Biking in Beijing!

Today we woke up at 3:30am, clambered onto a coach bus, and hopped a flight to Beijing. Short flight!! Safa and I sat next to Regina, a cute half-Samoan girl from Australia who had been on a missionary trip in northern Mongolia. We played Mad Libs and then traded UB (Ulaan Baatar) stories-- she hugged me goodbye at baggage claim and waved goodbye in her ¨I Love Cairns¨ t-shirt.

BEIJING! Despite my apprehensions, my first reaction was this: ¨Niiiiice!¨. A beautiful blue sky greeted us outside (although tinged with brown) and the drive to our hostel was...GREEN.

For some reason I had imagined Beijing to be pure, solid, cold concrete: gray air, gray buildings, gray bulletin boards. On the contrary, the entire length of the freeway ride was lush with trees...tall ones with broad canopies and some young saplings. I asked Daniel, a UPS alum who lives nearby, if it was new. He said they were all transplanted for the Olympics. Talk about a sweet social expenditure!

So we are definitely staying in the high end of Beijing. For lunch, we ate a delicious meal of mapo tofu, orange chicken (it tasted like chicken nugget with a spicy Cheeto sauce- aka DELICIOUS) and chow mein. Mm!! 4 people ate for under $2 each. WOW.

After lunch, Safa, Todd, Epiphany and I went for a bike ride through the city-- the hostel provides bicycles for rent! Todd´s chain fell off and none of our brakes worked but it was terrific! The wonderful thing about Beijing is that there are bike lanes EVERYWHERE. I am talking 12-20 foot wide bike lanes on every main street. This was so exhilarating-- the sun was bright, good smells wafted out of every restaurant, and people smiled and waved and said Ni hao! We said hi back and dinged our little bells.

Suddenly we came upon a long red wall. A really long red wall. Epiphany said, ¨Hm, is this what I think it is?¨ and all of a sudden, BOOM! The Forbidden City! Complete with Mao´s portrait and throngs of pedestrians. On the other side of the street was that place where that thing happened you know when. It was covered in floats left over from the Olympics and there was a massively gaudy fountain in the middle covered surrounded by flowers. We stopped and oohed and ahhed and then pedaled on, delighted by the fact that we had stumbled upon two terrific landmarks- on bikes!

We then stopped for a snack. The owner was watching soaps. The menu was all in Chinese with no pictures, so I pointed to two random appetizers and she said ¨Dui¨ and then screamed over Safa´s head, ¨HAU! HAAAAAAAU!¨ Then a door popped open from the wall and nearly knocked Safa out of his chair, and out peeped a man who said ¨Shenme!¨ (¨What!¨) Then she yelled at him more and he ran through a door in the other wall and popped a dish out through a little flap, which she plopped in front of us. It tasted like strip of tofu with cilantro. The second dish was a nice complement-- sweet radishes. The entire time we ate, she sat in the back and watched this soap opera about a doctor in a love triangle and a crazy woman and a construction worker. When we asked for the bill, she said okay and then sat and waited for the commercial. We weren´t mad because we were watching it too, along with her son who was squatting on the floor and munched on a melon twice the size of his head.

At the end, we wanted to double-check our location so I said ¨Women zainar?¨ which is literally ¨Us where?¨ and she showed us. YAY! Evie, aren´t you proud of me? I not only asked an intelligible question in Chinese, but I also figured out where we were on the map! (We got lost on the way back anyway but that was not my fault.)

Dinner was greasy and spicy. The entire family who owned this restaurant literally pulled us off the street and sat and watched us eat our food. The cups were greasy but the tea was delicious, a sort of cinnamon, nutmeg-y green tea.

Now I am back in the lounge of the hostel which has a terrific wifi connection, chilling with Fayez, Kelsey, Nat, Reed and Mark from UPS (who is studying abroad in Beijing and met up with us tonight). I am content and happy and greatly looking forward to my soft bed tonight.

I don´t know if I will be able to/ it is wise to upload my Mongolia pictures, so those will come eventually! More soon!