We've had a great visit in Beijing. Today was our last day and it went reasonably well. After yesterday's heat and long queues, we had only two goals: to buy Leo a chop (a stamp made of stone with his name carved in it that he could use to stamp letters or art) and to eat hotpot (Chinese fondue). We went to Liulichang first, which is the art/calligraphy/antiques street. Finding a taxi in the morning was difficult but we eventually landed one. Liulichang used to attract many tourists. Today we did not see any foreigners there and there were few Chinese. My Beijing friends say they have never been there. It was clean with new fancy store fronts and a beautifully paved street lined with Mercedes and other fancy cars. The first store had chops for 3000 RMB ($500). We kept walking and eventually found a nice chop made of some stone from Fujian province for $30. Leo found other treasures as well - a watch that looks antique (but I'm sure it is not a real antique) and a really cool reusable practice mat for Chinese calligraphy.
We met a very nice painter who had some giant crickets in these beautiful metal cages.
We bought a painting of a cricket from him and also got from him intell on the nearest hot pot restaurant which was at the top of the nearby Sogo department store. Sogo is a Japanese department store. The restaurant was a chain, called Xiabu Xiabu and modeled after the Japanese chain Shabu Shabu.
They call this "little hotpot" because each person has their own little hot pot. Leo had spicy broth; Paul had curry and I had mushroom broth. It was ok, certainly nothing compared to my mom's but Leo loved it and even Paul now wants to buy a hotpot. You dip the sliced meat or veggies into the boiling broth and it cooks immediately and then you dip it into some peanut cilantro dipping sauce.
We'd been so lucky with the pollution. You can see from this graph of the last month that our 5 days in Beijing have had good air quality. My Beijing friends say this is quite unusual. Typically a good day or two is followed by several bad days. Today was definitely starting to eke up into unhealthy though. We tried to not walk around too much today and it was pretty hot (97F) in any case.
Then a bit of a fiasco trying to meet our friends for dinner on the other side of town. We asked the staff at the apartment to help us call a taxi. The taxi called us when they were on their way and somehow they never found us. We had them talk to the guard at the front of the building but somehow they could never find us. We waited as several empty taxis went by and then finally just took one. I couldn't figure out how to tell the taxi driver on the phone that we had already gotten another taxi and ended up making up some polite lie. Anyway, that took up 30 of the 60 minutes that I had allotted for getting through town. It took us about 90 minutes to get through town making us about an hour late. We met our friends in a very fancy private room in a fancy hotel with way too many dishes. Leo wouldn't eat and was pretty tired. The head of the group that I used to work with had a second dinner going on in the room next door with the folks from the meeting that he had been in that day. An hour or so after eating some, we all were tired and went home. Most of the food was packed up.
Anyway, we've been very lucky to have the use of our friends' apartment here. Making breakfast and doing laundry and just having a nice haven to relax in has been wonderful. I don't know what we would have done without this. Tomorrow we fly to Kunming where we will see more friends. I have been told that it is getting very expensive for even Chinese people to travel to Kunming and Lijiang, etc. Apparently it is now far cheaper for Chinese people to holiday in Japan than China!
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