Tea Shopping: we went to "Tea Street" (called "Lily Street" on the signs, but everyone knows what you mean) and found one of the eight major wholesale markets and picked around. Some of the tea tasted like grass (it was pretty lousy), but we finally found a great place where we stayed for an hour, trying different teas, 'till we got what we wanted, and haggled down. We ended up staying until the last minute of business, and walked out the service exit with the entire team... when we had walked in, there were 2 people manning the counter. When we left, there were 7; we figured they called their buddies from the otherwise-empty retail shops to help the rich white folk spend more money.
The Marco Polo bridge does indeed have 500-some "unique" lions carved at the fencing. Much of it has been restored, of course: Japanese heavy machine guns did a real number to the bridge's aesthetic integrity. Of course, unskilled Communist labor in the 1950's left many of the lions beyond saving, with splotches of concrete smeared on the blown-off lion faces like emergency bandages over a wounded soldier.
One of our favorites was a Chimera-like monstrosity:
I stood at the bridge, briefly, re-enacting the brave Chinese response to the harrowing Japanese onslaught:
But my favorite part of the bridge was the freight rail nearby, carrying all sorts of yummy raw materials into the city:
From there, it was a short walk through a former fort-village to get to the anti-Japanese War Museum, full of reasons why you, too, should spit every time you hear the word "Ri."
The tank outside, of course, was my favorite part of this exhibit, and I took some time to stand, bewildered at the thing (it was a Soviet T-34, probably gifted to the Chinese right before the Russians invaded Manchuria):
But, staring out into the distance, it became hard to resist the urge to climb. I had to settle for egging it forward:
The museum itself was not quite as impressive as the Military museum, but did actually include a lot more about the American, British, and Soviet involvement in fighting the Japanese, which was interesting. There was a fair bit of credit given to the US for "helping" the Chinese "defeat" Japan.
And, of course, some cool paintings:
The fort-village on the way out was pretty cute:
After it all, we drove through a part of Western Beijing we hadn't seen before, and realized that the Enormity Scale of Beijing was greater than we thought. After thinking it was a mere "Gi-normous," we are now under the impression that Beijing might actually be a "Huge-mongous" level city, placing it a mere notch away from "Metro-Juggernaut." A lot of the architecture is lock-stock blocks, so none of it was that thrilling on its own, but together, it just felt big.
In the evening, we ventured to go see Olympic Park. We rode, during its first day of public operation, on the 10 line:
The car actually had a new subway car smell. Now neither you nor I had ever smelled a new subway car before, but man, once you smell it, you _know_. The thing wasn't even that crowded, but that was mostly because it was Saturday night:
The new subway map claimed that the Olympic Spur Line (line 8) was open now:
But it lied to us. Line 8 was not open, and we had to hike a good hour-and-a-half to get to the Olympic site. The site was... interesting. It was very hard to walk from the south--the roads seemed design to block you from getting there. But we took a detour and got to the high-security military installation between you and the national treasures that are the Water Cube and the Bird's Nest. There's barbed-wire fencing and guards every 50 linear feet in a grid... it was impossible to get close enough for a good picture. And the water cube wasn't even on. Very disappointing. But they're there, I've seen them with my own eyes. When they get blown up by East Turkestan nationalists, I can refute the moon-landing conspiracy psychos that the whole thing was done in a studio.
I did get a picture of "The Torch," a building that is made to look like the Olympic Torch. I'm sure it's commercial, but not sure what it's there for, otherwise.
The TV's on the side are all advanced LED technology, which was impressive, but they were out of sync--those on the left lagged those on the right. You know what that means, kids? Don't build your massive Olympic TV circuits in series!
A final parting shot from our hike away (which was another 90 minutes, because we were too cheap for 2 cabs in one day):
For dinner (which happened somewhere in there, but it's a blur), I finally made it to a Xinjiang (that's the northwest region, home of the crazy East Turkestan nationalists) restaurant in Beijing. Let me tell you, it was amazing. It rivals the Korean Barbeque in terms of pure quality of food (turns out local food is pretty boring, sorry guys). It had a creative mix of Sichuan style (spicy and hot) and Middle-Eastern (naan, lots of lamb, curry, etc). We had some really impressive, spicy and thick naan-ish thing, potato shreds with cilantro (I will try to reproduce--they were amazing), lamb skewers, very spicy green beans, a lamb-potato-carrot-pepper-onion-etc-curry-stew, and these really amazing apples flash-fried in liquid sugar. The waitress gave them to us burning-hot, and put a bowl of water next to them and made us dip them and eat them quickly, let they turn into one giant inedible crystal sugar blob. It was spectacular. I may try to go back bofore I leave.
Anyway, that was the weekend. Tonight: Red Cliff (a movie about the 3 Kingdoms).
