houhai

We decided to try to catch a cab to our next destination, Houhai. We managed to find a “rickshaw” (I can’t stop calling them tuktuks, which is what they are.) This wound up costing twice as much as the 10 kuai a taxi would have, but he got to us first, and he entertained Yili on the way. Yili tells me later that he looked at me, and asked her “is he paying or are you paying? Cause if he’s paying, I’m going to charge a lot more.” Assuming I didn’t know about how far it was, or that taxi rides that short are the minimum ten kuai. Anyway, on the way, he was a chatterbox, and kept asking Yili about the number of Americans, and asking if she knew any American girls, since he thought marrying his son off to an American was a pretty good idea. She said she’d pass that along.

“Hai” is Mandarin for lake, and essentially, this is the lakes district that is to the west and north of the Forbidden City (no idea what “hou” means – I don’t know even know the tone, let alone the character, so my dictionary says anything from ‘monkey’ to ‘sorrow’. We could call it “sorrowful monkey lake”, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part. I will look it up.) So, what it is, is a road that’s mostly devoted to pedestrian (no guarantees on that in China), all the way around several different lakes, with shops/restaurants/bars around that. Alleyways lead off this road, leading to more of the same (these alleys are called “hutong”.) It’s not too awful for tourists, just a few touts trying to get you into their shops, until you hit the thick bar district. At which point, one bottle of Tsingtao is much like the other, so you’re just negotiating the price then. And seeing if the live music looks ignorable.

The incredible thing to me, is that since the lake is frozen, people stake off an area and rent skates out. I wound up not going, and it might be my biggest regret about Beijing (it has now warmed enough that the ice isn’t thick enough anymore.) Skating on the ice at Houhai is now on my life list of things to do. In addition to traditional ice skates, the vendors have gotten creative, and strapped blades onto all kinds of things, including what look like old school desks (you have ski poles to push yourself) and tricycles (you pedal a front wheel for locomotion, and skid where the back wheels should be.) I even saw something that looked a lot like bumper cars. The place was mobbed with people on a Sunday afternoon. At least several thousand people were on a lake much smaller than Greenlake in Seattle. We saw an old guy hack out a clear area from the ice and, after a crowd pleasing warm up ceremony of some sort, jump in. It wasn’t clear to me what the point of this was – was he passing the hat for change, or just nuts?

At one point, we found chou doufu, or stinky tofu. With some kind of spicy sauce on it. Awfully good on a very cold day. 5 kuai.

Our other coworker, Chris, got into town that night, so we met up with him and went out to eat. Where we learned that the vegetarian menu just means that it has vegetables in it. The lotus root stuffed with pork didn't taste like much.

forbidden city

The second day here, Yili and I did a tourist double play of Forbidden City, then Houhai. First, the Forbidden City. It’s directly in the center of the city. The city is going through huge changes as it expands rapidly (something like 16 – 17M people in the city. Biggest place I’ve been by a factor of 2. It’s a testament to the size of Mumbai that this is *not* the biggest place Evelyn has been.) But, when you look at a map, the forbidden city is still directly at the center.

This was the imperial palace for many centuries, and ordinary folk were not allowed in, hence the name. It’s huge, and very austere – perhaps it’s a bit more lush in the summer, but in the cold, there’s endless small courtyards paved in stone, with long alleys between them, and punctuated by buildings housing artifacts (these also all have the heat curtain thing I mentioned, but usually made of strips of clear plastic instead of a green army blanket.) It looks like a pretty cold place to have lived, but I suppose before central heating, life was a lot harder, even for the Son of Heaven.

That’s all around the edges. The center of the city is really large stone courtyards, with big buildings at the centers, that served variously as temples, living quarters, throne rooms, but the main thing about them is how they are named. You read the signs, and you see that this hall was named the Hall of Peaceful Harmony, but they was renamed the Hall of Scrupulous Behavior in 16xx, then renamed again in 17xx to the Hall of Preserving Tranquility. I’m not making these names up. I’m sure it’s entirely lost in translation, but it’s hard not to snicker a little bit at the seeming goofiness of some of the names in English. (This has led to a running joke amongst my coworkers who are here with me – one of us was commenting on the organization name changes that happened in our latest reorg (we have one every 6 months or so at work), and I pointed out that this is how you know someone is in charge, when they can rename things. What’s the first thing the new Emperor does? He renames the halls. What’s the first thing a new Vice President does? He renames the teams. Which is not entirely cynical – names are powerful symbols.)

But, I digress. The bulk of it appears to have been built by Emperor Yongle in about 1405 – 1420. So, old stuff. There must have been a hell of a stimulus package in the early 15^th century, as he built all of this, plus big sections of the great wall. Walls are all painted a red color (reminds me of terra cotta color, but not as dusty), with yellow knobs on the doors (doors are important, judging by their number.) The accents, the beams supporting the roofs, though, are painted in bright greens and blues. Interesting designs, but also paintings sometimes. I don’t think of those colors as Chinese colors for some reason, so it keeps surprising me.

You keep heading south (we went in the back door, to the north), and the plazas get bigger and bigger (if you’ve seen Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, it was actually filmed there, so that’s what it looks like), until you get to areas you could review troops in (and which remind you of the function of the Plazas de Armas in every South American town – no idea if this ever happened here, but it certainly looks like convergent evolution to me.) Then, you leave via the front gate, and you see a real Plaza de Armas: Tiananmen Square. It’s close to a kilometer square of concrete. Not as big as the Forbidden City, but no walls blocking your sightlines (just Mao’s mausoleum) – we didn’t go there that day, we just saw it across a very busy and wide street. You turn around, and over the gate, there’s a giant portrait of Mao. And a guard waggles his finger if you try to take a picture (so you wander a ways off and do it through your zoom lens.)