A Day of Cafe Extremes

This morning we began with a walk to the mall/plaza we found yesterday, in part to see what it was like - quite commercial-American - in part because the hotel breakfast ended at 10 and we had either been rushed or missed it altogether. Marqueshia had come here yesterday and told us there was a Starbucks inside, the first we've seen in Beijing, so we went there to eat and caffeinate. Chris had read to us in a guidebook that this mall was rather high-end for the area, and that the local people came to look, then go across the street to the hudong (the market where we were most graciously invited to shop - i.e. grabbed) to buy food. We sat in an area outside the cafe itself within the mall space and watched people walking around for a while, and it seemed true ... many to most of the people didn't have shopping bags. I wonder how these places stay in business if everyone just looks, and if there are that many tourists that do shop. Or maybe a few sales per day in this economy is enough. I don't know. Though the mall is huge, we didn't stay to explore it. It was very western ... we'd seen enough.

Outside, we walked the rest of the plaza, stopping at a "foreign language" (English) bookstore, then decided to try to find our way back to the hotel using backroads instead of retracing our steps. It was here along these smaller streets that we found a tea house! Actually, several, as we continued. So we went in and had tea; having tea in a Chinese tea house had been on both my and Leah's lists of things to do while here. Inside, the house was very ornately decorated with dark, carved wood, Chinese calligraphy, and paintings hung on the walls. The tea itself is brewed in a rather complicated ritual, which we could see from where we sat: hot water poured into the cups to heat them, the tea flash-steeped, perhaps to decaffeinate it some, then strained several times as it's brewed. Leah video-taped it with her camera. The teas seemed to be steeped briefly, and what was brought to us, while fragrant, was light in color. I ordered a jasmine tea, but Chris and Leah ordered teas with Chinese names, so we don't know what kind of leaves they were. The ceremony of it was a nice and interesting contrast to the familiarity of the Starbucks we'd come from.

I had to take out my map on our way back because, as we realized later, the street names change every block or so, so we crossed our street and continued further to the west; fortunately, the Forbidden City is two streets to the west of us, which makes it difficult to get lost in that direction. The street we finally took back paralleled ours, and along it we came across a string of small art galleries, which I hope to return to and see how expensive the paintings are. I have a feeling they are run by the painters themselves. Also on the way back, Leah and I stopped in a little shop on our street to get ice cream. She has joined me in my ice cream obsession (we stopped again after dinner!) ... it's warm here and summertime, and it seems to be a rather common thing here. There are many shops - in Hong Kong too - that call their product "Italian gelato"; it's not, it's more of a smooth ice cream. But it's good. Yesterday, we were just getting ice cream bars on sticks, but they have some really cool varieties here!

I forgot to point out before ... with the pictures of the Great Wall you can clearly see the air pollution in Beijing. Yes, that's smog. Our tour guide told us that the city's location was chosen in part for its defensibility, but also for good feng shui, which is helped by the mountains to the north that block the "strong wind" from the city; unfortunately for us now, that means these winds don't clear the air. When we first flew in, it had rained that day, so the air was very heavy and hazy, and we were worried about it, but the skies have cleared up some since then, and I think I actually saw blue yesterday. Ari's friend, who has lived here for the past year, said that last summer was worse: they've turned off the industries in preparation for the Olympics.