Found an Apartment

I've found an apartment in Beijing! Living with a French girl and an American/Chinese couple, slightly overpriced at 3000rmb (about $450) all-told, but available for just the month (and with the screwy dates I have) and in a great location...actually around the corner from my hostel. Moved in yesterday.
Interestingly, Beijing seems to be cheaper than Shanghai in almost all respects, from food to transport. Been exploring a little, had dinner with Larry the other night (and his girlfriend...OOPS, he didn't know it was Chinese Valentine's day until I told him.) You can live in a country for 20 years, but if it's all in an office...the story behind this holiday is fun, it has to do with a goddess [in the moon. obviously.] and mortal falling in love, but the goddesses protective father separates them. Once a year on this day [by the lunar calendar so it changes every year] the birds form a bridge to the moon and they meet. Met a friend with a scooter (and my landlord has one! he took me to the bank and the police to register) so I've been scootering around Beijing a bit. Terrifying. God save the third world as they get cars. The visit to the police station was interesting--they have an old-time stamp for everything instead of signing and I got to go into the fun 'interrogation room'...to sign stuff. Little nerve wracking, but certainly an experience.

Beijing Impressions

Beijing: So much more alive, more vibrant, more smelly! A city of big causeways and myriad wending alleyways that threaten to swallow you. Each is a city in its own right, replete with markets, shops, hair salons, restaurants, old women complaining, young couples walking, and nearly naked children with wise faces perched on handcarts, surveying it all. Public toilets abound—one on every corner, wafting its odour to mingle with the food and people and dog smells of the street. The air is hot but dry, the sun casting mottled shadows on the larger, tree-lined boulevards, catching the red lanterns lining the street and washing out the neon facades of the more glamorous restaurants, making them even more tacky. Three bird cages hang from one tree above a stand of bicycles. I sat in the only restaurant I could find that was still open and busy for lunch at 3 in the afternoon and devoured a bowl of eggplant-pork noodles drowned in enough oil to fry a cat. I sipped a can of cold coconut milk.

I feel much more at home here than in Shanghai. People seem less rushed, more relaxed. The mere presence of trees and gardens does wonders for the spirits, and the older, crumbling architecture gives it a sense of concrete PLACE (spatiality) in this McWorld that Shanghai lacks. And on the steet, a white UN truck honks in irritation as a taxi cab cuts it off.

Still alive in Shanghai

Hey! I'm still alive, still in Shanghai partying the weekend up before getting serious about Beijing next week (like how to get there....where to stay...the small stuff).

I've read that the more time you spend in China the less you are able to say. Stuff that at first is really odd becomes everyday, but I thought I'd start a list, for my own memory as much as anything.

It starts with the hallway outside our apartment, on the 25th floor. Coming out of the elevator the first thing you notice is the shiny plastic wall hanging--two tigers around a character. I imagine it is left over from some holiday or festival--we saw similar things in Guangdong on the doors of houses. Moving down the hallway you notice a row of cactuses and plants on one window ledge, then the next window open and leading out onto a rooftop area, where one of the neighbours has installed a pigeon coop. Pigeon is a fairly common item on all the menus here. Further on my neighbours have hung their washing and have a stool and bucket out in the hallway--their apartment is only maybe two rooms so they leave the door open most of the time and a large amount of day-to-day life is lived in the corridor. Should also mention that the corridor is the parking garage for everyone's bikes.

And speaking of bikes, the things people here fit on them boggles the mind. Today I saw someone on a motorcycle with a flowerpot--that was just surreal, but its not uncommon to see them loaded with wood or water cooler tanks or anything you can imagine (plants are more common than you might expect). Also popular are attached trailers with everything from goods to people, with the poor person in front pedaling furiously in the traffic. And bikes and motorcycles here consider themselves halfway between pedestrian and car, zooming around on sidewalks and even 'jaywalking' when no cars are coming. A lot of the streets have unofficial bike/motorbike lanes, and cars seem to be as used to driving around them as the cyclists are to performing all sorts of vehicular acrobats to not get run over.

That's all for now--more next time!