Beijing Diary: Part 2

Thursday 14 April

Got up late, too late to have breakfast at the hotel, so I went looking for a suitable shop, and quickly found one on the main road: Your Friendly Community Store!  Bought bottled water, sultana biscuits (the only packet in the small section with the contents in English), four oranges and a package of  small Kleenex tissues, for use in the public toilets!

Heather was still not ready to get up, so I went to the hotel lobby to check email. There doesn’t seem to be wifi access in the room, but the hotel charges only Y5 an hour (about 65 cents), and an hour was more than enough for me. It was a little perplexing to be faced with Chinese-only instructions in Windows, but I remembered enough to navigate to my Google account. Following a link to another page was more tricky – two dialogue boxes appeared – with one result opening another window (but nothing appeared), the other choice bringing me to a page in Chinese! I managed to get the headlines of the Canadian news, via CBC, the soccer results from the Champions league (Manchester beat Chelsea, Tottenham lost to Real Madrid), and the elevated crisis level at the Fukushima reactors.

The hotel is undergoing some renovations, so Heather did not have an undisturbed lie-in. We eventually got out by 2 pm and decided to to look for the park that Gordon had mentioned. The directions he had given us were a little vague –“It’s over there,” he said, waving his arm at a wide area on the other side of the main road.

Now, although there are pedestrian crossings indicated, albeit in fading paint on the road, no-one observes them. In preparing to cross, check there are no electric bikes approaching; they are silent and very swift. Then when there is a break in the traffic coming from the left, move to the middle of the road  and wait for a similar break coming from the right. Easy peasy, but a little nerve-wracking, especially when traffic from the right decides to cross over the centre line to avoid a stopped taxi or bus!

After wandering down a rather dusty Hutong, and making some rather arbitrary decisions as to turns to make, we came to a very smart laneway, paved, clean, and lined with more expensive shops. It was relaxing not to have to deal with traffic (it’s a pedestrian way) and the street had been there for centuries, first as a centre for tobacco, and was called “The Pipe”, in part a reference to the street’s shape. 

At the end of the Pipe, we found what looked like a canal, but was in fact a narrow waterway connecting two lakes. We were in the park!  It was obvious from the number of rickshaws that this was a favourite tourist attraction. There also a number of night-clubs catering to the young. Every few steps we were being shilled to take this tour or that, go up to aroof-top area for “plenty beer”, and once to buy a kite! A young man was displaying how easy it was to fly a string of 20 or so kites (though we didn’t see how he got them up there) in the breeze, while an older woman had two tiny kites, looking like enlarged dragonflies. We ignored all entreatments, crossed a bridge to continue our walk, and stopped at a beautiful tea house.