Beijing

This Friday I left work about 30 minutes early, took the subway to the Shanghai train station, and boarded an overnight train for Beijing. A dry business book and a mediocre meal of overpriced train food with half a loaf of bread I had bought that morning put me right to sleep, and I slept relatively soundly until our arrival in Beijing.

People – in both cities – like to ask me whether I like Beijing or Shanghai more. If the conversation is in Chinese, I draw on stock, stilted textbook vocabulary to say that Shanghai is more commercial and has better architecture, while Beijing is China’s cultural and political center (my classmates know how unoriginal this response is). If asked in English, however, I will admit that – objectively – Shanghai is a better city in almost every aspect, but I have a strange, sentimental nostalgia for “The Capital of Dust”, as a lawyer at my law firm called Beijing. I love Beijing, and I had a my-plane-has-just-touched-down- in-the-San-Antonio-airport-after-a-term-at-Dartmouth kind of feeling in my stomach as the train reached the Beijing train station just a little before 7am.

Because it was still very early and I didn’t want to wake up Dartmouth and Beijing friends just yet, I walked aimlessly around the train station neighbourhood, eventually wandering into an internet café to check my email. At 7am, there were still people – mostly younger men - there from the night before intensely playing internet games.

After my email and NY Times fix, I took the subway toward Beijing Normal University. The walk from the subway station is about 20 minutes, but I still had some time to kill – the rest of the weekend I took 5 yuan, ~70 cent, rides in what a guess could be called modern rickshaws, little passenger cars somewhat haphazardly built around 3-wheeled motorcycle frames. In preparation for the Olympics, everything in Beijing is under construction, so I found the university neighbourhood familiar, but changed. A giant construction project near the foreign student dorm had progressed significantly, and a building was starting to appear under what had before been mostly scaffolding.

I spent a lot of the weekend going to my favourite restaurants from this summer, more to see the waiters and waitresses again than to eat the food (though I do miss Beijing food while in Shanghai). Some recognized me, some didn’t. A group of waitresses at a Japanese restaurant my classmates and I often visited remembered how we had, inexplicably, all broken our disposable chopsticks on our heads during our last meal there (I can’t actually explain why we did this either); but at another restaurant, I got an unexpectedly cool reception from Zhou LiHua who was by far our group’s favourite waitress.

On Saturday, I also went to Hong Qiao, a massive indoor market, under the auspices of souvenir shopping, but mostly just to practice my bargaining skills. Later I played basketball at the Beijing Normal courts with a mixture of Dartmouth and Chinese students. Unfortunately, it took me a while to remember how to play Beijing Normal ball – fast-paced, chaotic play that takes place almost entirely in the key with only an occasional outside shot – and we lost a few games before ending with a winning streak. That night, I borrowed sheets from the Dartmouth TA and slept on the floor of two Dartmouth students’ room. I know: I’m cheap.

The highlight of my trip was definitely a Sunday lunch with one of the 3rd year teachers from the summer, Jiang Laoshi. It was really fun to reminisce, complain about jobs, and joke over dumplings and tea at 太平饺子馆, another of this summer’s staple restaurants. She said my Chinese had improved, but scolded me for picking up a bit of the Shanghainese accent (I’ve lost some of Beiing’s stressed “sh”, “zh”, and “ch” sounds). I hope to meet up with her again the weekend before I leave from Beijing for the States.

Before leaving for Shanghai, I spent some time tooling around Wangfujing, a Beijing shopping area, mostly looking for a good English language book for the train ride home (in typical fashion, I bought 4). Early Monday morning, I arrived back in Shanghai, took a taxi home, picked up my dry-cleaning, showered, and went to work. This weekend certainly wasn’t restful, but I had a lot of fun, and I look forward to a last weekend in Beijing this December before flying out of China.