But one fancy dinner wasn’t the only meal worth telling about. Here are some of the other highlights from my food experience — or at least those of which I took a picture:
hot,but the heat continues to build, even after you swallow. Eventually it tops out. The brown, sweet gelatin soup (bottom) and plum juice (yellow cup) helped tame the heat. View image
drunkenbullfrog stew, shellfish soup, and steamed buns. View image
noodles,this soup can have a variety of ingredients. I had it twice while in China, and it was better this second time. View image
Snack Street,all sorts of exotic foods were for sale, including these fried scorpions and seahorses. I didn’t try one. View image
Don’t drink the water!
my family told me before I left.
Do you know not to drink the tap water?
the design
program organizers told me when I arrived.
One of the most frustrating parts of my experience in China was the fact that the tap water just isn’t safe to drink. The reason? It contains a delightful mix of bacteria and heavy metals.
Some people drink boiled tap water, but boiling doesn’t take care of the heavy metals — so I spent a considerable amount of time and money going to the store to buy bottled water. I was quite happy to discover the 1.5 liter bottles, which are a little big to carry around but well worth the saved money and effort: I drank about 2 liters total per day, meaning I had to only buy one or two 1.5 L bottles at 3.5 yuan. Before I had discovered the big bottles, I was going through about 4 bottles at 2.5 yuan each.
I never buy bottled water in the States because one, it costs anywhere from 300 to 2000 times more than tap water; two, the tap water in northeast Ohio (where I live) regularly exceeds health and safety standards; and three, all of those extra bottles are extremely wasteful, even if they are recycled. Recycling helps, but it still takes a lot of energy to process all that plastic! Having worked on several environmental sustainability projects in the past, I felt like I was just slaughtering the environment with how many bottles I bought in China. Sob.
On that note, the smog was probably tied for the most frustrating part of my experience. I could actually see it through the window when I arrived, but I didn’t smell it until I finally got out of the air conditioning. It was heavy to breathe, and sweet — sweet in a way you don’t ever want air to be, sweet with a mix of car exhaust and cigarette smoke. Those first few days were probably the worst out of my three weeks, since a rainstorm on the fourth day cleared up the sky quite a bit.
Beijing is particularly prone to dense smog because the city is surrounded by a mountain range that tends to block the wind — not to mention the population over 20 million and traffic jams caused by the roughly 6 million registered cars. Very few people wear breathing masks, and even I started to get used to breathing the air after a few days. I’d rather not think about all the pollution I inhaled.
The currency of the People’s Republic of China is the
renminbi, meaning people’s currency
and abbreviated
RMB. The yuan (元) is the
base unit; there are 10 jiao (角) to 1 yuan; and
there are 10 fen (分) to 1 jiao. I never saw any
prices or coins in terms of fen, probably because they have so little
value. Today, the exchange rate fluctuates between 6 to 7 yuan
per 1 United States dollar — but with that in mind,
the cost of living in China is also considerably lower.
A regular 18-ounce bottle of water is typically priced at 2 or
3 yuan, or 30 to 46 US cents.
Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics. What happens to a more than $2 billion (USD) Olympic complex 8 years after the games are over? It turns out that the Olympic complex is less of a corpse and more of a thriving tourist attraction.
On the first day I am there, a Tuesday, there are hundreds of other tourists from all over China, plus a handful of foreigners. The Bird’s Nest stadium, pictured below, is open for tours for a price of 50 yuan, and in the recent past it’s been used to host sporting events and concerts.
The Bird’s Nest.
We walk across the vast expanse of asphalt, over to the
aquatic center, nicknamed The Water Cube.
The
blue plastic façade makes the building look like a square blob
of soap bubbles. The panels are even translucent to let
through light. Since the Olympics, the building has been
transformed into a water park, but we don’t go inside to check
it out.
Heading further north, we wander past a few more (less architectually-interesting) buildings, check out the public art, and gaze up at the Ling Long pagoda.