吃饭 (Food in China)

** I originally wrote this post over a week ago but never published it, so I'm backdating it. That way it doesn't look like I forgot about my blog for a week, even though I did :P **



In the second of my daily-life segments, I'm going to cover what we eat around here, since "how do you like the food?" is probably the question I've been asked most by people back at home.

Cafeteria Food
There are more than ten cafeterias/restaurants open to students on campus. They're pretty easy to find even if you don't speak Chinese, because they get very busy at meal times. Almost all of them are of the pay-for-each-dish variety, although there are a few set-price buffets as well.

Breakfast
Aside from a few notable exceptions, breakfast is the one meal I always eat in the cafeterias. The most common breakfast food by far is 包子 (baozi), or steamed/fried buns, pictured below. They range from thin buns with meat/vegetables inside to thicker ones with red bean paste (tastes much better than it sounds). You can also get 鸡蛋 (jidan, hard-boiled eggs), 面包 (mianbao, regular/fried bread), and a bunch of other things I don't know the names for, most of them soup-like. My standard breakfast is three or four baozi and some 豆浆 (doujiang, soy milk), which is exactly what I've put together below. This costs less than ￥2 (~30 cents).



Lunch/Dinner
As at home, lunch and dinner foods are essentially the same thing. Most of the stuff at the cafeteria is some sort of meat (usually one of chicken, beef, pork, duck, or lamb) with vegetables. But some of the cafeterias have dishes unique to a particular type of cuisine. One of our favorites is a teppanyaki-like skillet where you choose a type of meat to be served with rice and vegetables. It's made to order, so it's always hot, and it's only ￥7.

There are plenty of different drinks in the cafeteria, including water, juice, tea, instant coffee, smoothies, and beer. Most of these will run ￥2－3, or a little more for beer. My favorites are peach juice, green tea, and pineapple juice.

Basically, it's really difficult to spend more than ￥10 ($1.30) on a single cafeteria meal. We also eat out at plenty of restaurants around town. One of them even has an American-style breakfast (eggs, bacon, pancakes), which was a welcome surprise after a few weeks in Beijing. Even our most expensive meals (usually roast duck with plenty of sides in a fancy restaurant) rarely cost more than ￥50 a person, which is less than I would spend at Chili's.

So to answer the question, I love the food here. I've yet to have any adverse reactions to the Chinese food, and there is enough American-ish food to hold me over indefinitely. We even found a pizza place called the Kro's Nest that does pretty good imitation Chicago-style pizza. Add that to the standard selection of McDonald's, KFC, Dairy Queen, and Starbucks in every shopping mall, and you can easily forget you ever left home.

Class is wrapping up here, and in a few days we will catch a train overnight to Shanghai. I'm pretty excited, but a little upset that our time in Beijing went by so quickly. But I had a great time and am ready for a change of scenery. More on that in a few days!

Communism at work?

So the other day we had to get up at 7am and (instead of going to class) ride about an hour and a half out to a place listed on our schedule as a "Green Ecological Community". Weren't sure what to expect, and even now I'm still not entirely sure what it was, due to some flexibility in translation.

Basically, it was something like a pre-fab agricultural community. They explained to us how everyone in this small town worked equal jobs and got equal shares of what they made (I think). Most of it is based on fruit and grain production, but they also kept all kinds of animals and livestock.

The village itself reminded me of visiting some of the places outside Kunming last summer, at least in the way the buildings were set up. But the communal-farm thing is a pretty sharp contrast to what we're used to seeing in Beijing, which itself is more befitting of a typical capitalist American city.

In any case, it was a quick but interesting visit. We spent twice as much time driving as we did visiting, and initially I wasn't very enthused, but in the end I was actually glad we went. Below are some photos... as always, more on Flickr.

Otherwise, not much to report... just another rainy afternoon in Bejing (it's rained pretty consistently at some point every day for the past several days). We only have about two more weeks in Beijing, which is really hard to believe. But two weeks is still a pretty long time, so stay tuned for more updates!

Summer Palace (06/06)

As promised (and only about a week late), here are some pictures from the Summer Palace. There are more at my Flickr page.

This is incidentally the place depicted in the banner I chose for the top of this blog, even though I didn't know it at the time.






Unlike the beautiful day on which I shot these, the past couple days here have been quite dreary. It rained for the better part of 24 hours the other night, and I seem to have picked up a slight cold as a result.








Our only tour this weekend (scheduled for today) was canceled in advance due to rain. We were supposed to go to 香山 (xiangshan).











Plans for the post-China part of the trip have started to take shape. At the moment our plan is to start with a few days on the beach in the Philippines, then check out Singapore, Thailand, and some combination of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong before returning to China.

I'm toying with the idea of staying an extra week to watch the beginning of the Olympics, but not sure yet. Seems I could probably get tickets to some of the matches, which would be fun. And many people are extending their trips beyond what they originally planned, so I should have plenty of company for most of the time.



It's back to class tomorrow, so I'm going to go watch a movie and get some sleep...

Getting Around in Beijing

After more than two weeks, things have definitely fallen into a daily routine... a very fun daily routine at that. This weekend we only had one visit, the Summer Palace, which is about 15 minutes from here by bike. It's a rather small complex built on a huge lake and was pretty cool. Pictures of that will be along sometime soon.

But going to class during the day and going out at night doesn't provide a lot of variety in stuff to post on here, so I decided to detail daily life a little more (and specifically how it differs from life at home).

UIUC is nice enough to pick up the entire cost of our US-to-China airfare in exchange for completing a project they can use to promote the program to other students. For my project, this basically breaks down to writing a 10-page guide to daily life in China in exchange for $1400. It's a pretty sweet deal, and so writing these kinds of posts will make it even easier to put the project together when I get back.

(Plus, I think my family would be more interested in stuff like this than "we went to this bar, we went to that bar, we went to a big lake" all the time. But there will still be some of that :P)


Ok... so here we go. This one's on transportation in Beijing.

自行车 - Bicycle
Our most often used means of getting around is via bicycle. We rented bikes on one of the first days we were here. There was a ￥300 deposit and a monthly charge of ￥60 (about $45 and $9, respectively). So that's about $20 to rent a bike for two months, assuming nothing breaks or gets stolen. One of my locks (everyone has two) just broke earlier this afternoon, but otherwise I've been pretty fortunate so far. The bikes are all pretty much identical, which is to say quite 80s- or 90s-style with fenders and baskets and stuff. But they're relatively new and pretty reliable.

Biking requires a bit of a different mindset than most of us were used to. If you want to be successful, you have to act like all the other bicyclists, pedestrians, and cars in the country. By that I mean you should pretend you're the only one on the road and drive blindly into situations you'd otherwise try to calculate and reason out. This applies to sidewalks, narrow gates, crossing 6 lanes of traffic against a red light, whatever. As long as you're more confident than anyone in your way, you win.

Here's a video of us just after getting said bikes:


The campus is huge, even compared to UIUC. Class is about 10 minutes away at a leisurely pace, but the cafeterias and store are closer. We bike everywhere on campus. There's a little village/entertainment street called Wudaokou about 15 minutes away which has a mall and plenty of bars. It's sort of the hub for international students as there are four or five universities surrounding it. It's also the nearest subway station, which brings me to our second-cheapest mode of transportation...

地铁 - Subway/Metro
Being about seven miles from the center of Beijing, we're actually pretty lucky to have a metro line (which is above-ground out here). Most of the currently-open lines are concentrated in the middle of the city, are entirely underground, and were built in the 80s. Our line (#13) was added only a few years ago (picture above), and three more lines are supposed to open before the Olympics. All told, there are supposed to be four times as many stations/lines by 2015, which might explain why the currently-operational lines are numbered 1, 2, 5, and 13.

Everyone gets on for ￥2 ($.25) and you can ride as long as you want and transfer as many times as you like. This is good, since we have to transfer twice just to get to the center of the city. It takes about 45 minutes to make that trip if it's not too crowded, or up to an hour and a half if the trains are packed. There are often so many people that it's simply impossible to get on a train. Luckily, they come frequently enough that it's not too much of an issue. Everything is relatively new, clean, and air-conditioned. And for a quarter to get anywhere within a few miles of the city center, it's not a bad deal at all. The only downside is it doesn't run after midnight.

出租车 - Taxi
Taking a cab is the priciest way to get around here, but it's still grossly inexpensive compared to Chicago. The base rate is ￥10, and that will make any short trip of maybe 10 or 15 minutes. After that, the rate creeps up as a function of distance and time. Still, getting four people to the center of Beijing on a high-traffic day will cost around ￥80, which makes about $3 per person for an hour-long ride. When there's no traffic, the same trip will be half the cost or a little more. We went to a club on the other end of town (about 45 minutes away with no traffic) the other night and paid ￥2 to get there and ￥15 each to get back.... so it's pretty awesome. One of these days they'll probably wisen up and raise the rates (especially with gas prices), but until then it's good for us.


Hope this was somewhat interesting. I just realized that I haven't enabled comments for any of my past posts, but that's corrected now. Let me know what you think.

I'll be posting pics from the Summer Palace trip soon, but for now this is all...

天安门广场，故宫--Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City (and some other stuff)

Here are some pictures from Saturday's trip to Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. We rode our bikes to the subway station (about 10 min), and then took a train to the center of the city for all of ￥2 (~$.30). It takes about and hour to reach the center of the city, even though it's only about 8 miles. The subway system looks like it was designed by a first grader, so we have to transfer trains twice in the process. And if it's during rush hour, trains will come by packed to the walls and we have no choice but to wait or squeeze one person at a time on. Luckily the trains are frequent, air-conditioned, and usually reliable.

We got to Tienanmen Square on the south end and walked the length of it to get to the Forbidden City. We did the place by ourselves instead of opting for a tour guide, although we were constantly bothered by people offering to be our English-speaking tour guides. Some shots from inside the city:


Again, the Olympics are just.... everywhere. This sign on the side of Tienanmen Square is identical to many others we've seen since we got here.
Directly opposite that, there was a team of people cleaning the blocks that make up Tienanmen with a bunch of bottles of water and hand brushes. I don't have a good picture that illustrates just how unbelievably big a job this is, but the Square is roughly a half a mile long and a third of a mile wide. Sucks to be these guys.
One of my favorite shots of the inside of the Forbidden City. There are just vast expanses of open space in some areas and really dense collections of buildings in others...

Maybe the best shirt we've seen since we got here. The front was a picture of a teddy bear with a caption that said "Bees", and the back... was the text of an asbestos sign.
A pretty cool rock formation towards the back of the Forbidden City:
After that tour, we went to houhai and rented a boat. It was oppressively hot while we were touring the Forbidden City, so this was a good way to cool off.

The lake is probably a good mile long and half as wide, and entirely encircled by bars and restaurants.

Since Saturday, the temperatures have been a lot more mild, which is great. Yesterday (Tuesday), we didn't have afternoon class and it rained for hours on end, so it seemed this was a signal that it was time to do laundry. I made it ten days without even wearing some of what I brought, so I think I got it right. The only downside is that the washing machines here are not as good as the ones at home, and we have to hang dry. This might be the only aspect of this trip so far that I haven't enjoyed.
And even this wasn't so bad. I put some laundry in and then just relaxed. My friend Matt from across the hall is a big hockey fan, so we caught the end of the Penguins/Redwings game on the radio, but couldn't figure out how to get any video of it. Sounded pretty awesome though.

Anyway, that's all for now. All these pictures and more are at my Flickr page.

第一周: Week 1 in review

So it's taken me awhile to get around to posting again. Things have been moving nonstop since we got here, but only in the sense that there's always something to do or somewhere to go. Put simply, I'm having an awesome time. Hopefully future posts won't be this few and far between.

There are some new (as of yesterday) photos on Flickr inclu ding our trip to the Great Wall on Friday. They'll be followed by shots from the Forbidden City sometime soon. My upload bandwidth here seems to be pretty slow, so they're only about half or a third of the photos I actually took.

On Tuesday we rented bikes for a 300rmb deposit and 60rmb per month. Things are absurdly affordable here in most places, although there's a huge difference in prices depending on where you buy. A bottle of beer will go for 3rmb in a vending machine (a beer vending machine in the dorms, mind you) but anywhere from 15-70rmb at a bar. But we ate roast duck at one of the best Peking duck restaurants and got hour-long massages for a total of about 140rmb ($20), so I'm not complaining.

Wednesday was another day of class, and we went to a bar geared towards international students that night. Then we hit McDonald's at about 3am before calling it a night.

Thursday was our last day of class this week (and most weeks), and there was a school-sponsored trip to KTV for karaoke and dinner afterwards. That ended up being a whole lot more fun than I would have expected.

Friday was an early morning trip by bus (about an hour) to the Great Wall at 八达岭 (Badaling). Tons of photos of that on Flickr.

Saturday was supposed to be another early morning trip (this time to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City), but some of us overslept and did it in the afternoon instead. Then we went to 后海 (houhai), which is this big lake surrounded by restaurants and bars, and rented a boat for a few hours.

Sunday was our first official free day all week, and today (Monday) it was back to class.

And now some photos (more at flickr.com/photos/johndietrick):

There are some pretty weird products around here, including Jackie Chan's "anti-falling shampoo"... not sure what that's for.


One of our more expensive dinners... I think I might've dropped about $6 US :P

Bad translations everywhere as well, but quite entertaining:

And in case you didn't know, the Olympics are kind of a big deal over here right now. This thing was about 50 feet from the Great Wall:

more to come...