when it rains, it pours
a cliche, you might think, until you've been in beijing for a week and a half and you've been sweating away in the humidity. isn't shanghai the humid one, you think, and beijing the dry one? unfortunately, the weather gods have proven you wrong yet again, driving you to insanity in the humidity, and then dumping buckets of rain on you as soon as you think the weather's never going to get better. the result is beautiful cool weather in the evening, following a loud, windy thunder-and-lightning storm; how long it will last is pretty much a mystery.
the air quality here is pretty bad, and is exacerbated by the heat. blech - you know the air's no good when you get a sore throat from breathing while biking around. i can just feel the dust collecting in my respiratory system. i haven't had much of a problem with a sore throat, though, since we spend most of our days inside the studio. i've been using my inhaler, so even if i were outside a lot, my lungs would be fine - it's the eyes that start feeling like you've been walking around in the desert for a few days, after you've been out and about for a few hours.
we went out last night, to a bar strip somewhere in the city. "somewhere in the city" is a pretty good description for anywhere in the city, save for large landmarks like the forbidden city. it's impossible to tell where you are because the city is vast, and much of it looks the same. the ring roads also confuse everything (and the signs only in chinese don't help much either). i wonder if the chinese characters on road signs are as descriptive as highway signs in the united states; somehow i doubt it. you could tell we were in a sort of tourist area, though there were a fair amount of chinese people, because the bar owners would lurk outside their bars' doors, exhorting passersby to come in (in chinese, which i think is probably pretty useless for tourists). you also have to pay for your drink first, i guess so that you don't get too tipsy before the time comes to pay. i made the mistake of looking at some random guy for a millisecond too long while we were on the street (he was a north african french guy who was speaking french) and got a generic, french-accented pickup line. ugh. nothing more sketchy than that. i may have paused there to look revolted.
studio is pretty intense - we're there every day almost all day, breaking for lunch and dinner. we've been to the dining hall several times, which i think i mentioned earlier; it's incredibly cheap. would that you could get lunch or dinner for 25 cents, huh? after eating at the big (four floors of food and seating) dining hall for a few days, we've been discovering smaller, better lit dining halls that have slightly different food. the dining halls are vast - like the stereotype of an American dining hall, but bigger and more utilitarian. there are tables (with the chairs attached) in the middle of the room, with stainless steel counters along the edges. the tables are arranged with paths between some of them, so you have to pay attention where you're walking. we've actually seen workers measuring the distances between tables with a string in order to put them in the right place (with a string?! labor really is cheap here).
the food's not too bad, though in the big dining hall the food is kind of like a chinese greasy spoon. we've had better luck at the smaller places - the one we went to today had some random things like stuffed fried dough and egg-and-leek dumplings. i hear that the food is all northern chinese cuisine (as opposed to more fiery southern cuisine) - after all, we are in the north. when i think north, though, i tend to think of cold places...
the air quality here is pretty bad, and is exacerbated by the heat. blech - you know the air's no good when you get a sore throat from breathing while biking around. i can just feel the dust collecting in my respiratory system. i haven't had much of a problem with a sore throat, though, since we spend most of our days inside the studio. i've been using my inhaler, so even if i were outside a lot, my lungs would be fine - it's the eyes that start feeling like you've been walking around in the desert for a few days, after you've been out and about for a few hours.
we went out last night, to a bar strip somewhere in the city. "somewhere in the city" is a pretty good description for anywhere in the city, save for large landmarks like the forbidden city. it's impossible to tell where you are because the city is vast, and much of it looks the same. the ring roads also confuse everything (and the signs only in chinese don't help much either). i wonder if the chinese characters on road signs are as descriptive as highway signs in the united states; somehow i doubt it. you could tell we were in a sort of tourist area, though there were a fair amount of chinese people, because the bar owners would lurk outside their bars' doors, exhorting passersby to come in (in chinese, which i think is probably pretty useless for tourists). you also have to pay for your drink first, i guess so that you don't get too tipsy before the time comes to pay. i made the mistake of looking at some random guy for a millisecond too long while we were on the street (he was a north african french guy who was speaking french) and got a generic, french-accented pickup line. ugh. nothing more sketchy than that. i may have paused there to look revolted.
studio is pretty intense - we're there every day almost all day, breaking for lunch and dinner. we've been to the dining hall several times, which i think i mentioned earlier; it's incredibly cheap. would that you could get lunch or dinner for 25 cents, huh? after eating at the big (four floors of food and seating) dining hall for a few days, we've been discovering smaller, better lit dining halls that have slightly different food. the dining halls are vast - like the stereotype of an American dining hall, but bigger and more utilitarian. there are tables (with the chairs attached) in the middle of the room, with stainless steel counters along the edges. the tables are arranged with paths between some of them, so you have to pay attention where you're walking. we've actually seen workers measuring the distances between tables with a string in order to put them in the right place (with a string?! labor really is cheap here).
the food's not too bad, though in the big dining hall the food is kind of like a chinese greasy spoon. we've had better luck at the smaller places - the one we went to today had some random things like stuffed fried dough and egg-and-leek dumplings. i hear that the food is all northern chinese cuisine (as opposed to more fiery southern cuisine) - after all, we are in the north. when i think north, though, i tend to think of cold places...
posted by awol at 9:51 PM
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