshakes, and sitting on the couch watching television. It became clear to me that I was homesick.

I’ve never been homesick before, never in all the times that I was somewhere else. I’ve missed home, but I’ve never been overcome by it the way I was when I decided to leave China.

My leave-taking was subject to all of the accoutrements of Chinese culture. I was invited for lunch and dinner and given strong drink, my friend’s grandmother sewed me 2 pairs of colorfully stitched soles for my shoes, and then another friend’s grandmother sewed me about 6 more pairs, and I became leery of any more “grandmothers” out there sewing brightly colored shoe soles. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, the ritual is light, but the cordiality is heavy. If the shoe soles came heavy like the dumplings, I would have to begin turning them away, and I worried that this might somehow affect my fortune.

By virtue of leaving though, I did have the perfect excuse to throw an American party. I printed flyers and handed them out. This seemed to confuse people. The serve-yourself fixings bar also threw people off. The chicken wings were a big hit, as were the dance and air guitar instruction and my impromptu rendition of the White Stripes’ “Elephant,” although people did begin to leave shortly after…



I gave away all the things I had accumulated in China and I still couldn’t close my bags. When I left I had a huge overweight suitcase, a fully-packed hiking rucksack, an overstuffed computer bag, and a loaded backpack. Unfortunately I had to leave behind the large gold-framed Jesus stitching that Yuan had given me.



In appreciation of my stay, the school administration gave me four medium-sized glass representations of a cabbage, three pigs, a pig holding a cabbage, and a fish in the shape of a vase where you put the flowers in its mouth. These I added to my menagerie of personal belongings. I was then ceremoniously deposited at the airport to begin the long journey home.

Upon arrival in Beijing I spoke to airport employees at the information desk who assisted me in purchasing a ticket to New York. I would have two nights in Beijing before my departure to sort myself out for the return home. There is no leaving that does not carry with it some emotional toll.

I braved Beijing’s rush hour traffic by bus, a long, tedious rite of passage back into the immense sprawl of metropolitan life. I disembarked at the Beijing Railway Station and hauled my various apparatus to the curb and hailed a taxi. By taxi we dove back into the city’s glow-in-the-dark circulatory system, through its spaghetti-laced network of veins and conduits, navigating the complex hive of apartments in Beijing’s second ring.

Alone and exhausted in the back of the taxi I felt somewhat disconnected from the world around me. I had no idea where I was really, aside from in a taxicab somewhere in Beijing. Everything looked the same. I was in no danger. If I were to be let off here I would simply hop another in the infinite supply of taxis. I had money to buy food, clothes to spare, and the address of my destination, but I had no bearings and only a rudimentary grasp of the native language. I looked forward to arriving somewhere.

My good friend and sometime travel agent Mona Bei had made reservations for me at a hotel in Beijing. At check–in it came to the desk clerk’s attention that, not only was there no reservation in my name, but my visa had expired. I tried phoning Mona with no success and then tried to convince the desk attendant that my passport didn’t expire until Jan. 5, a full two weeks hence. He showed me the stamp that stated that I had arrived on August 8, and the fine print on my visa that stipulated that it was valid for the duration of 60 days after entry. I tried in vain to explain to him that it was a multiple-entry visa and that I wasn’t required to leave the country, but he was relentless. The Chinese government does not allow foreigners without valid stamps to rent rooms in Beijing.

I started to wonder. What happens to foreigners, like myself, who accidentally end up in a country illegally? I tried my luck at two other nearby hotels. One of the desk clerks made a surreptitious phone call to the district police station, only informing me afterward that she had reached an answering machine. I quietly slipped out of the lobby through the revolving doors.

Dragging all of my luggage and glass pigs and cabbages down a street in Beijing in the bitter cold, I thought that I was making a good decision to leave the country at this juncture. If I could last two nights without getting arrested or robbed, it would probably be wise to return home and regroup.

I reconnoitered the area and found a sympathetic front desk clerk that believed me when I lied and told her that my passport was still valid, despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe she just wanted to practice her English.

The room was clean and cheap and it looked as if all of the furniture had been purchased at IKEA. I was getting closer to home. The shower sprayed all over the bathroom but it was a small price to pay for a safe hideout. I ditched my baggage and asked if there was anyplace to buy a hamburger in the area. She said that there was, just down the street, a little place called McDonald’s. I laughed and tried to explain the subtle differences between hamburgers. She stared at me blankly. Still queasy from my food poisoning weeks earlier, I opted for the safety and comfort of the golden arches.

Mona called me while I was there and we had a four-minute phone call that I later found out cost 17 dollars. We said our goodbyes and I dove back into the crisp Beijing night. I walked with the crowds for a while and observed the people ballroom dancing in lines on the sidewalk, the nightly ritual in much of China. I stopped and chatted with some street vendors who were amused by my meager Chinese and bought trinkets for the folks back home, then I found a café with free Internet access that proved too difficult to access and instead ate corn chowder and drank a thin milkshake. I stopped for an overpriced back massage on the walk home and finally crashed some time after midnight.

I awoke Saturday morning with the unique feeling that I had been hit by a moving train. I was groggy, sore, thirsty, hungry, and still tired, but this was my next to last day in China and I wanted to make the most of it, so I rallied for my cold shower and charted my course on the map the lobby attendant had given me the night before. I would take a taxi to Grandma’s diner, eat apple pancakes and drink coffee and thick milkshakes while catching up on my e-mail, then I would walk to Silk Street and spend what would amount to hundreds of dollars on clothes and DVDs to add to my already bloated suitcases.

I had a ball at Silk Street bargaining and just plain arguing with vendors young and old. At one point a young girl held me hostage until I had tried on every pair of Adidas in the catalogue, then yelled at me when I didn’t want anything, attracting the attention of one cop patrolling the aisles. I made promises I didn’t intend to keep in order to escape. With my booty in tow I went to my favorite teahouse to plot out my evening. The hostess remembered me and we looked at all the junk I bought and talked about Beijing restaurants and Chinese medicinal substitutes for Valium. She didn’t charge me anything and I hopped a taxi to find a restaurant we had picked out.

The taxi driver had no idea where we were going and we drove in circles until I couldn’t bear it anymore and told him to drop me off on Gold Street. I went to the pharmacy to find the pills the girl from the teahouse had recommended for sleeping on flights. They had two kinds, one that, if I understood correctly, would render me unconscious, and another which would induce relaxation. I opted for the latter, then went across the street to eat another McBurger.

It was late when I returned to my room, around 10 p.m., and I still had to find a way to cram all of my new junk into my grotesquely overweight suitcases. I had a theory that if I rolled every single thing inside of each suitcase, it would all fit. By the time Borat had ended, I had new bags. I had converted every single bag I could find into luggage. Plastic bags, paper bags, the bag they gave me at the store. I even had to call front desk the next day for more bags, bigger bags, because these weren’t working. They had bags that were just big enough to make things interesting, but far too small to pass for comfortable. This is how I will always remember China. I went to sleep in a sweat.

The alarm came far too early. My plans of eating a hardy breakfast and lounging in Starbucks washed down the drain, and sprayed all over the toilet, sink, and the clothes I had brought into the bathroom with me. I did my final repacking and hustled out of the room with my various bags. I caught a taxi to the bus station easily enough and was on my way to buying a bus ticket when the bus attendant wearing a blue vest told me that the bus would not leave for a half-hour and would take an hour to reach the airport. I still had to deal with check-in and customs and thought it would take too long. It was at this juncture a man approached me and offered to take me in his vehicle. He escorted me to his parked car, a white Volkswagen Jetta, and hustled to pack the trunk. We would most likely arrive at the airport within 45 minutes. I sat back wearily and took in the monstrous Beijing skyline one last time, then closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.

I had partially fallen asleep when I realized we were at the airport. I got out of the taxi and stood there as the driver unloaded my equipment. I actually shook his hand I was so excited to finally be at the moment of departure. And with that he drove off and I turned and pushed my cart into the main terminal.

I went to the ticket counter where I’d bought my ticket two days before and they informed me that they didn’t accept credit cards. My heart skipped one or two beats before I walked over to the ATM to investigate my financial status. After taking out all of the money I had in my various accounts in two banks, I was left with enough money to buy a Starbucks.

I filled out my international flight forms and maneuvered through the crowd into the check-in area. During check-in, it was determined that my bags were indeed overweight and that I would have to pay an extra fee to bring them onboard. I walked over to the overweight baggage line and waited my turn. I was informed that the fee would be the equivalent of US$200 unless I could reduce the weight. I opened one of my mammoth suitcases and actually unloaded a bag from inside another bag to come in under the weight limit. Then I returned to the check-in line with my children in tow and waited for the attendant.

It was at this time that I had a revelation. I had an undeniable certainty that I was being protected by something greater than me and now it was bringing me home safely. Immediately following this feeling of immense security, I realized that I was missing one of my bags.

I looked for it among the other bags and it wasn’t there. It was very clearly missing. I thought about what was in the bag. I made a mental checklist: laptop, video camera, all of the video footage I shot in China, and my iPod. The strangest thing is that I never panicked. I stood very still and thought about what my options were. I could sacrifice the bag. Though this was a choice I clearly wasn’t thrilled about, I was fully aware that it was the most likely outcome of the situation. Regardless, I wanted my stuff back and I wasn’t going to let it go without a fight. I decided to enlist the help of the ticket counter people.

I told them my story. Woman with a blue vest, man with a white Volkswagen Jetta. That’s all I had for them. They said a bunch of stuff in Chinese and I understood some of it. They were going to try to get in touch with the bus station, and they were going to wait for the bus that I had intended to take to arrive to ask about the guy with the Jetta.

I stood there watching them abuzz and thought about my backpack. This is a backpack I’ve had since at least college, maybe longer, filled with the digital detritus of my four months alone in China. All of my memory files and the first 20 pages of a movie script were in it. I felt as though in the pit of my stomach there was the end of a rope that stretched out into the city somewhere with my stuff at the other end and I tried to will it to come back.

I made deals with myself. I told myself that I could live without all of my stuff. I’d have to start over. Things would be slow, but everything would ramp back up. I could write the movie script from scratch if I had to, it would just be a pain in the ass. Then I promised myself that if it came back, I would finish the script.

I calmly stated that in my country when there is a robbery in progress we usually inform the cops, and would they be interested in doing that? The woman making the decisions agreed and we walked into a branch of the Beijing Airport Police Station.

The redirected us to the headquarters in the upper level parking lot. I had left my bags with the attendants and was free to follow my stomach-rope into the police station. There, sitting in the center of a large white counter, was the Beijing Airport Chief of Police. He stood and we looked each other in the eye and I listened again as my girl told the chief what we had. He looked indignant and nodded to me and motioned for the woman to take me away.

We went back to the counter and I was informed that my flight had been delayed and I would get a free meal at the gate when I arrived. I looked forward to this free meal as it was now past 11 a.m. and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. The counter people told me to go ahead and check my stuff in and to come back afterwards. I went back to the ticket counter and checked everything in, and when I returned, the counter people told me to go with the girl to the police station again.

I wanted to feel hopeful, but it seemed pointless. Whether or not it was there, I had to remain calm the whole time or else I would upset the balance of whatever the hell was going on. When we opened the door to the police station I saw my bag sitting on a chair next to the counter. I felt so relieved. The police chief was smiling and I shook his hand and they told me that they found the guy, everyone at the bus station knows him, the guy with the white Jetta, and they told him that he could do one of two things. If he brought the bag back, there would be no questions asked, but if he didn’t, I was only told that there would be trouble, and I took that to mean something about the weight of the Chinese Police being brought to bear against some lowly cab driver.

It called into question some ideas I had two days before when nobody would let me rent a room. The bureaucracy that prevented me from speaking directly to anyone to secure a hotel room was the same one that put the fear into my bag thief. Maybe we had something in common.

I thanked my erstwhile companions and entered the check-in hall once again. Once I scanned my carry-ons, the five of them, I took my place in The Longest Customs Line Ever. I moved incrementally forward, grabbing all of my bags, picking them up and moving them forward a few feet at a time. I tall man with a beard in front of me talked to his ex-wife on the telephone about their delinquent child. When I finally reached the customs officer, he informed me that I did not have the proper boarding pass and would have to return to check-in to retrieve it. Even though my bag had returned, I couldn’t deny the Kafkaesque proportions to which my reality had swelled. I didn’t know if my nerves could handle it.

I returned to the check-in counter where they had misplaced my proper boarding pass and got back in The Line.

Then I reached The Promised Land. There were hordes of people surrounding the pile of food trays. I pushed my bags into them and showed my ticket, good for a tray of noodles and a coke. I bought my Starbucks, looked at airport souvenirs, and sat and waited for my plane to depart.

When I boarded the plane I felt giddy with fatigue. Every few minutes I would say to myself, I can’t believe it. How did this happen?

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully explain what China meant for me. What was I doing there in glamorous and harmonious Rong Cheng, city of the future? I wish I had written a blog about the sheer magnitude of contraptions I saw in China chugging along and blowing out steam, and that I had pictures of them. I wish I could tell you about the time my landlady set me up to eat in some kind of lamb dive-bar on my first night in my apartment, and how I was too weary to change course so I ate all of the soup even though it tasted and smelled like funk. These were interesting times.

Ba Da Guan

December 1, 2, 3 2006



Qing Dao: Days 2, 3, 4

I wake up, take a cold shower and go find the Red and Black Cafe, a place I spotted during the previous evening's excursion. It is a posh three floors of polished wood, leather chairs and big soft couches. I am momentarily transported. The coffee comes in a nice grande-sized serving, the tiramisu is flat (the tomoatoes were an interesting touch though). I liberate a city walking map from the book rack.



Back at the hotel I grill the staff about net bars, buses, and what there is to do in Qing Dao. We make notes on my map and write things on post-its. I feel eager and excited about being in a new place.



I walk around a few streets close to the hotel, getting the lay of the land, then hop a bus to Qing Dao University where I find a net bar, post to the blog, and download reams of information on Qing Dao. I read about a place called Ba Da Guan that was occupied by the German army before the first wolrd war and still houses some classic European architecture. Somewhere around this time the weather drops severely.









I hop a cab to Ba Da Guan and stumble around in the cold for a few hours. Despite the now bitter cold there is massive wedding photography going on, women in strapless, sleeveless gowns fearlessly posing for posterity.

I take a taxi to another part of town and search for a travel guide. After sufficient confusion I find a bookstore that has only the barest selection of English books. Conversely I did find a DVD store that had an incredible selection of American film classics. I loaded up on films I've always been meaning to see.

After that I walked to the Tsing Tao brewery and picked out a restaurant on bar street to eat dinner and sample their fine brew. I feast on fish, shrimp and beef and am unable to finish a large pitcher of beer.

Back at the hotel, Hu informs me that he is going to Yentai for the evening but leaves me in his friend Li's charge. Li and I take a taxi to the Paulaner Bar to see some unspecified musical performance.

The Paulaner is top shelf, leopard print furniture, lava lamps, continuous techno party looping on the flat screens. A Filipino cover band takes the stage and tears through searing renditions of Say You, Say Me, I Just Called to Say I Love You, and With or Without You. I fall in love with the beautiful Russian bartender who stands behind the bar making little hearts out of clay.



Li tricks me into thinking we are going to another bar. Instead we go back to the hotel. I go to sleep and wake up two hours later with food poisoning. I will spare you the gory details, but let's just say that both sides suffered heavy casualties. I spend the next day alternately writhing in bed and watching such cinema classics as Double Indemnity and Casablanca. I make brief harrowing forays into the freezing cold for medicine, pizza and Coca-Cola. I boil water in my electric water heater and soak my feet in the sink to warm myself. One of the medicines has the unexpected side-effect of making me bloated.

I don't sleep for the first 24-hour period. The second night is make or break. It is obvious to me that if I don't sleep I won't kick the sickness, and if I don't shake it off by the next day, the bus ride back to Rong Cheng could be particularly traumatic. I wake feeling warm and only slightly ill.

I pack my things and surf the hotel office internet and find a cafe on the ocean that serves Western cuisine. Upon arriving I find that the Western menu they advertised was really a Western menu item, a steak. I bail and go to the Crown Plaza where I shell out for pastries and a seriously bungled eggs benedict. I attempt to buy Christmas presents in the town market and forfeit relatively early, realizing the impracticality of the situation. I catch a taxi to the bus station and manage the bloated 4-hour ride back to Rong Cheng.

Qing Dao

November 30, 2006

This is how I get around China. I show people these post-its and they take me places. It is not a foolproof. I have accepted it though as a viable means of transport. I seem to have forsaken the all-knowing guidebook and legitimate research in favor of random possibility. I land and scramble for information. Today it worked, mostly.

It all started out wrong. A friend of mine backed out on me at the last minute, no reason stated. After class I boarded a bus full of students and then had to fight my way through the young pubescent hordes yelling for the bus driver to let me out after he took an alternate route, bypassing my stop. The fascinating thing was that I was asking students all around me to tell the bus driver to stop, to help me, yet they all just stared at me quietly. There is a chance that they didn’t understand me, but surely the sight of a man flailing and shouting near the back of the bus must have resonated with someone.

At the bus station I boarded a junker, a heap for sure. Blackened on the inside from the smoke of a thousand cigarettes, I could clearly see that I was in for a long ride. I had heard that the ride would take about four hours. It took five and felt like three days. I grew fingernails and a beard. The oldest man I have seen in China rode with us. He aged as well.

People boarded at all manner of strange location, at on ramps, under overpasses, by gas stations. There seemed to be an elaborate system of phone calls and shouting out the window that allowed people to board with their various sacks. I have never seen such an assortment of paraphernalia as I have on the buses in China.

The driver drove with his window partially open the entire trip. I was cold but offered no complaint as it lessened the amount of smoke that pooled overhead. I saw some of the bleakest, greyest landscape I have ever seen in my entire life between Rong Cheng and Qing Dao. Miles and miles of tree branches and the outlines of mountains through overcast skies, harvested cornfields, piles of pasty earth, mostly colorless, except for the occasional green field of baby wheat or pink brickyard. Sporadically we came across power plants spewing clouds of smoke into the air and the early stages of cities around them. The miracle of industrialization. I saw vehicles hauling cardboard, fiberglass automobile shells, hay, pine, people, cornstalks, people lying on cornstalks, pigs.

At one point an empty bottle that had occupied a seat up until that time fell onto the floor and started rolling around. The driver told a woman to throw it out the window. I looked outside and noticed a small seating area up ahead with benches and foliage. She seemed to wait until we arrived there and threw it at the little park so that it shattered around where people would walk. The driver noted the strangeness of her shot selection as well and told her he meant for her to throw it into the bushes. She responded that she heard him, but didn’t understand him. I am not alone in this, apparently.

Upon arriving in Qing Dao I inquired what the name of the place was so that I might catch a taxi back when I return. The driver said, “Qing Dao.” I had to specify, the name of the bus station.

I caught a taxi to the hotel that Mrs. Yu had set up for me, upon my request, through old friends of hers from school. It’s still too early to say, but it seems my request contained a fatal error. I had read once in a guidebook, which I subsequently forgot to take notes from or bring, that one of the hotels near city center had rooms with balconies overlooking the sea. I thought this was great and asked Mrs. Yu if she could arrange a room like that. She unfortunately did get me a room overlooking the sea ("Perfect Life Between Sea and Mountain"), only not in city center. Qing Dao is on a peninsula. I am somewhere on the outskirts of the city, on a desolate strand of beach, from the looks of it, and it is not summertime.

There is an upside to this. While trying to coordinate the Internet in my room with the hotel staff, I befriended them and have plans for all types of unspecified fun over the next two days. Seeing the Internet not working and time slowly slipping away, I told them not to worry about it, that it was more important for me to go and eat and have fun as soon as possible, and where exactly would that be…? They told me of a place down the street (surely there must have been something lost in the translation) that was alternately beautiful, bamboo, and animals. I was drilling the boys for deeper meaning when one of them offered to take me out to at least fulfill the eating portion of my request.

We hopped in the hotel minibus and drove off into the night. I found out that my host’s name was Hu and that he had been in Qing Dao for 2 years and thought highly of the place, and though he was on the clock, it was somehow permissible for him to take his new American friend out for dinner, on me of course. I gathered that he was on sporting terms with hotel management. We drove through an upscale Qing Dao neighborhood and stopped for gas before arriving at the restaurant. In China, I find that it is quite common to pick your food out from a selection of fish tanks and plates of uncooked meat. I am always confused by this as I’m never sure what’s what. I attempted to make selections based on what Hu seemed excited about.

The food, truthfully, was excellent. We feasted on a plate of spicy fried lamb, legs of pork, some kind of fish I had seen him handle a few minutes earlier, and raw oysters dipped in wasabi and soy sauce, accompanied by a couple of Tsing Tao beers. We made suitable conversation, I think I may have a ride to the brewery tomorrow and definitely some sort of outing planned for tomorrow night, perhaps including hot pot and maybe dancing (?), and, more importantly, I felt like I had pierced the usually opaque veil separating me from China.

Beijing Diaries VI

October 23, 2006



Last day in Beijing. I wake up early to pack my things and make the key exchange with Alison. She suspiciously looks the place over. The TV/VCR/Speaker complex doesn’t turn on and she looks at me despairingly. I had unplugged it to charge my laptop. She returns my deposit. The last I saw of her she was on the floor frantically shoving loose papers into a makeshift garbage bag. I took this as my cue to leave.

I had epically overpacked for Beijing and paid dearly for it this morning. I made the prerequisite rounds, Starbucks, the bookstore, the sidewalk eatery, the tea house, all the while hauling two gigantic bags around and causing untold damage to my neck. I tried on pants with my two huge bags. I walked around carefully trying not to knock people down. I was like some awkward lumbering alien with huge unsightly growths. I felt like that terrible monstrosity, the tourist, and was embarrassed for myself.

I managed to board the metro and purchase a bus ticket to the airport. I sussed out the schedule and saw that I was early, a rare occurrence for me, and made my way around the block to the lush cafe where I had coffee earlier in the week.

Airport check-in was fairly painless. I wandered into all of the clothing, book, and souvenir shops and found a reclining chair to curl up in until take off. The in-flight corned beef sandwich was unexpected. Upon arrival in Weihai I located my luggage and walked out of the airport alone into the cool night. I felt momentarily liberated, independent, as if I had truly arrived and could finally maneuver through this strange land unattended. This was short-lived. My official re-entry into provincial life began when the taxi driver didn't understand a single lick of my efforts at Chinese. I did understand that he wanted to take me somewhere I didn't need to go. We settled on the Jiaotong, even though I wanted to go to the school. We would at least be in the right city.

I urged the driver on at the Jiaotong and eventually up the long dirt road to the dorm. Though the meter read 50RMB, the driver tried to charge me 100. We yelled at each other for a solid 5 minuted before I grew weary and gave him 80RMB. I could live with a $4 loss. Thus began my life in the dorms...

Beijing Diaries V

October 22, 2006

Mona had arranged a pedicab ride through one of the last remaining Hutong areas of Beijing. I was also staying in a Hutong area but was informed, to my dismay, that it wasn’t one of the originals and had only been reconstructed to look like an original. Upon arriving, I was again reassured after seeing how small and uncomfortable the originals are.

We rode through the narrow alleyways built during the Mongol occupation to house the city’s teeming residents. The alleyways eventually opened up onto a lake surrounded by bars, shops and restaurants. After dismounting, we met a guide who led us through some shop-lined alleyways back onto the streets of Beijing and through the gates and up the steep stairs of the Drum Tower.

Back in the day (I’d make a terrible tour guide), they would beat on the drums at certain intervals to tell time. There was also an elaborate water clock on display, one, I presumed, that had not been widely produced. While perusing the Hutong shop area I had been hurried along after stopping to buy an old advertisement for “Oh Dear” cigarettes in order to catch the drumming spectacular at noon.

After leaving the Drum Tower we had our brief encounter with the Olympic Torch entourage.

The guide led us back into the Hutong and we visited a family that still lived there, and evidently made a reasonable living showing people they still lived there. We sat in the courtyard sipping tea for a few moments before the tour masses showed up. The man of the Hutong told us that a couple from Yale had spent their honeymoon in one the rooms off the courtyard and the family had left it decorated to show people. I made a mental note to cross the Hutong off my list of honeymoon destinations.

After the tour Mona humored me while I looked at old Chinese junk and ate more Thai. I made her drink a mojito and we sat in one of the cafes off the lake and chatted over tea and coffee with rum as the evening chill set in.

Cha Shan

30

November 16, 2006