Two of my students took me here, which one list said is the best fish restaurant in Beijing. (Based on our meal, that’s plausible.) Its specialty is grilled fish “Wushan style”. Wushan is a mountain, not a province (like Sichuan or Hunan), so the restaurant may have invented the term. The menu is short. There are a bunch of cold dishes and the grilled fish, which comes in seven different flavors (hot & spicy, chinese sauerkraut, etc.). Unlike any other Beijing restaurant I’ve been to, you need a reservation. (Call a week ahead.) The restaurant, which wasn’t large, was packed. The walls were covered with Post-It notes. One said: “I wish I find my dream girl and me and my friend Bob have a safe life.” Another said: “Very spicy, very tasty, makes me feel very good.” A third said: “We had to wait a long time, so we ate a lot.” I wrote one saying what one of my students suggested: “We didn’t have to wait a long time but we ate a lot anyway.”
Category: Beijing
A Chinese Joke
In a Shanghai apartment, the phone rings. A friend of the occupant answers the phone. “It’s someone from a rural area,” he shouts to the occupant. (Shanghai and other dialects are quite different.) “I’m from Beijing,” says the person on the line. “It’s someone from Rural Beijing,” the friend shouts.
This joke is told by people who are from neither Shanghai nor Beijing.
The Bike: X Invented It. Y Perfected It.
The bicycle is far from the most influential invention ever — that would be the printing press — but it might be the most perfect, at least where I live. As I rode home last night I reflected how curiously great it is (where I live):
1. Low cost. A friend gave me hers for free. Perhaps it would have sold for $5. A new bike costs as little as $20.
2. Durable. They never wear out, although parts need replacing. I could have the bike I have now 20 years from now.
3. Ages well. Unlike almost all commercial products, bikes improve with age. They look less and less desirable so the probability of theft goes down. My bike, which looks worthless, will never be stolen. (As my students confirmed for me today.) I took to fake-locking it because I couldn’t get the key out of the lock. One day someone managed to get the key out leaving my bike locked and possessing the key. Whoever did that didn’t bother to take the bike. I got the lock sawed off a block away for $1. I bought a new lock for $2.
4. Great service. When something goes wrong, I can bring it to a bike shop that will fix it in minutes. There are lots of bike shops in my neighborhood.
5. Convenient. You can always park your bike close to where you’re going.
6. Green. Zero pollution, zero fossil fuel.
7. Exercise.
8. Quiet. The Tsinghua campus is full of bikes yet is always quiet. Because of the bikes, cars are banned from large chunks of the campus.
9. Safe. My neighborhood, like elsewhere in Beijing (but unlike some Chinese cities), has plenty of bike lanes. It feels perfectly safe to ride in them. In Berkeley I wear a bike helmet but at least in my neighborhood I haven’t been able to see the need — it would be like wearing a helmet while walking.
10. Facilitates exploration. Most of Beijing is no fun to walk in — things are too far apart. But it is fun to bike around. You can easily bike from one interesting place to the next and whenever you get somewhere interesting you can get off your bike and walk around it.
Beijing Air
Yesterday was really windy. Lots of bikes fell over, including mine. I thought my sheets, hung to dry outside my apartment window, had blown away. I searched for them around the building. I eventually found them — in my closet. I got a piece of dirt in my eye that I noticed for several hours. It was my first significant bad encounter with Beijing air this time around (since August). I was in Beijing last fall, too, and then the dirty air really bothered me. I felt better after I got an air filter for my apartment.
When I was a freshman at Caltech, Richard Feynman came to our dorm for dinner. I asked the first question: “What do you think of the air?” He looked at me as if it was a stupid question. I think his answer was, “You get used to it.” After living in Beijing last year, I said over and over I liked everything except the air. Now I find it hard to complain about the air. In my apartment I have one big air filter per room that runs constantly; they are quiet and turn red if the air is dirty. They hardly ever turn red. Last year, after a week without dusting, you could write “lung cancer” in the fine black dust that had accumulated. Now it isn’t there. Through my window the visibility is usually pretty good; I can see the lights of buildings in the distance.
Yesterday someone told me Beijing air has gotten much much better. “Ten years ago your hair would get filthy” from coal dust, he said. The hutongs had coal-burning heaters. Now they are gone. Measures of air quality have even improved since last year, I think he said. I met someone recently arrived who was bothered by the air but she felt much better after I gave her an air filter.
Overall, I think four things have changed: 1. The air in my apartment, where I spend most of my time, is much better (compared to unfiltered). 2. Outside air is somewhat better. 3. Due to fermented foods, my overall health is better. 4. Due to learning about hormesis, I don’t worry about a small amount of air pollution.
James Fallows on How I Survived China. The bottled water at a Buddhist restaurant came from a garden hose.
Beijing Subway Security in Action
I cannot believe that I am still being asked to take my goddamn shoes off every time I want to go on an airplane, but I am able to board mass transit trains without anyone checking me for explosives at all.
Have I told you about the time I took a cleaver on the Beijing Subway? The Beijing Subway has security: They screen all bags. It started before the Olympics and, after the Olympics ended, kept going. At Wal-Mart, I bought a cleaver/cutting board/chopstick set (enclosed in plastic), put it in my laptop bag, and entered the subway. I was stopped. The cleaver had shown up on the scanner screen. The guard was pleasant and after I showed her what it was I was quickly sent on my way.
Miso Shopping in Beijing
In Beijing I have no kitchen, just a microwave oven. Which is enough to make miso soup. Which I can eat happily day after day.
But I need miso. In Tokyo I bought miso far better than what I used in Berkeley and now cheap miso isn’t good enough for me. Finding high-quality miso in Beijing is turning out to be hard, even though there are many Japanese students in my neighborhood. Today I went to a Japanese-owned department store with a food market. They had hundreds of Japanese foods, including plum wine, natto, Japanese pickles, sushi ingredients, seaweed crackers, and black milk (whatever that is). But they didn’t have miso. I have no explanation; the local hypermarket (Carrefour) had low-quality miso.
If you know where to get good miso in Beijing, please let me know.
Beijing Wal-Mart
To buy a refrigerator, a friend suggested I try a store called Vollna, to which I found references online. When I got to the right subway station, however, no one had heard of it. She’d meant Wal-Mart. The Beijing Wal-Mart has many interesting features:
- They sell live turtles.
- A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
- Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
- They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging.
- They had pairs of escalators (actually sloped moving walkways) going in the same direction. For heavy traffic, I guess. I’ve never seen such a thing anywhere else.
- It’s extremely convenient, right next to a subway station. In America, as all Americans know, Wal-Marts are almost never convenient. Which is why I’ve been to an American Wal-Mart only twice, in spite of the large selection and low prices.
- The refrigerators were hidden behind large stacks of what looked like flour.
- After I bought a blood pressure monitor, the salesperson added batteries and showed me how to use it. Such product verification/education has happened before to me in Beijing, never in America.
- A staggering number of food samples. Maybe a hundred. Other Beijing supermarkets are like big-city American supermarkets; some have samples, some don’t. This was a full-court press. Every possible sample. The roast duck was the best, the yellow kiwi (sweeter than green kiwi) the most unusual. I got tired of sampling and stopped. I can’t remember that happening before.
- The prices were ordinary Chinese prices. Not unusually low. To bring flaxseed oil to China I’d bought a very large duffel bag from Land’s End, so large I had to drag it. (Which ruined it.) It cost $70 plus shipping. Wal-Mart had a more reasonably-sized large duffel bag, better-made and with wheels for $20. Ugh. It was the wheels, not available at Land’s End, rather than the $50 difference, that pissed me off. My too-heavy duffel bag was a pain in the butt because I had to drag it (at the same time carrying other luggage). This made me never want to shop in America again for anything I could get in China.
- Cigarettes are in a special booth off to the side. About 200 choices.
They can’t compete on price in China, of course. So my guess is that they are trying to compete on selection, convenience, and customer service (thus all the sampling). That you can return stuff was very clear.
What One American Thinks of Beijing
She loves it:
1. The vibe. It reminds her of New York and London.
2. The range of Chinese food. You get food from all over China here. (At all price points, I might add.)
3. The atmosphere. The air isn’t so bad. She spent two years in another Chinese city, never saw a sunrise.
4. The bike lanes. You can walk comfortably. In the Chinese city where she lived before there were no bike lanes and no bikes. Everyone had a motor scooter, which you were constantly dodging. (The bike lanes also make it easy to bike, I might add.)
5. The balance between international and Chinese. Shanghai is basically all international, you can get around without a word of Chinese. Poorer cities are all Chinese. Beijing isn’t the only city with a balance, it’s just done especially well here.
6. The people. Strangers are friendly, if you ask for directions, they’ll make sure you get there.
7. The vast amount of culture. The 798 art district, for example.
She doesn’t like the weather; it gets really cold in the winter and the air is very dry (bad for your skin).
Beijing Air: Not Dirty Enough
I’ve been back in Beijing a week. I’ve been eating lots of fermented food, which is easy to get, including fermented eggs (10 for $1.50) sold at a stand in a shopping mall. There is a bigger yogurt selection here than in Berkeley. Tsinghua University sells its own perfectly good yogurt (20 cents a serving). Every supermarket has a big pickle selection.
In Berkeley, as I blogged earlier, a few months ago I noticed that my nose was no longer runny. My Kleenex consumption, which had been about one box of Kleenex every month or so, was reduced to almost zero. (A reader of this blog had a similar experience.) No doubt this was due to eating much more fermented food. The runny-nose-absence has continued in Beijing.
Last year in Beijing, I had a runny nose. I used about one tissue packet per day. I ate almost no fermented food. So far so good. The interesting twist is that dirty city air has been linked to less runny nose. Air pollution, in other words, can have the same effect as fermented food. Last year, apparently, Beijing air wasn’t dirty enough to get rid of my runny nose.
I’m not joking. After I realized this, I felt a lot better about Beijing’s air, which I have long said is the worst thing about living here. Someday I will blog about the health benefits of smoking, which suggest the same conclusion.
Spectacle Practice
Late last night, on my way home, I came across a huge crowd of Tsinghua students next to the campus stadium. More than a thousand. There was no event at the stadium. All of them were dressed in a casual uniform, in varying colors. “What’s this about?” I asked one of them. “It’s a secret,” she said. Another one told me they were practicing for the upcoming National Day (October 1), which is China’s Fourth of July. This particular National Day will be the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the current system so there will be an especially big celebration. The uniforms said “60″ on the shirt. There were going to be at least 9 practices. This particular night was the first night they would practice in Tiananmen Square, where the event would take place. Every one of them had a square with different colors on the two sides; like a giant LED display they would make different displays. “It lasts all night,” the student told me. “It ends at 6 am. We don’t sleep.”
And, indeed, at 5:30 am the next morning, a police-escorted convoy of 45 buses, each with about 60 students, came through the campus gate near my apartment. An article about the Tiananmen practice says it involves about 200,000 people. That’s a lot of buses.