Adventures Around Town

Our new hotel is in walking distance of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, so once we'd checked in and rested for a bit yesterday, Chris, Leah, and I went for a walk, thinking a major public site like that would have shops and markets and tea houses and restaurants everywhere. Nope. It reminded me a lot of DC's museum and monument areas, where it's all big stone government buildings, and anything like what we expected to find would be associated with those places. After trying a few random streets and being followed around by a Chinese tourist - who was apparently trying to find his tour bus, but we suspect it may have been a kind of scam - we walked back toward the hotel to try a different direction.

That's when we found the mall. Didn't go inside the mall itself - we're saving that for today ... it's big - but the entire street looked very much like a Times Square (but without the huge billboards): stores and a big McDonalds sign and lots of people. We spent probably an hour in an 8-story bookstore, which was full of people sitting on the floor or standing, reading. Leah and I agreed that if we walked into a B&N or Borders in America and saw that, we would wonder where we were. I bought a copy of C. S. Lewis's novel, Till We Have Faces, in Chinese. Books are cheap! It was 25 RMB (ren min bi, the currency of the people, or yuan), which is about $3.50 USD. And that's typical. I wonder if it's comparable to our prices based on average income, or if books in Chinese are one of the few things I've seen so far that they have no need to raise the price for tourists.

After the bookstore, we walked around this plaza-street a little more. We found a tea shop, which is different from a tea house. In a shop, you buy loose leaf tea. A tea house is like a cafe where you drink it (still looking for one of those nearby). On the way back, we walked down this alleyway that was lined with food stalls grilling skewered things (normal stuff, but also squid/octopus, snails, beetles, stuff like that) and other market items. We turned at an alleyway-intersection down a path lined with touristy souvenir stalls, and once we'd walked all the way to the end of it, Leah and I didn't want to walk back through (Chris did, but we cut through a store out to the main road. These vendors were so competitive (they all had the same goods) that they would literally grab our arms while saying, "Hello sir, just look." I had to remove their hands from me, which is just crossing the line of being friendly for me.

For dinner, we found a place right on our street that - like our first night in Beijing - was close, inexpensive, and really good. This one seemed quite authentic and not steered toward tourists, which is what we wanted. After, we stopped in a cigarette and liquor store and bought cigarettes (Chris), wine (me - a cabernet), and Leah got a kind of liquor she'd seen, but had no idea what it was. It's 56% alcohol, and nearly lethal. The wine was good. We also stopped in a laundry place to ask about prices ... we'll go back with a phrasebook.

Driving around Beijing on a bus is good for sightseeing (also can't get lost!), but it's fun to walk around a new city. Many of these streets are lined with ginko trees. I think today we'll go back to that mall area and continue exploring, and continue the search for a tea house.