The winter unpack . . .

One of the amazing staff members from our international office called this morning to tell me I had packages (she actually said a package but I was expecting the plural so misheard her). I asked for a trolley, which she borrowed from the construction team on the sixth floor, and went across expecting to collect the things I left at a friend’s home in Seoul last week and he shipped earlier this week with an arrival date of today.

Instead, I found the box I shipped before I left, “slow shipping” that the post office told me would take two months.

I’m excited about what I thought I would need but could wait on til then, have given up on live blogging on the iPhone, so will do a delayed live blog here.

Going for the scissors . . .

I open it and the first things I see are my cowgal boots, hot water bottle, favorite scarf, Korean wine bottle covers from Barbara and Cheryl Scott and my wish book. All good, but I may have to buy some wine (and not drink it) for the covers. [Which reminds me, beloved, do you still have my bottle of wine? It’s special and needs to be sent somewhere.] I also have to make Fred’s second hot water bottle cover – even if he gives it away to a cat again.

This is becoming like an excavation – I remove the top layer and find more. More scarves, all with memories. And a book that a wonderful, unexpected friend sent me about Kiwis called “Fly” – thank you Kelly, it will go on my wall. And the Good Neighbor Awards booklet – I left the big-ass plaque with a friend but it’s nice to have a reminder. And [by the way, readers, as an editor, I abhor starting sentences with “and’” or “but.” But this is a blog] “The No-Excuses Cookbook” my cuzzy-sis Tania gave me. Memories are made of this . . .

All filed – time for the next layer.

A galot skirt I bought from a designer I interviewed and fell in love with on Jeju-do. A pair of winter pjs I picked up from the Thrift Shop and a crocheted skirt that is far too young for me, but what the hey. You only live once and I like it. It looks great over thick tights in winter.

Next layer, and there’s the thing I’ve been waiting for. Everyone has told me how cold it gets here in winter and that I need a good jacket, I just unpacked and hung my quilted London Fog jacket – I think I’ll survive the cold, if not the smog.

Next layer – shorts, yoga pants, my favorite suede jacket and a pair of skorts. The shorts, yoga pants and skorts aren’t for winter exactly, but I gained weight in my last two months in Korea and knew I would lose it when happy (note to Stuart, alcohol doesn’t solve problems, but it does let you put them on hold until you can solve them).

The next layer is much more exciting. The Harley Owners Group Touring Handbook Bill gave me when I borrowed/stole his brother’s bike and did 6,000 miles in three months (Bill is part of my US family and considers me a hobo or carpetbagger, which is probably correct), a favorite top I bought at Portobello Market in London and another fave I bought in Indonesia. Plus a few other things I love, a cotton top that will be perfect for Beijing’s heat, a skirt that is business-like so useful, and a dress that works for summer or winter..

Time for the last layer.

Another quilted jacket (I do think ahead sometimes), and a sequined cocktail dress (because every female motorcycle rider needs a sequined cocktail dress). Plus a “Power Strip” (workout thing, so I can fit the skorts again), a very old diary, “The Complete Yachtmaster” by Tom Cunliffe (just in case I decide to run away to sea again), and the big-ass medal the four star gave me in Seoul and I thought I had lost.

I didn’t lose it – I packed it!

Looking forward to the other boxes . . .

Live blogging the unpacking . . .

I know, unpacking is very boring stuff, but bear with me - I'm excited.

Backstory, the international admin office called to tell me I had shipping. I thought it was the things I left at my friend's apartment and he shipped earlier this week priority mail. It was the box I shipped before I left slow mail and they told me would take two months. "That's okay," I thought, "I won't need this til winter.) Let's  see what I packed . . .

[to truly appreciate this experience, you need to be listening to "The Great New ZealandSongbook" as I am - thanks Phil, you will get the first book

Going for the scissors . . .

Tranquility amongst the throngs . . .

Yesterday, I decided it was time to take a break from my shopping tour and see some of historical Beijing. After days of heavy, haze-filled skies, we had heavy downpours throughout the previous day and night and I woke to beautifully clear skies with the sun shining – perfect weather for exploring the city’s grandeur. What could be grander, I thought, than the Forbidden City, which the Lonely Planet guide has listed as No. 3 on it’s 30 Top Experiences.

(And yes, I still have to write up No.s 21 thru 30, and I plan to get on to that this week.)

Beijing’s subway and bus networks are well laid out and simple to use, as long as you know where you wish to go. All stops are announced in Mandarin, which the Chinese call Putonghua (common speech), and English and every bus stop has a name, as do all the subway stations, obviously. The nearest subway station to my home is a transfer between two lines, which gives me multiple options of how to get to and from different places.

From here to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square is simply eight stops south, a quick line transfer and two or three stops west, depending on which side you wish to approach the two from. (Everyone gives directions in terms of compass points here and the exits from the subway stops are also labeled that way, making it easy to guess the correct exit once you have your bearings.)

So, about 1030 on a Tuesday morning, I hopped the subway to Tiananmen East, and exited on the Forbidden City side of the street to hordes of people. And I do mean hordes, there were tour groups everywhere, school groups from all over the world, families with children and the occasional independent traveler like me. Exiting the steps from the subway was an exercise in itself, as waiting for the throng were vendors selling maps, water, food, ice blocks, trinkets, hats of many kinds and traditional Chinese dress style headbands. Plus many, mainly young, Chinese offering tours of the Forbidden City in fluent English and many other tongues. I’m an old hand at turning down such offers unless I really want to avail myself of them, so simply smiled, held up my hand and said xiexie, wo bu yao (thank you, no). I’d already decided I would use an audio tour for the site, as I could easily ignore that if I wished. 

Leaving the subway

The first thing one comes across is Tiananmen itself, for which the square opposite is named. The name Tiananmen is made up of the Chinese characters for “heaven,” “gate” and “peace,” therefore in English it is known as The Gate of Heavenly Peace, although the original Chinese name is longer and has its own history attached. It’s an impressive building - 66 meters long, 37 m wide and 32 m high, with a portrait of Mao Zedong above the main archway and large red flags flying at either end. The largest and center of five archways was used only for Ming and Qing emperors while the smaller ancillary arches were used by ministers and officials.  A moat in front of the gate is crossed by carved marble bridges, with the widest central bridge again reserved for the emperor.

It's possible to climb the tower above the gate for a small fee, but free to walk through to the Forbidden City which sits nestled behind.  I decided to leave the tower for another visit and headed through the gate with the crowd, wondering if it was some sort of holiday as there seemed to be many school-age children visiting. Chinese use umbrellas to protect them from the sun, so avoiding a spike in the head or eye required full vigilance. 

 

Crossing the moat to walk through Tiananmen

 Once inside and across the forecourt to where one buys tickets for the Palace Museum, as the Forbidden City is known, I realized it was too hot to wait in such a long, slow-moving line so decided to explore the surrounding area instead. To the east was an extension of the Palace Moat, where I was slightly tempted to don traditional garb and have my photo taken, while on the west I found Zhongshan Park, where there was no queue for tickets (Y3/48 cents admission, Y5/80 cents if you wanted to see the flower exhibitions also). I paid my 5 kwai and walked through the gate, where I found my own version of heavenly peace - just a few people meandering through lush gardens, relaxing in pagodas or cruising on the water in peddle- or battery-powered boats. I was thrilled to find such a tranquil spot in the very center of this bustling city.

A close-up of a building outside the Palace Museum

A wall of the Forbidden City

The moat to the east

Inside Zhongshan Park

Chinese opera singers accompanied by a piano accordion - I also saw a couple playing hulusi - an instrument with three bamboo pipes that pass through a gourdwind chest. It felt rude to photograph them so I simply enjoyed the music.

Detail of one of the many gateways

lotus pool

the Waterside Plants Pavilion

I spent a peaceful few hours strolling around the park and will no doubt go there for some peace when the city center gets too crowded for me, and plan to go boating there with a friend who is coming to visit in August.

I will return to tour the Forbidden City, but plan to do so early in a bid to beat the worst of the crowds, which I have been told will continue throughout the summer.

The Dorm, continued, with pics . . .

An addendum to my last post, with photos of my apartment (at the request of Kim and Stephanie):

My apartment is one the 7th floor (four floors from roof), at far left. The windows are the spare room balcony, kitchen and bedroom balcony.

The bedroom

Bedroom closets

Dining room leading to kitchen

Desk and TV in spare room

Sofa in spare room

Messy desk and bookshelves in spare room

Kitchen and washing machine

Stove top

View from my balcony

The Dorm . . .

Part of the employment package here is housing, complete with furnishings and utilities. A friend worked here many years ago so I’d already seen what was on offer and I do like my new place. I like it most because it is mine. (Yes, I do realize it isn’t really, but read on.)

Sometimes (most times?), I’m the world’s best chameleon, or perhaps a cuckoo. I learned the skill while young. When you grow up in a dysfunctional household, you learn to find other places to be safe. My older brother turned to God, the next older brother turned to crime and charm, we all found our own ways to survive. (Irish families tend to tend toward God and crime, when you merge the two, you get to work at the Vatican.) I made myself welcome at friends’ homes, where their parents were happy they had a friend with such nice manners. I watched, listened, and learned to fit in.

It’s a skill that has served me well in my subsequent travels.

I’ve never really felt at home though. I’ve always (almost always) been welcome and I have homes all over the world that I am part of, but they belong to someone else. So I watch, listen, and bring to the table the version of myself that best fits the environment. I don’t even realize I’m doing it most times, it’s an unconscious survival technique, but it works. It’s taken me across oceans, countries and professions, and won me surrogate family across the world, but it’s always been someone else’s home.

This home is mine. Not technically, of course, it belongs to my employer, so probably belongs to the State, but it’s mine as long as I do my job competently. I plan to do my job much better than competently, so this is mine while I do. And I like it.

I have a good friend who teaches at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul and she lives in also, and she has half the area I have, plus has to pay her own utilities (if you’re monitoring this, dear employer, please don’t get any ideas). I’m in the same complex as the paper (two minutes walk) and in a 10-story “Foreign Expert Building.” With seven apartments on each floor, that’s a good number of foreign experts, but I don’t know my own neighbors yet. I do know the cool kids and the problem children – those are the ones to meet first.

So, welcome to my home. I’m on the 7^th floor and overlook a middle/high school, which is kinda cool. I especially like the sports days – having grown up watching Chinese gymnasts on TV, I expected it to be an innate trait. It isn’t. Chinese youngsters are just as clumsy as the young of every other species, but I like that they laugh with each other when they fail to achieve the elegant dismount from the parallel bars (I like even more that the gym teacher smiles and pats them on the back for trying).

I have a large fridge/freezer, which I am covering with pictures. There’s a Ranger banner on the front that I was given at the VFW in Leesville, Louisiana, and pics from Bonnie and Granddot that were waiting for me when I arrived. Also some pics from a palace in Korea that I wrote a story for before I left. I went to IKEA yesterday and bought containers so I now have food in there also. The freezer? So far, just vegetable scraps to make stock for soups – I hear it gets kinda cold here in winter.

Then we have the kitchen. I may need to purchase more storage space here. It came with utensils and a pot or two, but few people cook here so I’ve already replaced a few things. I cooked last night for my Seednee friends, which needed a new wok and some kitchen tools. It’s a little less than I would design, but I can do dinner on a camp stove if needed, so can cope with this. Let’s call it a work in progress.

Bathroom – adequate, I need to replace the skanky shower curtain and get the fan fixed.

Spare room – where I will sleep when visitors vist – two large bookcases, writing desk, coffee table, sofa, flat screen TV. I tested the sofa by lying on it to see if it was comfortable enough to sleep on, and promptly fell asleep. I guess that’s a “yes.” I haven’t worked out the TV yet, but just noticed it isn’t plugged in – could that be the reason it doesn’t work? Oh, I forgot, curtains and air conditioning, this is okay.

My room – a king size bed, two bedside cabinets and two huge closets. And air con.

A colleague told me I could choose to live out and get a housing allowance instead of staying in “the dorm.” I see no reason to do so and have to negotiate all that is involved in paying rent and utilities in a language I don’t yet know, and until I do, the comfort of living in works for me.

Accepting guests, if anyone wants to visit . . .  

Beijing Shopping 101 . . .

With all the costs involved in relocating from Korea to China, I’ve arrived here with enough to get by until my first payday, but with a need to be frugal. That has not only been easy to do here, but has turned out to be a great thing as I have spent my first few weeks perusing the many markets and stores making notes and comparing prices, rather than simply buying the first item I see and regretting it when I find a much better deal. I’m also taking notes and making lists for the friends who come to visit so I can steer them to the best places for whatever it is they want to buy, see or do.

Again, my colleague Brian, who leaves Monday, has been an enormous help not only with directions to the places the Chinese go to shop, rather than the more expensive Western haunts, but by demystifying Beijing’s bus system for me. The city also has an excellent subway system, but traveling by bus allows me to get more of a sense of where I am and the ability to more easily navigate the city. That will be crucial if I do decide to buy a motorbike here but, for now, I prefer to travel by foot and bus where possible, so I have the time to observe and become part of my new environment.

On Tuesday, on my first bus ride, Brian escorted me to a food market at Liangmaqiao where we didn’t see another Westerner but where many of the vendors knew him. He pointed out the best stalls to buy mushrooms (so many varieties to be had), vegetables, foreign food items (yes, there are some things I can’t do without), fish, chicken and pork. There is also a fantastic fruit store immediately opposite that also sells nuts and seeds. All only 5 stops from my home by bus, at the cost of only 1 or 2 kwai (the local word for yuan or renminbi, with 1 kwai being equal to about 16 cents US). 

I was initially impressed that the small supermarket right near the China Daily complex had such a good selection of things, but have now found a hypermarket (Wu Mart) 15 minutes walk away and an upmarket Japanese department store with supermarket (Ito Yokado) another five minutes beyond that. There’s a Carrefour four bus stops away in one direction and an Ikea six stops away in another. I’ve spent much of this week walking up and down aisles seeing what each place stocks and noting down prices. Wu Mart is where I’ll do most of my day to day shopping and Ito Yokado is a good option for special treats. Carrefour and Ikea both have things I plan to buy, including imported food items, but I also have a Chinese market that sells household goods, clothes and shoes to check out, now that I’ve noted the prices in the stores.

One thing I’ve been blown away by is the selection of fresh produce available here. I’d been worried about what I could eat before I arrived, and listened to and read too many horror stories of what I daren’t eat. Some of them were sensible, and I’ll no doubt continue to avoid street food, but there is so much else available. My breakfast each morning, despite watching my kwai, has been fresh fruit – always mango, lychees and blueberries plus either nectarine, peach, banana or whatever looks best and is cheapest when I’m buying and yoghurt. Lunch is either a quick stirfry of vegetables or a sandwich or wrap and most nights I eat dinner at the canteen, which is reasonably healthy, tasty and, best of all, free (we get one free meal there a day, Monday to Friday). 

A typical breakfast tray, before preparation

Tomorrow will be my first time cooking dinner here for friends, the Australian couple who live one floor down from me, and I look forward to visiting the market to get all I need to make a Thai vegetable curry -- mushrooms, eggplant, green or snake beans, tomatoes and maybe some squash -- and fresh fruit to follow.

the vege vendor at the market

the mushroom lady's offerings

a selection of tomato types at Carrefour

part of the fruit selection at Carrefour

This is a gourmand’s paradise, at least in summer, and I look forward to making yummy soups to keep me warm through winter.

One week in . . .

It’s been just over a week since I landed in Beijing, something I realized yesterday when the morning routine in the schoolyard my apartment watches over changed. Each weekday morning, I’ve watched the school assemble for mass calisthenics, coached by a teacher on the stage, pepped up by a few of their peers joining him to lead the routines and overseen by what must be class leaders or monitors, fellow who wear armbands and stand at the front of each group observing (perhaps not completely the synchronized fun I first took this for, but I’m still all for the daily exercises).

Yesterday was different, and a colleague whose apartment also oversees the school told me each Monday is the same. This time, when the music announced assembly (the day is broken up by musical interludes, which I guess mark different lesson times or breaks – they continue into the evening but the school also continues into the evening, with what look to be classes or meetings of adults), it was for a more solemn occasion. The students again formed into lines before the stage, but this time the national anthem (I assume) was played as three students raised the national flag behind the stage. There was then a type of prize-giving ceremony, with some students called to the stage where they were given what appeared to be a certificate of some sort.

It’s interesting being here as an observer, especially at this stage when I have almost none of the language with which to communicate, and I can’t help but compare and contrast what I see and am told with Korea, as well as other countries in which I have lived and traveled. I watch the students as they play and interact in the schoolyard and on the street, watch the men (it always seems to be men) play board games on the street (yesterday I passed two who had used broken brick to draw a board on the road and were using pieces of brick and torn up paper as their pieces), the grandparents and parents play with the children and family members care for the elderly. Much of life is lived on the streets, particularly in the heat of summer, and the many parks near my home and further afield are filled with people playing, talking, exercising or simply resting in the shade. Of course, there is also food everywhere, from fully-decked restaurants through shop-front eateries, take-out windows and street vendors. (There’s going to be a lot of blog posts about food – it’s an important part of my life.) It’s not unusual to see a couple or group find makeshift chairs and picnic on the sidewalk or wherever they happen to be.

Beijing is chaotic, noisy and undeniably dirty, but I feel very much at home here. There’s not the sense of pali, pali (hurry, hurry) one finds in Korea, nor do I sense the same anxiety one often encounters there. If I were to describe how the Chinese I have seen appear to live their lives, and this is definitely only a first impression, I would say they do so with gusto. They seem to grab this crazy world we all share and try to squeeze every last drop from it. I’ll be the first to admit that can cause a multitude of its own problems, but I see every day in the stories we run how the country as a whole is trying to come to terms with itself and apply reasonable limits. I watch the process with great interest.

Perhaps that is why I feel so at home here, apart from the welcome and professionalism I have experienced from my colleagues and work superiors – I am by nature an observer and there is so much to observe here. One friend teased me, when I announced I was moving here, that only I “could see moving to China as the route to freedom. Or sweetness, or even taste.” But so far, that is exactly what I am finding, the freedom to be myself without expectations from anyone else, because I am completely unknown, the freedom to work well and to the best of my ability, because that is why I was employed (it’s a sad indictment of many workplaces that that is often not the case) and the freedom and inspiration to write. As for sweetness, I find that each day in my interactions with my Chinese colleagues, neighbors and strangers on the street, who are often transformed by a simple smile and greeting from this laowai who can’t even speak their language, in watching workmates practice Tai Chi in our beautiful garden or Chinese practice in the park, and in watching the families care for each other and spend quality time together.

As for taste, that’s a whole other blog or 50, but suffice to say, I’m living well and loving life.