Well, it's a PRETTY good wall... I GUESS...

So Saturday night, after shopping, I decided I would go down to the travel desk and just book a seat on a bus tour to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. I know it's touristy, and I'd rather see what the locals call the "Wild Wall," but hey - touristy is part of Beijing, too!

I got down there, but the clerk had left for the night. No big deal, I thought. I'll just do it next week.

No sooner do I get to my apartment than my phone rings. It's a woman at my company, though we've never been introduced. She is a friend of my main contact here, and wanted to know if I wanted to go on a hike to a remote part of the Wall on Sunday with a bunch of her friends.

Old Henry would have hesitated - a long car ride with a bunch of strangers, then a long walk to who knows where out in the middle of nowhere? But New Henry has no such inhibitions. He has eaten chicken feet and eels. He has pantomimed a taxi from Point A to Point C. He has purchased bananas all by himself. He... well, frankly, he doesn't KNOW anybody, so what else is he going to do?

If I was worried about sticking out like a sore thumb, I needn't have. We met at Starbucks (no, not THAT Starbucks... The one across the street. No, the one on the OTHER corner across the street)... and pretty much every laowai ("Old Whitey") who came in was part of our group. In fact, the only Chinese were the woman who called me and our driver.

My coworker's husband is from Jersey; he sells English books to International School libraries. Then there were sisters from New York, both in the art business. One of them brought her beau, from San Francisco, I think. Another coworker from Germany - very smart, very nice guy; we had a long conversation on the ride out. And an English language teacher from... I don't remember, but her boyfriend (not present) was from Edina, Minnesota.

They were all professional risk-takers. All had lived in Beijing for years, all spoke excellent Chinese, few had any intention of moving home, most had lived in more than one other country.

So I guess I stuck out a little, but I smoothed it over with my witty, urbane banter, such as "Gawrsh! I seen a Chinese guy at the circus once, but there's BUNCHES of 'em over here!" and "Why, these places is OLD!" and "Sure could go fer some REAL food 'bout now! Like a Chalupa!"

Anyway, after an hour and a half driving outside of Beijing (and up some super narrow and twisting roads) we pulled into a dirt parking lot at the edge of a small village. There was just a dirt track leading into the hills, and only a few other cars in the lot.


The hike was pretty intense - probably an hour climb through jungle, with lots of steep switchbacks and slippery, rocky bits where you had to use your hands to steady yourself.


It didn't feel that dangerous since there were lots of trees to grab onto, but it was a good hard hike. I was huffing and puffing pretty good when, through the trees...

The wall runs along a steep ridge. We came up from below and entered through a ruined archway.


We climbed up on top. It really is a wild ruin - the trees have grown up all around it, and in one direction half of the wall's width had eroded away.


As you can see, the weather was poor; otherwise, I was told, I would have been able to see 10-15 towers in the distance. As it was, the fog was cool - it was like movie fog, where you could see distinct tendrils wrapping around your legs - but not picturesque. Worse, the German got a call from his girlfriend warning of rain, so we had a quick picnic lunch and headed back down, not wanting to get trapped on the steep, muddy slopes.

I'm sure I'll see the wall again - apparently hiking is a popular weekend activity here - and I probably will go to the touristy, restored wall at some point too. But even for a short visit in the fog, it was very impressive.

(Click to enlarge for more detail)

IN OTHER NEWS

NOTE TO SELF: THE CHINESE LIKE LOUD THINGS:
Even though we were one of maybe three groups on the mountain, we could hear Chinese yelling to each other.

On the drive back down, we stopped at a peaceful inn and sat at tables beside a still, green pond and had some beers and snacks - all the while listening to whole families setting off box after box of firecrackers and those little poppers for no reason whatsoever.

Then I get dropped off and I'm walking back to my apartment, and I hear more noise. This time it's some adults who have somehow gotten hold of an enormous balloon bouquet and are now merrily jumping in it.

UMMMMMMM... I CAN WAIT. THANK YOU SO MUCH:


RACE JOKES, CHINESE STYLE:
My Chinese coworker and her American husband were talking about their marriage, and he made a joke about how he has a Chinese soul. "Yes," she said. "He's like a cooked egg." They contrasted that with a friend of theirs who is Chinese but prefers to live Western-style - this person, they said, was a "banana."

Our Musical Guest: Chairman Mao!

This is a long distance dedication not only, but ESPECIALLY for my buds from the former Sam Scratch. So Matt, Pat and Mike, get ready to sing along with the soulful sounds of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolutions!



IN OTHER NEWS

SLOW AND STEADY WINS YOU SQUAT:
Note: This turtle tank is NOT in the pet department.


SHOPPER'S HELLIDISE:
My coworkers Andrew (my creative director) and Michael (an account guy) let me tag along on a day of shopping at the [somethingsomething] Wet Market, a giant free-for-all bazaar.

For reference, take the idea of the Minneapolis Farmer's Market and make it ten times larger and insane. Each aisle is probably 100 yards long, with a walkspace maybe five feet wide, and on each side are booths anywhere from 4-8 feet across. Call it 60 booths per aisle, maybe more, times 15 or more aisles, plus people who have set up shop in open areas - sometimes just setting stuff on newspaper on the sidewalk.

A lot of it is meant to look antique. Some shops specialize - Mao posters here, fans and chopsticks there, calligraphy scrolls, modern Chinese art. Others have what's supposed to look like a random collection of treasures - copper swords green with age, bits of jade, pottery that's been carefully dirtied to look ancient, and maybe one top-drawer watch sitting amongst the antiques, just looking for the sucker who thinks maybe that vendor doesn't know what he has.

"Just think of it as toys," said Michael, examining his 18 karat gold (HA!) Swiss-made (HA!) genuine Petak Philippe (HA!) watch that he bought for 250 yuan - about $20. "You'd spend this much on toys. I'm not going to spend $10,000 on a new watch. It looks good, yeah? Look at the detail!"

You haggle for EVERYTHING, and let me tell you, the Chinese are master hagglers. Andrew and Michael would laugh, argue, walk away, walk back, argue more, scoff at the counteroffer, shake their heads, walk away again, then go back and buy it for half or less of the asking price, which is exactly what everyone knew would happen from the start.

Now, I'm Minnesotan, so my idea of haggling is to passive-aggressively leave a 14.9% tip when I'm unhappy with service. So fortunately Andrew and Michael handled that for me.

It's easy to go a little overboard, especially with two pros telling you what you should get - what am I going to do with a set of 5 foot long crimson calligraphy scrolls? - but I spent a grand total of $67 U.S. and I got some cool souvenirs, some gifts and one-of-a-kind mementos that actually reflect some of China's culture.

And after all that? Pork chops at The Sizzler!

What a country.

A PHOTO OF THE MARKET:


AND A VIDEO:

Frank's Place Part II: Prince, Chinese Style

It's Friday night again, which seems to happen about once a week here, so I went back over to Franks Place for another delicious burger and a little baseball (they seem to show a replay of an MLB game at 9:30 p.m. local time). Today it was Giants-Mets in New York, and I got to see Barry Bonds pop up weakly to the third baseman.

I also noticed a soundcheck happening out on the patio. So after I finished my burger, I took my Tsingtao (if you're ever here, be sure to pronounce it "Shing-doe" or the waitress will laugh at you) and went out to the patio.

It was raining, so I was one of maybe 7 people listening (still better than the Sam Scratch gig in Fargo, am I right?). I took a table under the umbrella and soaked in some American blues and funk.

The band was led by an African-American on lead vox and guitar, with a Chinese drummer and bass player - the bassist was named Wen (he had painted a giant 'W' on his cabinet grille) and played what may have been an authentic Fender P-bass.

So I'm just chillin', feet up, and they launch into a song I'm sure we can all enjoy:

[EDIT: June 6 - I've been censored! Not by who you'd think. The following was an ultra-poor quality 8-second snippet of a band covering Prince's song "Kiss," and I now see that when I click on it, I get the following message:

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Universal Music Publishing Group"

Well done, gentlemen. I hope you feel the $250 an hour your lawyers charged you to kill my little funny was well spent.]


(Sorry for the quality. My phone can only take 8 seconds of video at low resolution.)

Ah. A slice of home.

IN OTHER NEWS

DANG RIGHT I'M CINDERELLA! NOW BRING ME THE DING-DANG PRINCE!
As you may know, the company was kind enough to fly me to Beijing first class. My wife was amused when I called her from the plane on May 10 and was interrupted by a flight attendant handing me slippers and a wine list, something that rarely happens in coach, where I normally sit.

Anyway, as a cheapskate, I kept the slippers and have used them in Beijing. But they got ratty and torn (they are essentially disposable), so I decided to switch to the complimentary slippers the building supplies with each apartment.


I might as well have been putting on Audrey Hepburn's 5th grade ballet slippers.

IT'S ALMOST HARVEST TIME IN THE CRANE ORCHARDS:
The crane farmers have nurtured and fertilized them all year, and these cranes are almost ripe!




Soon it will be time to harvest them, pack them in ice and ship them off to construction-deprived nations, like the U.S.!

WORK IN PROGRESS:
Beijing is nuts, as you may have gathered. There are probably 40-50 skyscrapers under construction right now, many of them designed and built as though money were no object.

One of the most famous buildings under construction is the new CCTV (China Cable Television) headquarters, which will look like this (watch for it in your local Olympics '08 broadcast!):



Here's what it looks like now:



MEANWHILE, IN REAL BEIJING:
Just for the curious, here's a typical street scene one block from my work building:



And that's all I got for today. Beijing OOT!

Best. Movie packaging. Ever.

OK, so you all know, as a marketing person serving a large software client, I have to take a hard line on piracy. Remember kids: Just Say No!

That said, I had to buy a pirated movie today. Not because I really want to watch it - it's "Babel", which I hear is good, but I rarely come home from a long day at work and say "I really need to watch a deep, complex film filled with emotional distress." More often, it's something like "Earnest Gets Stupider II" or "Exploding Helicopter: The Movie." (Props out to Pat!)

In this case, however, I had to shell out the 5 yuan (63 cents)just for the packaging. It's a cheap tri-fold knockoff of the real packaging, all cardboard, complete with the Cannes logo and a cutline from Rex Reed - "A Genuine Masterpiece!" - on the cover.

But on the back, the package designer decided to provide a little counterpoint:


I almost busted a gut.

Now, this HAS to be deliberate. It's a real review - I looked it up. Maybe an English-speaking designer thought it would be funny and most people wouldn't get it or care, or maybe he didn't like the movie, or maybe he counted on suckers like me actually going out of their way to buy it because it amused us and, at 63 cents, I've already gotten my entertainment value out of it.

In any case, it will have a special place in my collection when I get home.

My Apartment was Designed to Kill Me

Now that I've been here 20 days, I have my doubts about whether the Chinese really like me. Oh sure, they're extremely polite and friendly to my face, but then they put me in an apartment that is a veritable Pit and Pendulum of ways to main and kill myself. Let's take a tour.

1.) Trip Inducing Doorways:

Most of the doorways, including the front, have a threshold that's a couple inches high. Apparently this is an architectural relic of superstition, which said that evil spirits couldn't make it over these. Large, clumsy, bleary-eyed Americans who just need to use the bathroom, for crying out loud, may have some trouble with them as well.

2.) Razor Sharp Doorknobs:

The doorknobs are made of flat pieces of metal, and the corners are slightly undercut, meaning that each of the four corners has a razor sharp edge that could bring down a boar, if said boar happened to be walking by the door with his arm swinging freely by his side.

3.) Convenient Electrified Showers:

Sure, they could have actually put the outlet UNDER the shower head, but where's the sport in that?

4.) Do-It-Yourself Defenestration Kit:

In the states, you rarely have free-opening windows in a high-rise building. At least theres a screen to help break my fall if I-- oh.

5.) Super-Secret Window Features:

Let's see, I just turn this handle ALL the way up, and--

--


--the window NOW tips into the room the long way, causing me to lose my balance and fall backwards through the screen shown previously.

After all that, I don't even want to know what the mysterious, unmarked, unmentioned shiny red button located above my bed - right next to the light switch, where I reach without looking every night when I go to sleep - does.

Happy Memorial Day, slackers!

While you're still dragging your lazy selves out of bed on a day off, I've already put in a full day at the office. Gave a good part of a creative presentation to a global software client today - felt like it went very well. I like presentations, and for once the fact that I spoke English was an asset.

Besides which, the creative thinking in the Beijing office is very good, which makes it easy to present. They do nice, clean, direct concepts that really deliver on the client objectives. Very thoughtfully done, too.

Anyway, after that I came home and had the traditional meal I make every Memorial Day in Beijing:



It's a stir-fry of chicken, onion, cashews and sesame seeds in soy sauce served over rice noodles, with potato chips, dill pickles and a crisp, refreshing Yanjing Beer, well known for their catchy slogan "Yanjing Beer? How much? And how much for the Heineken? Really? OK, I'll take the Yanjing Beer."

(OK, for you advertising sticklers out there, that's more of a Perception Shifting Case coupled with a Desired Consumer Outcome rather than a slogan.)

Anyway, have a good safe holiday back home. Talk to you later!

Where are my cheap DVDs? I was promised cheap DVDs!

From reading the newspapers back home, you would think that China is literally awash in pirated software, movies, music and the like, with vast turbulent seas of Spiderman III and Star Wars DVDs and the occasional whirlpool of movies by the Wayans brothers, and all around would be people with buckets flinging pirated material this way and that yelling "Please, Mr. American! Please save us from all these movies! Just take them!"

So I wasn't entirely surprised when, in the first few days there, I saw small 10-foot wide storefronts with hand-lettered signs offering DVDs for 10 yuan (about $1.25) each.

I WAS surprised the next day when I walked by the same store, and it was just a pile of broken shelving.

A couple days later I went to my local Vanguard store (kind of a small Target plus a grocery store) and discovered that their DVD section had just been replaced with an enormous toilet paper display.

There's been news about China cracking down on pirated stuff, and maybe it's just a drop in the bucket, but I was surprised to see such changes so quickly. It might really be happening this time - with the Olympics coming, and piracy so common, they probably need to get a head start.

That's not to say you can't find DVDs in Beijing. A coworker showed me a store one evening after work. It was like a speakeasy - you had to know the right door and the right stairs, and suddenly you emerge in a large, well-lit room bursting with videos, tourists and office workers.

As an upstanding citizen, needless to say I was morally outraged. After loudly berating the staff for taking money out of the mouths of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, I went directly to the U.S. Ambassador and members of the U.S. trade commission to lodge a complaint.

(They were in aisle 2, buying copies of LOST Season 3 and arguing over whether the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie was just guilty fun or a sign of what's wrong with Hollywood today.)

ODDS & ENDS:
I can't form a coherent story to save my life. It may be that I had poured so much of myself into BeijingBananaQuest '07 that now that it's over, I need a new focus. Or maybe it's that case of 24-hour Avian Influenza I've got. ("Here, handle some dead chickens," he said. What was I thinking?)

In any case, here's a bunch of little stuff that's been going on.

BREAKING CULINARY NEWS
I ate eels yesterday. I had to go into the office on Saturday to proof some work for a presentation Monday, so my boss suggested we go out for lunch first. We went to a Chinese restaurant and I let him order, although I did ask for nothing with too many bones.

(Admittedly, the Boney Bone Pudding with Bone Sauce did have some bones.)

Seriously, though, another excellent meal. There was spicy stir-fried beef, two kinds of duck including one famous kind in which they take duck and egg yolks and apparently make some kind of loaf out of it, then slice it thin, a soy and tofu dish that almost had the texture of wheat bread, a rice and bean concoction, tea - and a big ole' bowl of eels.


Photo chosen for dramatic effect. Mine weren't this fresh.

"It's just spaghetti with heads," I whispered to myself. "Just spaghetti with heads."

And you know what? They weren't too bad. They had been stir fried with soy sauce and garlic, and they really tasted like soy sauce and garlic. Texture is a little weird, I admit, and I didn't go back for fourths, but after the chicken feet, a pleasant surprise.

WHAT'S CHINESE FOR 'BJOONGLHOOVEORN'
After the DVD store, I joined my coworker on a trip to IKEA in Beijing. He needed to buy some household stuff, and we also had dinner (mmmm! Swedish meatballs!)

It was the exact same stuff we buy. With the same ridiculous, unpronounceable meaningless names. And the store was just as much of a maddening cattle chute as any in the States. Apparently the Swedes have figured out this 'global economy' thing.

PLAYING TOURIST
I've been a little unsure what to see and how much effort I want to expend on weekends, especially since I am working full time. I had almost talked myself into spending the day watching movies - and then the 'How often will you be in Beijing' voice started going through my head. (Actually, through my headphones. I was talking with my wife, who fully supported my laziness but planted a seed to take some action.)

So I took a cab to Bei Hai Park, northwest of the Forbidden City.

It used to be a private playground for the Khan and rulers who lived in the Forbidden City. They dredged out a large lake, used the dirt to build a steep island, and did it all in a similar style to the Forbidden City. But it has more little staircases and rock gardens and these neat little lanes that have rock piled up on each side so you can find privacy and quiet for a few minutes. It also has a huge promenade along the lake and little buildings tucked against the side of the hill. Very neat.

(To the south is the new 'Forbidden City': The southern 2/3 of what used to be the park was converted into the residences of the Party leadership, according to the guidebook.)

From the island I walked north through a more modern park area, kind of like a smaller Central Park. Lots of people out and enjoying the day or out on the lake in small rented boats. For me, it was nice to see so much green again.

From there I went northeast through a touristy hutong (an old neighborhood of narrow alleys - probably a little lower-income, certainly a little run down, but the area I stuck to was along a lake and more open) to the Drum Tower, a 700 year old building that was used to keep time.

After that I walked down a street of small shops, poking my head in and looking around here and there until I got tired and took a cab home.

Anyway, here's some pictures:

SPEAKING OF 'LOST'...
OK, this is either really nerdy or too too precious, but my wife and I made a 'date' last night. We both downloaded the season finale of LOST from iTunes, then got on an audio-chat and watched it together.

HOLY SMOKES! That was a heck of an episode. Fellow LOST fanatics, we will have much to discuss when I get home.

I have more little stuff, but I think I've rambled long enough. Later!