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There have been a few times on this trip where, while wandering a city, just minding my own business, I’ve turned a corner… and inadvertently stepped into a completely different world.
Today was one of those days. I stumbled into Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter this morning, and felt instantly like I was 1,000 miles away from China, and 100 years in the past.
The Muslim Quarter is a series of tight, noisy alleyways, swarming with jolly Muslim men wearing white skull caps and women in burkas. The streets are full of vendors selling all manner of delicious steamed or fried snack; barrels of walnuts, carts of apples and watermelons, and boxes of dried fruit are at every turn; butcher shops where the proprietors lazily whisk away flies from their display of purple sheep livers; covered rickshaws transporting old men with round, coffee-colored glasses and scraggly beards; welders constructing giant metal basins from flat sheets of steel; bike carts overloaded with bricks and blue-colored eggs, darting through the crowds; little brown and yellow ducks waddling freely in the streets; old women weaving sandals and handbags from rough white fiber; and happy children with red scarves darting in and out of the courtyards. It’s one of those markets that has been doing things exactly the same way for a century, and will (hopefully) continue that way for a century to come.
When I arrived in Xi’an, my stomach was a-rumblin’ — and when I spotted the city’s Subway restaurant, I made a b-line for it. I’ve been craving a sub ever since I left the States, and this was the first Subway I’d seen in all of Asia.
Upon entering the store, I felt instantly like I’d been transported to somewhere in Idaho or Nebraska. The Subway was full of white people, mostly American tourists. Aside from the four Chinese “sandwich artists” (as they call them in Subway corporate literature), everyone else was Caucasian. [Read the rest of this entry…]
I just got my first haircut in China, for the outrageous price of 10 RMB ($1.47 US)! It was at the sketchiest back alley barber shop in Beijing, a two-seater about the size of a walk-in closet — and I was pleasantly surprised by the service. The woman working there spoke no English, but I mimed “scissors” with my fingers, and she of course knew what I meant. She asked me the sign language equivalent of “how short?”, and I made a joke by spreading my arms wide and saying “this much!” She laughed. I adjusted the measurement to an inch-and-a-half between my fingers. She nodded, wrapped me up in a plastic sheet, and I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
The haircut didn’t turn out too bad…and there were perks. Not only did I get my hair shampooed twice (once at the beginning, once at the end), I was also given an unexpected shoulder massage (!). She undid the plastic sheeting, and I was about to stand up because I thought the haircut was over. Then I felt her hands kneading my shoulders. “That’s odd,” I thought, but I relaxed for a few minutes while she worked out the knots in my back. Not bad for a buck and change!
They sure love Chairman Mao in China. Not only is there a statue of him in every city, his face on every single one of their RMB bills (except for the worthless ones; those are reserved for the ethnic minorities)… but he also makes an appearance on t-shirts, watches, buttons, playing cards, figurines, handbags, hats, headbands, whistles, underwear, and anything else cheap and plastic. After all, what better way to remember your grand exalted leader than to plaster his face on tons of schlocky merchandise to sell to foreigners?
This is a series of photos I took over the course of a few minutes in a market in China. (You can imagine how much Mao merch is available!)
China’s got the most diverse array of food in the world, and the Donghuamen Night Market in the heart of Beijing is the largest street food market I’ve ever seen. It took me 12 minutes to walk from one end to the other! Here you can find treats here like fried scorpions, snakes, ostrich heads and pig penises. Check it out:
Truth be told, the Donghuamen Night Market has become a big tourist attraction, so the prices have been jacked up significantly from what you’ll find in street food markets catering to locals. All the merchants have joined forces into one long stand, most of them speak at least rudimentary English, and they all wear matching uniforms. Plus, they’ve removed certain foods from the menu — dog, for instance — to keep all the western tourists happy.
Still, it’s quite a site to behold. I tried a fried scorpion and one of those fizzing, bubbling drinks. Not bad!
Beijing’s got a soundtrack right now, and boy is it catchy!
The Olympics may have the most upbeat, cheesy and sickeningly happy collection of songs ever recorded. And everywhere you go in Beijing right now, you’ll hear them, played ad-infinitum. Every store, every train station, every TV station, and every cell phone ring tone…it’s inescapable. But then again, I can’t get enough of it!
Here’s an mp3 of the most popular song, “Beijing Huan Ying Ni” (Beijing Welcomes You):
It’s 8 minutes long, and each line is sung by a different person from China.
The other “Official Olympic” songs have titles like “Forever Friends” and “One World, One Dream” and “Light Passion Share Dream,” and they are just as kitschy. (There’s also another infectious song that goes “Beijing, Beijing” over and over again that is really great as well.)
Turns out that the “Olympic logo police workers are tasked with vigilantly going around all facilities and putting masking tape over the logos for any product where the company is not an official sponsor.”
Yes, there are workers who spend their days going around Olympic venues and meticulously covering up every single little tiny logo and trademark with masking tape.
The official line from the Olympic organizers is that all Olympic tickets are SOLD OUT, but that certainly doesn’t mean every seat is filled. Here is the row of seats behind me at the BMX Cycling event I attended today:
The number of empty seats is painful, especially when the demand is so strong. I purchased the BMX ticket from a scalper for 200 RMB — FIVE TIMES the 40 RMB ticket price — and many more people at my hotel were complaining that they couldn’t go to events because they didn’t have tickets. It’s really annoying for all of us in Beijing trying desperately to go to events, and on top of that, it makes the games a whole lot less exciting. Plus, the conspicuously vacant seats make the Olympics look a whole lot less exciting for people watching at home on TV.
Why are so many tickets going unused? There are a lot of theories, but I see two primary reasons…
I arrived in Beijing at the Olympics on Sunday, exactly one week before the end of the games, with no tickets, and not much of a clue on how to get them. But it didn’t take more than a few minutes on the streets to figure out where to buy tickets — albeit at ridiculously inflated prices. Right now, Beijing is a ticket scalper’s paradise.
Months ago, the Chinese reported that all the tickets to every event had been SOLD OUT. There wasn’t an Olympic ticket to spare — partly because of the relatively low prices the Chinese government set for the tickets, and partly because of the overwhelming demand of 1.3 billion Chinese citizens itching to see the games in their home country. (Quite the contrast from the Athens games of 2004, when the ridiculously high price of tickets resulted in thousands of unsold tickets.)
But once the Beijing Olympics began, mysteriously, there were hundreds of empty seats at all but the most popular events.
Watching from my hostel in eastern Taiwan two weeks ago, I couldn’t believe that there were so many vacant spots. I had been hoping to go to the Beijing for quite some time, but my Olympic dreams came crashing down when I heard about the difficulties of getting a Chinese visa and the complete lack of tickets.
But seeing that the opportunity to attend the Games was clearly there, I decided on the spur of the moment that I had best get my kiester into one of those spots. A few days later, I caught a plane to Hong Kong to get my China visa, and a few days after that, I was trolling the gleaming streets of Beijing, looking for Olympics tickets.
