November 19 – Beijing
I have finally decided on the best choices for breakfast: steamed buns, a scoop of something green, and a glass of orange coloured liquid. Everything else that I have tried has been unidentifiable except for the hard-boiled eggs, which are a bit grim without salt. I had the morning clear, and it is another nice day so I set off to explore the neighbourhood.
When people buy apartments in China, particularly in older buildings they have a cage constructed outside the main window. It is made of metal bars, sometimes quite decorative, and sticks out about two feet from the building. Many of them are used to grow plants, to dry laundry, or for storage. Today I saw one with two chickens in it. While it might be lovely to have fresh eggs literally at your fingertips, I wonder how the people living downstairs feel about being downstream from a chicken?
Eventually I stumbled on a shopping area complete with a coffee shop, Pizza Hut and KFC. They were all busy – capitalism is alive and well here. I did go in the coffee shop and had coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich. It was very relaxing to eat something identifiable. I wandered through the shopping centre and saw an amazing array of really expensive high-end goods. The shops were very busy too, which left me wondering who was buying all this stuff. If for no other reason, I am wondering where they store it, since living space is so cramped here.
In the afternoon I went to Beijing Normal University to teach a class. The campus looks very much as it did when I stayed there 10 years except for the addition of a coffee shop next door to where I lived, called the “Canada Café”. The only thing Canadian about it seemed to be the maple leaf painted on the sign. The menu had something called “mango ice cream continuous” – fortunately I had Alan with me to translate the Chinese, which actually said smooth mango ice cream…
I was really pleased when I taught the class that there were questions afterwards – when I taught here it was almost impossible to get students to ask questions. Their English was also good enough to ask without a translator, which I find really humbling as it is a third language for many of them. Anyone from a minority likely speaks their minority language at home, Mandarin at school, and English for university. For dinner, we went to the restaurant on campus for a very nice meal, which Winston chose based on things he thought I would like. It was my first time eating donkey. While it tasted fine, it was hard not to think of their cute little furry faces.