at home in the third ring road
so i'm currently sitting in an internet cafe near the hotel i'm staying in, trying to avoid the cigarette smoke of the guy playing video games next to me. i don't know what they smoke here in china, but it smells foul. good thing i'll be leaving before i do too much more damage to my health. the hotel we're staying in is some sort of back-door deal through a doctor friend of the family of the guy who's getting married - the entrance to the hotel is next door to a hospital, which rents space from the hotel, so we have to go through the hospital, up stairs, down a couple hallways, and through a random door to get to our part of the hotel. the doors don't lock, but we're all in the same hallway, it's clean, and it's air-conditioned, so that's good enough for me for a couple more nights.
the hotel is in near the southwestern corner of the third ring road, and seems to be more local than the touristy or university areas around tsinghua and the forbidden city - we can tell because 99.9% of the people we see are native chinese people. it's kind of a nice change from tsinghua's campus, which felt a lot like a small university town and not a little artificial. that said, it's dirtier, more people smoke, and i saw a small child urinating on the street on my way to the internet cafe - but it feels real. after having driven around the city a bit on my own, i've got a better feel for the city - it's actually smaller than i had thought it was, just very dense.
since jessica and lisa (a friend of jessica's from german house) are new to the city, when i arrived at the hotel saturday afternoon, we departed shortly for the temple of heaven. it was nice to see it again - i hadn't realized that there was so much stuff to the side of the main attraction (the round temple in the middle) to see: a garden, greenspaces, pagodas, and the like. the temple technically closes at 5:30, but 5:30 was well and gone by the time that we exited. it was rather quieter than i had found it when we went the first time for the studio - and much cooler because it was overcast. it was, however, disgustingly humid. hopefully it'll rain soon so i don't have to bear the humidity anymore.
today (sunday) we went to the dirt market (ok, in chinese it's pujian-something market), which is a sunday market in the morning where you can buy tons of stuff, from jewelry to silk and tea sets to mao memorabilia to...polished walnuts (please tell me the significance of this if you know). we spent about an hour browsing, then set off for the forbidden city. on the way, we stopped by tiananmen square, which was packed - i've never seen so many people in one place = weird, considering that we had just been there a few weeks prior. where did all of the tourists suddenly come from??? surprisingly, given that i didn't find the forbidden city particularly enlightening the first time i went, i found it to be rather nice, as i did the temple of heaven. we went off the beaten path and wound around on the right side, hitting the palace of glass, which is a white stone building in the european style, in the middle of a courtyard. i wonder if we might have seen more of the place the first time if it hadn't been so overbearingly hot.
from there we went to tsinghua for lunch - there's an offshoot of the peking duck place in the science park, which explains the five-foot-tall duck statue outside the calatrava arcade. we had lunch there, which was different from the peking duck we had - i think the 300-yuan meal they offered us at the restaurant in the downtown was what we had for lunch (it was much cheaper, since it was just lunch). i'm pretty sure i ate a piece of every part of the duck, from the feet to the webbing of the feet to the meat, gizzards, and brain. and, according to jessica, duck tongues. anyway, i'm not so much a fan of the feet, mildly a fan of the webbing, and well, duck liver always tastes good.
since we were close to the new summer palace, we stopped off there for almost three hours, and hit some of the places i hadn't seen before. for one, we got to see the marble boat, which is as tasteless as lisa's lonely planet guide says it is. i have pictures that i'll post when i get a chance (which probably won't be til later this week). after the boat, we split up, and v and i headed north to the causeway, which is a lovely tongue of land that's planted with willows and peach trees, connected to the rest of the summer palace with marble and stone bridges. it's very restful because the tourists are being herded around the sights, whereas people were just strolling around our side of the park.
tomorrow is the wedding until the afternoon, so i'm going to bum around the city somewhere while i wait for jessica and v to be free - we're headed to shishahai for some hutong coffeehouses, then houhai for dinner and drinks. it's a little strange to split off from the studio folks and join up with my friends from home so abruptly - after spending so much time with the same people for several weeks, it's weird to be away from them and with my friends from home. it's a little strange to be with my friends from home in a foreign country, too - especially a country as foreign as this one. never have i realized just how different regular mit students are from the architecture and planning students...
the hotel is in near the southwestern corner of the third ring road, and seems to be more local than the touristy or university areas around tsinghua and the forbidden city - we can tell because 99.9% of the people we see are native chinese people. it's kind of a nice change from tsinghua's campus, which felt a lot like a small university town and not a little artificial. that said, it's dirtier, more people smoke, and i saw a small child urinating on the street on my way to the internet cafe - but it feels real. after having driven around the city a bit on my own, i've got a better feel for the city - it's actually smaller than i had thought it was, just very dense.
since jessica and lisa (a friend of jessica's from german house) are new to the city, when i arrived at the hotel saturday afternoon, we departed shortly for the temple of heaven. it was nice to see it again - i hadn't realized that there was so much stuff to the side of the main attraction (the round temple in the middle) to see: a garden, greenspaces, pagodas, and the like. the temple technically closes at 5:30, but 5:30 was well and gone by the time that we exited. it was rather quieter than i had found it when we went the first time for the studio - and much cooler because it was overcast. it was, however, disgustingly humid. hopefully it'll rain soon so i don't have to bear the humidity anymore.
today (sunday) we went to the dirt market (ok, in chinese it's pujian-something market), which is a sunday market in the morning where you can buy tons of stuff, from jewelry to silk and tea sets to mao memorabilia to...polished walnuts (please tell me the significance of this if you know). we spent about an hour browsing, then set off for the forbidden city. on the way, we stopped by tiananmen square, which was packed - i've never seen so many people in one place = weird, considering that we had just been there a few weeks prior. where did all of the tourists suddenly come from??? surprisingly, given that i didn't find the forbidden city particularly enlightening the first time i went, i found it to be rather nice, as i did the temple of heaven. we went off the beaten path and wound around on the right side, hitting the palace of glass, which is a white stone building in the european style, in the middle of a courtyard. i wonder if we might have seen more of the place the first time if it hadn't been so overbearingly hot.
from there we went to tsinghua for lunch - there's an offshoot of the peking duck place in the science park, which explains the five-foot-tall duck statue outside the calatrava arcade. we had lunch there, which was different from the peking duck we had - i think the 300-yuan meal they offered us at the restaurant in the downtown was what we had for lunch (it was much cheaper, since it was just lunch). i'm pretty sure i ate a piece of every part of the duck, from the feet to the webbing of the feet to the meat, gizzards, and brain. and, according to jessica, duck tongues. anyway, i'm not so much a fan of the feet, mildly a fan of the webbing, and well, duck liver always tastes good.
since we were close to the new summer palace, we stopped off there for almost three hours, and hit some of the places i hadn't seen before. for one, we got to see the marble boat, which is as tasteless as lisa's lonely planet guide says it is. i have pictures that i'll post when i get a chance (which probably won't be til later this week). after the boat, we split up, and v and i headed north to the causeway, which is a lovely tongue of land that's planted with willows and peach trees, connected to the rest of the summer palace with marble and stone bridges. it's very restful because the tourists are being herded around the sights, whereas people were just strolling around our side of the park.
tomorrow is the wedding until the afternoon, so i'm going to bum around the city somewhere while i wait for jessica and v to be free - we're headed to shishahai for some hutong coffeehouses, then houhai for dinner and drinks. it's a little strange to split off from the studio folks and join up with my friends from home so abruptly - after spending so much time with the same people for several weeks, it's weird to be away from them and with my friends from home. it's a little strange to be with my friends from home in a foreign country, too - especially a country as foreign as this one. never have i realized just how different regular mit students are from the architecture and planning students...
posted by awol at 9:07 PM
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