Beijing, Week Two

Beijing.  I like it.  (wo3 xi3 huan1)

I've been eating (wo3 chi1) like a king (wang2) -- either out at restaurants (fan4 dien4) or at home (wo3 nar4).  Note the outrageous deep-fried chicken with lajiao below.  Every bite was a taste of heaven.  I'd been irritated that the restaurant, Lao Hanzi, had removed my favorites from their menu, but this sure as hell proved they still had it in them.  

I'm shocked I haven't gained weight yet.  Between the prepared feasts and the incredible home-cooked meals, I've been eating and eating and eating.  Mrs Kuo spent days preparing an amazing royal banquet, 14-dishes wide.  Mom and Dad collaborated on an insane lamb-cooked-three-ways-and-served-in-one-dish meal.  And then there was Nicholas, who took me out for "dumplings," which turned into twenty dumplings, a dozen deep-fried chicken wings, a huge whole perch in lajiao, and then three desserts at another restaurant.  All of this for lunch, and all of this consumed by just the two of us.

I need a real exercise regime to keep me skinny, and under the auspicious guidance of Mimi Laoshi, I've been getting my yoga fix.  But even there, there's risk.  After a grand two-and-a-half-hours of yoga with Mimi, she led me to a hutong-hidden cooking school, where we spent the next four hours making and eating dumplings.  Bah!  (The cooking teacher, an old Beijing lady I'd recently read a book about, kept commenting in Chinese on how strong I was.  "Give the dough to him," she urged a fellow kneader, "He's burly!  He knows what to do!"  Five people passed their dough down to me, the rest to Aaron.  Joo, a tall well-muscled Malay, stood empty-handed and looking confused.)

Beyond the eating, it's the learning that's keeping me busy.  

Every day I spend two hours with Hu (Hu2) Laoshi, a 30 year old (san1 shi2 sui2) Chinese (zhong1 guo2 ren2) woman who's married (jie2 hun1) with no children (mei2 you3 hai2 zi).  We sit in a small room and have difficult Chinese conversations about marriage, kids, jobs, etc.  I get out, and my head is a swirl of broken sentences and half-remembered words.  I see street signs, and recognize characters that make no contextual sense.  One sign reads "Beijing {?} Child {?} Meat."  Perhaps the missing characters make it less frightening, but they do eat dog here, so who knows!

On the subway, I recite sentences and phrases while listening to language tapes.  Strangers watch me warily as I ask and answer convoluted questions to myself like a New York loon.  "What time would you like to go to the Beijing restaurant to eat lunch?"  "I would like to go to the Beijing restaurant at 9pm."  "9pm is impossible.  How about 8pm?"  "I can not do 8pm.  How about 7pm?"  And so on.  People either step away nervously, or just stare.  But they stare anyway.  There are so few whites on the subway that new arrivals to the city, short skinny men in cheap suits, loaded down with bloated laundry bags full of all their possessions, will stop walking and gaze in awe at the gwailo walking past.  Yesterday morning, a small child sitting beside me couldn't look away.  I took advantage, and practiced sentences on him.  "Ni jiao shenme?"  He was far too young to understand.  His mother giggled shyly.

And similarly farang-free was my two-day Agile Project Management class, under the tuition of renowned ScrumMaster Pete Deemer.  Located in a high-tech hotel downtown, the class was 34 Chinese project managers and programmers, one Finn, and me.  Unshaven, with messy hair, shod in dirty black jeans and a cowboy shirt, I stood out: everyone else was in a suit.  It reminded me of working at CNET.  

And over the two days, repeatedly, I was cornered by tech-geeks who were sure they knew me.  "Hi!," someone shouted.  "Um...?"  I strained to remember him.  "Remember?  We met at the Linux conference last month," he reminded me.  "Sorry, I've never been to a Linux conference."  "Oh, he looks just like you."  A few hours later, I heard someone similarly mistake the Finn.  "We had dinner together," he said, "With your friend Bobby!"  "But I only just arrived in Beijing.  And I have no friend Bobby.  I do not think it was me."  Later someone asked when I was heading back to Finland.  Guess we all look the same, here, too.

The class was great, though, and the students treated Pete like a hero, lining up to take photos with him and asking him to autograph books he didn't write.  Several of them lined up to pose with me and the Finn, as well, to show their friends back home.  

I haven't explored as much as I want to, but I did discover this quirk-park, with an amazingly incongruous collection of old Russian metal art, Grecian statues, Indian mosaics, an angry alligator to scare kids, and one old man flying a kite without his friend.  The park was mostly empty, trees had kites snagged in branches, and it snowed briefly, all of which made the scene feel quite incredibly romantic, in a desolate, lonely way.