Today, I woke up and went on a search for bike keys. I was going to take a ride around some Hutongs with Hannah, Wes, and Eric, and all of the people that I had asked for keys had flaked out on me. I just couldn’t believe it. ACC people being flaky. Who would’ve thought? After trying to find people for an hour, we hung it up and took the subway over to the Rear Lake area.
Rear Lake only seems to get prettier and prettier as the spring progresses – or should I say as it thinks about progressing? There is still comparatively little green around Beijing, but spring must be just around the corner, as Beijing city workers are pruning all of the trees around the city and preparing flower beds. The Rear Lake area was much as it has been for the last few times that I’ve been over, and so I won’t bore you with the details of what we saw and experienced there.
We did find two very interesting stores in the Hutongs there. The first was a guy who was selling T-shirts, bags, coffee mugs, and other knick-knacks with comedic slogans across them. The owner of the store came up with the idea of an “ObaMao” T-shirt, where the Pres is waving Mao’s little red book and wearing communist-era clothing. I have to say that it is pretty funny. Other items include the “I voted for Obama and all I got was this lousy bag” bag, a coin bag that says “eating, drinking, and having fun bag – brought to you by the CCP,” and “you are my 3/4.” The owner finds all of these slogans extremely funny (he made them up himself). He is a very infectious guy, and we were all laughing by the time we left. The second store sold leather goods. I bought a manly leather bracelet, while my compadres looked at leather-bound notebooks, wallets, and other such leather goods.
After that, we went and got some pizza at Hutong Pizza, one of the top foreign pizzerias in Beijing. We ordered one mushroom and spinach pizza and one Mediterranean pizza. Don’t get me wrong, the pizzas were good; they just made we want to eat American pizzas more. I’m craving Wal-mart refrigerated pizzas, and you know that I am bad when I crave something from Wal-mart. Over the meal, we listened to Eric spin tales of living in Japan. It sounds like an interesting place to visit, but I still don’t know if I would want to live there…
From there, we headed over to the Hutong that I visited a few weeks ago (where I played Chinese chess). I took them around the Hutong, and we saw a lot of the same sights that I looked at before. It was fun being their tour guide on a not-so-touristy tour of Beijing. After seeing our fill of the Hutong, and stocking up on tea from a tea shop there, we trudged towards the nearest subway. I was near dead after the day of walking (after my day of running), and I took the subway back to the dorm, wrote, and generally took it easy. They went to see Tian’An Men.
They came back after about an hour of seeing the majestic square of the people, and I went to meet them at the Chengdu Fish restaurant. We ate a meal of stir-fry green beans, sautéed potatoes with onions, stir-fry chicken, soy braised Japanese tofu, rice, and washed that down with Qingdao.
I’m not sure what that party did for the rest of the evening, but I came back to the dorm. I wrote some, and worked on finishing the movie.
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