Guests at the Beijing City Planning Center

So today Ben and Cara (really I do work sometimes, I swear) checked out the Beijing City Planning Center (BCPC) whose primary claim to fame is a model of the city of Beijing as planned by the year 2008. This picture shows the apartments where we live and also shows all the buildings people are planning on building around us. (We live in the very tiny looking matching towers about midway down on the left hand side of the image.) To give you a sense of scale (which according to Ben is universally lacking in all Beijing maps):

Actual size - our apartment buildings are about 30 stories tall
BCPC model - our apartment buildings are about 4 inches tall

This model has an entire section of the building devoted to it.

To round out the day, we also went and got Ben his first massage. Sadly no photos were taken to commemorate the event.

 

Guests at the Great Wall

The Great Wall of China is something that every tourist must see, so today Ben and Cara went looking for it. The directions were terrible, the signs were in Chinese, and the maps were non-existent, but eventually we made it to a really spectacular section of the wall and it was all worth while. What made today an especially nice wall visit was
a) The company (i.e. Ben the guest)
b) The absolutely glorious Beijing weather that is continuing in spite of everything that we have claimed about it being terrible in the past
c) The fact that we went to a section of the wall that is so difficult to get to there are NO OTHER TOURISTS and NO VENDORS. If you have never visited China's Great Wall you may not appreciate this last aspect enough, but trust us, it is a VERY big deal.

This is a shot of the section of the wall to which we decided to climb.

This is us on the wall (in case that was not obvious). You may notice that we are trying to direct your attention to the magnificent wall stretching out behind us.

This section of the wall is not restored so there are many trees trying to reclaim it as there own. This picture is of the top of the wall as we walked along it.


And the top of the nearest guard house in this picture is where we ate lunch while enjoying the scenery. What a great day! 

Guests at the Temple of Heaven

That's right - someone was foolish enough to come out and stay with us even after Mari's warnings from way back in the spring. Actually Ben came out here for a conference and we are just sort of an added delightful bonus :)

Today, Cara left work early and went and visited the Temple of Heaven with Ben. (If you look very carefully, you can see Ben in front of the building in the first shot.)
Given that we have a lot on the slate for tomorrow and need to get to bed in order to be up for it all (especially those tiring foot massages), there won't be a lot of commentary about the Temple of Heaven park right now, but we will include a few shots of the inside of the building.

Unfortunately, we have no idea what the cows are all about. 

If the One Child Policy didn't convince you to get neutered, perhaps this bus sign will give you that nudge you need...

This photo was taken of a sign at a bus stop in downtown Beijing. Onceupon a time, Westerners painted a picture of Asians as inscrutably subtle in their expressions. It turns out 57 years of merciless propaganda campaigns and Communist Party sloganizing has pretty much beaten Chinese subtlety to death.

Curious, we checked out their website (listed on a part of the sign not pictured here), and discovered that it isn't just a place to unplug your babymaker, it's a fertility clinic that happens to do quite a bit of business helping locals comply with China's mandated birth control program.

For those of you who have checked out their website from the link providing in this blog post, the English looks a little funny because it was done automagically by Google, rather than by a human translator.

Chinese math

Our good friends Will and Olivia asked us if we wouldn't mind sharing a professionally-cooked meal with them and two of their friends. The catch? We has to let the chef use our kitchen to prepare the food. What a deal! Naturally, after wiping the drool from our chins, we agreed to offer up our pad for the party.

Here's where the Chinese math comes in to play: the meal was a set deal, dinner for six. Unsurprisingly, Will and Olivia organized a group of six hungry people to sit down and enjoy this meal. As you can see from the photo, however, there was enough food to easily feed ten half-starved teenagers, let alone six normally-metabolic adults.

You will note that there are seven dishes laid out: rice with vegetables, sweet-and-sour chicken, seasoned flank steak, braised fish, stewed lamb ribs with potatoes and onoins, egg-battered tofu, and steamed vegetables. You will also note that this photo was taken after everyone had eaten through their first servings. By the way, the chef whipped all this stuff out in under four hours, including time spent cleaning the kitchen after he finished; not only that, but he brought everything he needed to create this spread in two small handbags). The guy was a machine, and clearly has an enviable work efficiency in the kitchen. We were suitably awed and hope to match his performance after another twenty or thirty years of practice. 

Christmas or Sino-African Summit?

About 2 weeks ago while coming home from work, Cara noticed that the local municipality had put up their Christmas trees and lights.

What?!
Even though we definitely noticed how much Beijing liked dressing up the city for Christmas last year, the last week of October still seems kind of early.

Turns out all the lights and tree decorations were for the China-African summit. And the lights and such were pretty easy to enjoy since all factory work inside the 5th ring rode was shut down to help make the weather clearer. (While this seems very likely and we had it from a good source who shall remain nameless, unfortunately we cannot find a collaborating source to which to direct you.) It was perhaps the nicest two week period that we have ever seen here - especially this time of year.  

css posting

So China has once again decided that Blogger is bad for the common good and has re-blocked not only blogspot viewings, which means we once again can't view what we post, but also blogspot postings which means we can't even log on to let you know what we are doing. This is new. We tried to send you our exciting life story by email, but that was rejected. So now we are using a sophisticated proxy (Cara's mom) just to help us put up this one post so that we might explain our absence. We apologize of any inconvenience.

As requested - Kitty Friday!

We had no idea that Roxanne was so exercise conscientious, but it turns out that use of the home gym is very important to her and she tries to get in at least 30 minutes on it every day.

Exhibit A: Home Gym

Exhibit B: Roxanne on the home gym (as stated above)

Exhibit C: Not content with a single exercise, Roxanne tries to use at least a few different features of the gym equipment.


Exhibit D: And this is the result.

Sure she looks cute and fuzzy and soft but its all a ruse to cover up her 6 pack abs and mad clawing capabilities!

(ps - mom, i'm really sorry but i just can't make her eyes blue like they are in real life. Maybe next time.) 

We mentioned before that we are now getting vegetables every week from some Buddhists with some green thumbs and a few green houses to go with them. One of the fun things with the vegetable delivery service is that the Buddhists simply give you a selection of whatever happen to ripen that week so not only are we getting a nice selection of really fresh vegetables, we are also receiving a selection of things that we would probably never think to buy on our own. In the last batch we got a red winter radish (which is actually white and green on the outside), some wee little white radishes and these teeny tiny green bell peppers. We only managed to catch the bell peppers in a picture because the other items were cooked and consumed before we could round them up for a group photo – they’re really quick these fresh veggies. One of the other nice things is that the growers deliver a list (in Chinese AND English) of all the vegetables that they grow along with the bag of assorted stuff. This list really helps in the identification process. Just goes to show, these Buddhists are really thoughtful and considerate folks. 

Trick or treat? Where do you think you are?

Ah, yes. Hallowe'en. That magical holiday of monsters, mayhem, and enough candy to make every 7-year-old in America thoroughly ill. And that, dear readers, is where we run into a little problem. No, not the getting sick part. The "in America" part. Hallowe'en isn't exactly a widely-observed festival. In Beijing, it is only observed in small pockets of houses out in the suburbs, in places that have an unusually high number of American families.

We went out to just such a suburb in time to watch some brave bands of trick-or-treaters making their rounds, when we were struck by the true horror of it all: these poor kids were being handed a lot of Chinese candy. Oh, sure, a few dedicated families went through the trouble to track down candy bars and the like, but - tragically - the huge shipment of Hallowe'en candy that was due to arrive for sale at the U.S. Embassy's AEA Locker store got held up in Chinese customs and hasn't been approved for entry into the country as of this writing. The result is that a number of families in Beijing were forced to (gasp!) buy candy on the local economy.

Normally, we're all in favor of pumping money into the cash-strapped Chinese economy. But if you've ever had Chinese candy, we think you will agree with us that it is more trick than treat.

On the bright side, the end result (or so we've been told) is that kids tend to not eat all of their haul in the first 48 hours after trick-or-treating. One parent even told us that she found candy still sitting in the bottom of her daughter's collection bag when she dug it out of the closet for this year's event.

For those of you who don't understand how any country can produce 1.3 billion people without a single great candy bar to show for it, we wish to point out that while Chinese cooks recognize sugar and salt, they aren't particularly comfortable using them in concert. Thus, Chinese sweets tend to have no salt whatsoever, an imbalance that renders the final confection (or cake, or whatever) sweet without being remotely satisfying.

So, Happy Hallowe'en to all you back in the 'States; and while we'll gladly remind you that October is indeed the finest month of the year in which to visit Beijing, you might want to schedule yourself to be back in the safe cocoon of candy coma that is America by the end of the month. Until next time, then, good night and sweet dreams.