January 12th, 2011 (9 AM)

Dear All –

So I know that I’m a little tardy in sending out this message, but I’ve had quite the day. Please allow me to begin.

Hot pot with Cristina and Alex

I got up and tried to call Cristina and Alex this morning (the couple from my program) again, and I finally reached them! We decided to meet at the Wang Fu Jing station, which is near the Oriental Plaza. We were all getting hungry, as it was around 11 AM, and I’d eaten nothing all morning. We followed a street north, running parallel to the outer wall of the Forbidden City looking for a good restaurant. Cristina had already spent a semester here in Beijing, but at another program (CET).Thus, she had a better idea of what was appropriate prices for meals. In the restaurants in the tourist district, establishments usually have two menus – one that is for Chinese guests, and one in English, for tourists. The tourist one is guaranteed to have overpriced food, by Chinese standards. I’m still getting used to the price of food, as the price of food is higher than both Shanghai and Qingdao. I am getting more accustomed to determining when I am paying a fair price though.

The place that we chose was a “Beijing style” restaurant, and the food had a very specific way that it was to be consumed. We ordered a plate of beef, fried egg, and a rice noodle and cabbage dish. Then, you take the food and place it in a thin, wheat “tortilla,” put a little sauce on it, and eat it. The meal was very good

entrance to wang fu jing

After leaving the restaurant, we walked over to a tourist area called Wang Fu Jing. Wang Fu Jing is the name of a neighborhood, but tourists know Wang Fu Jing as a small side street where vendors sell “street food,” and all sorts of trinkets. The “street food” includes all kinds of strange dishes, and before today, I didn’t know that many of these items were edible. Scorpions (big and small), starfish, lizards, cicadas, cicada larvae, sea urchins, tarantulas, sea horses, snails, snake meat, bird hearts, and entire roasted pigeons are for sale. None of us had ever eaten a scorpion, so we decided to buy a chuar of them (a chuar is a shish-kabob, but in China one never knows what will be on the chuar). It wasn’t as bad as I thought, and it actually had a good bit more meat in it than I anticipated. I thought it was going to be just shell… I’ll have to come back and get souvenirs at Wang Fu Jing, and also try some more food.

Eating a chuar

All the creatures 

We then looked at the wares displayed on the street. It was fairly similar to the Xuan Wu Art Garden, but everything here looked to be new, not 100 years old. You could find anything Chinese here: panda hats, Mao hats, the Little Red Book, name stamps, model terra-cotta soldiers, puppets, chopsticks, masks, lighters, and more. MY personal favorite was something that I’ve been looking for for a long time: a 3-D picture of the last supper.

Playing featherball with people in wang fu jing

Their hotel... wow

After looking at all that was for sale in Wang Fu Jing, we stopped by their hotel, as Cristina needed some more clothes. The day wasn’t as cold as the one before at this point, but it was cooling off fast. I was expecting them to stay in a little hotel somewhere off the main street, but they were staying in the Beijing Hotel! It is so nice. It is actually several hotels that are all connected, and we ran the gamut before retiring to their room. We had a 30-minute turn around, and then we got back on the subway to visit the 798 Art District, which is a huge artist district in an abandoned industrial site to the northeast of Beijing. Artists set up huge studios, and can also live in the old buildings.

Getting there was quite an adventure. None of us knew exactly the best way to get there, but we guessed that we should get out at the eastern exit of our subway station (after all, 798 was to our east) and walk towards the district. Someone at the exit said that we could find a bus stop shortly up the road. They lied. We ended up walking for over a mile and a half along this eerie park along the road, and then along side streets till we came to a bus station that took us to 798 in about ten minutes.

creepy park area

We amused ourselves looking at the interesting artwork on display in 798. The art there ran from traditional Chinese watercolor, to huge acrylic paintings, to little penis statues (they bring long life), and my favorites, a 6-foot transformer wine holder and a 30-foot-tall transformer. Some of the art was very interesting, some just weird, and some quite awkward to look at. We stopped at a café, and we got coffees and a little sustenance before braving the cold again (as the sun had gone down while we were eating). We walked around the area a little more, and then headed back towards the subway station to get a bite to eat in the city.

Michael Jackson artwork

30 foot tall transformer

Dinosaurs in a cage....?

We all decided that hot-pot was a good choice for dinner – it is very nice to eat in winter. We also heard that at some hot-pot restaurants, you can drink free beer, but that turned out to be a legend. Depending on where you go, you can drink free carrot or hawthorn juice. Hot-pot, if you don’t recall from my last journeys, is a pot set on a gas burner in the middle of your table, and you cook meat and vegetables in boiling “soup.” Soup is the basis of hot-pot. You can get spicy if you’d like to eat spicy food, and the traditional way to eat hot-pot is extremely spicy. Hot-pots originated in Si Chuan, a province in the south-central (west) of China, and the province is know for its spicy food. The people there invented hot-pots because the workers in the field needed a way to cook their food coming and going to the fields, especially in the winter. In the earlier days of the hot-pot, I hear that people would use the same “soup” for months at a time (yum!). We decided to get a double pot (the pot has a separator in the middle), with one spicy and one not. I honesty thought that the spicy was going to do me in at first. It was SO SPICY, and it had little peppercorns in the soup that made your mouth go numb.

After leaving the restaurant, we headed back to their hotel. The hotel had a swimming pool and Jacuzzi area that they wanted to try out. After all, if you’re staying in a five-star Beijing Hotel, why not? Sadly, the pool was closed for the night when we got there, and we just hung out in their hotel room for a while. We talked about the program, life in Beijing, and then we got on the subject of religion. Cristina is not very religious, and we talked about religion for about three hours. I left their hotel dead tired (but so excited), called Morgan to check on the National Championship game, which hadn’t started yet, and then I crashed.

I’ll write again soon!

Love,

Jamey

PS Jamey is being very humble in the end. He shared the gospel and his faith for over 3 hours and in the end is going to give them a Bible and walk through passages with them over the course of the semester. Praise the Lord for giving him such boldness and an amazing opportunity!  -Morgan