China - Beijing - 3/6/2005

Our first day in Beijing was very exciting, while I was still feeling a bit tired and out of it because of the jet lag I had been so exhausted that I slept all through the night.
The breakfast in the hotel was extremely large, it was a buffet that included everything you could want to either eat for lunch, breakfast or dinner... so since I was still unsure what time it was for me, I selected a bit of everything, including fried rice, dumplings and some eggs with bacon. After breakfast I went out with Daniel, Eugenio and a few other people to walk around the hotel area where there were some interesting stores. Something that stood out were the amount of cell phone related stores that I saw in the short range of blocks we walked.
Another thing that kept creeping in the back of my head was how much the area looked like Mexico City, the way people moved, the traffic on the street, the buildings and so many other details gave me a huge sense of Deja vu, maybe the most significant factor was the grayness of the sky that made me unsure whether it was simply foggy or if it was actually caused by smog.
After walking around the stores in a modern looking mall, Daniel showed us a bottom floor that had smaller stalls and bazaar like stores selling traditional Chinese trinkets and clothes. We explored this area, that seemed to go on forever for almost the whole time we were there, and while we didn't purchase anything I was surprised at the aggresiveness and pushiness of the vendors who even went as far as grabbing you and putting the things in your hands so you would buy from them.
The whole area seemed to be very dormant, but it probably had something to do with the fact that it was Sunday afternoon.
After visiting the stores we went back to the hotel where we met up with our group and proceeded to drive around the Beijing area. I got to see for the first time the Forbidden City while we drove past it to a restaurant that was very close to it.
The restaurant we went to, we were told, was founded by former chefs of the Imperial Court, who had been left unemployed after the last emperor left China, and all they knew how to do was cook this specific type of food, so they simply put up different restaurants around the city and kept on the recipes for buying customers, and the food still is around in the rest of the country.
In this restaurant we experienced for the first time how cheap beer was, when we ordered 3/4 liter bottles of beer for about a dollar each. At the same time we were served a lot of very good food. The way the meal worked was that about 10 of us would be sitting in a table with a very large lazy susan in the middle (A lazy susan is a large plate that turns around so people around the table can rotate it to get different dishes), while waitresses would come over and put new dishes every few minutes on the lazy susan. This gave us a great sampling of the food that was very good and very plentiful, at this rate I'd probably gain several pounds by the time I got back home.
After lunch we went straight to the Forbidden City (although we had a hard time moving after all that we ate). We got to walk in through the rear door and something very pretty to watch was the lake around the city, that had frozen due to the cold winter. Besides hearing the explanations that General Lee was giving us, it was very interesting to see the actual buildings in the forbidden city. Maybe the most interesting point was that many of the buildings looked run down because of their age and the pollution in the air, yet because of the efforts to beautify the city before the olympics there was a lot of construction activity going around where they were re-tiling and re-painting all the buildings. An interesting comment that Gen. Lee made was that all the reconstruction was scheduled to end by the end of 2006, so that during 2007 people would forget that it had been run down before, and would be able to talk about it as if it was always like that when foreigners started arriving for the Olympic Games by 2008.
Another funny detail in the forbidden city was to see the Starbucks that had been built in there, since honestly that was the latest place I expected to find one, but China is a market where you can see almost as many starbucks as in NYC.
After walking through the Forbidden city (and stopping every 2 minutes to take a picture) we came out the front door out to Tianamen square. All the buildings had red flags flying, and this happens only for a month or two during the year when the government is in session, so it was a very nice sight for us. Tianamen square is huge (as almost everything seems to be in China), and it fits half a million people in it.
After walking around Tianamen we went to a dinner at a restaurant that served arab food. Unfortunately for me, I've had better arab food, thus I was unimpressed, and while it did have a bit of Chinese flavor to it I was unable to eat the kebabs that seemed to be the best part of the dinner. While we were having dinner we also got to experience some dance shows, which included some audience participation, so I even got to go onstage and bellydance a bit. That part woke me up a bit and I started feeling slightly better after that.
As if we weren't tired enough a group of us still managed to go out drinking to one of the streets that had many bars. Maybe because it was Sunday night the place seemed very quiet for a bar street, where we even got to haggle for the price of beer at different bars so that we would go in. In the end we hung out for a short while before taking cabs back to the hotel. Luckily we had enough business cards with the hotel name to make it back safely.