Beijing photo walk

I love my DSLR. I wish I could use it better and own a wide-angle lens for touristy photography, but still, I absolutely love my camera.

And luckily I found a photo-walk group in Beijing. It is just a group of cool people who like taking pictures, and get together to walk around and take some pictures. And the Beijing group is pretty awesome. I only went on one of the events due to time/travel issues but that day I met people from France, Canada, UK, US, China and a couple of other countries that I am forgetting. They were expats, people with short-term projects in China, students etc. It was a fun group of budding (and some pro) photographers.

I skipped going to one of the temples but was able to go to the mosque - Niu Jie and Fayuan Si (Temple of the Origin of the Dharma), which is the oldest Buddhist temple in Beijing. I was prepared for another Chinese mosque after being to the one at Xi'an. It looked pretty similar in Chinese architecture as with other temples.

And it being China, every tourist attraction has to be accompanied with a silly, confusing but completely amusing sign. This one was green !

However, this being a photo-walk, goal was to get some out of the ordinary pictures. I think I did well with the grill behind a grill (reminds me of dream within a dream from Inception)

And I happened to like the lines created by the construction material lying in one of the mosque corners.

The temple was more colorful and had an air of liveliness to it. There was a giant fish, fake flowers put in plants and super sharp talons on the momma lion.

In China, it is common to see two lions at the entrance. One of them is the momma lion playing with its cub and the other is a male lion with a ball. However, at Fayuan Si, both the lions had sharp claws. No one knew the answer as to why, but the cracked ball looked ominous compared to the other versions I have seen.

Lion on left looks much less menacing...

Hopefully I can find a photo-walk group in Atlanta but I doubt it would be as diverse as the one from Beijing !

Things to do in China

I have 30 more days to spend in China. And suddenly, I am overwhelmed by the things I need to do. I thought I would share the list. Here it is, in no particular order of priority (this does not include work + research + class related tasks).

1. Go to Forbidden City (seriously, I have been here forever and haven't seen the most famous Beijing landmark)
2. Go to Shanghai
3. Shoe shopping
4. Buy Chinese tea
5. Eat
1. Hot Pot
2. Gong bao ji ding
3. Korean bbq
4. Rotating table sushi
6. Watch movie - Flowers of War
7. Picture taking
1. PKU campus
2. Subway stations
3. Canteens at campus
8. Visit the Bird's nest (olympics)
9. Ice skating at Weiminghou lake at campus
10. Bask in the attention bestowed upon me by virtue of me being a foreigner

ps - All things panda are not included in the list, because I have realized that it is going to be a life long obsession, to collect/do/be involved in all things PANDA.

A panda picture, because they are so darn cute

Inner mongolia - Hohhot

Towards the end of October, I was getting a little travel lusty and convinced Warren to take a weekend trip. 

Inner mongolia, a north-eastern province of China with its grasslands and deserts seemed inviting enough.

I did enlist the help of a travel agent who said that we would live in yurks at the grassland, see Mongolian people dancing at the bonfire and other fun things. We did know it was cold and we wouldn't see rolling green grasslands but we hadn't imagined quite this:

We arrived at an ungodly hour at 4am at Hohhot (pronounced as Hu-huh-haw-tuh). Then proceeded to the "grasslands". It was freezing and I was shivering and just wanted to go back and sit in the van (which we did after sunrise). The whole dew freezing at dawn made for this empty beer bottle to look artistic.

We did see the sunrise and our over enthusiastic guide took a picture of Warren and I holding the glowing sun !

The rest of the grassland day was kind of a let down though. We saw some horses but didn't ride them because everything was barren. We had lunch with the Mongolians (no fire included) and I tasted some of their wine which I think was 50% ethanol (*gags*). Due to the freezing conditions, our yurk stay was canceled and we proceeded to the city. Warren and I decided to just go exploring the town on our own and that was quite fun. We saw a temple, giant statues, walked around in the market etc.

But the highlight of the day was going through the local vegetable market and looking at the ginormous produce. We were amazed at the sizes of scallions and carrots and onions they were selling. See for yourself:

Later we had dinner at a non-English speaking place with a Chinese menu. It was quite eventful as the adjoining table had 6 boisterous middle-aged men whose goal was to make conversation with us. Warren and I tell Chinese people that we don't speak Chinese usually as an opening line. That is a good way to stop them from bombarding us with questions. In reality we know a tiny bit of survival Chinese but our vocabulary being limited to about 20 words or so, doesn't really help us in carrying out social conversations. 

However, this dinner group was not deterred by our inability to speak the language. I think they believed that if they talked "louder" and "used more words", we would eventually understand what they are saying. They were sorely mistaken though. I am still not sure what they were trying to say. They gave up eventually, but ended up taking pictures with Warren and I (more with Warren, him being white and all) as a consolation prize. 

It was a quaint town, not touristy at all. We went through the entire day and almost the whole weekend, without seeing any foreigners !

I was going to write about going to the desert the next day, but that is going to be a tribute to Warren's jumping picture modeling skillz, so it shall be a separate post, hopefully soon.

Children acrobats - China

As our Inner Mongolia tour did not meet our expectations (blog post to be written soon), I coerced/blackmailed/convinced our tour operator to reimburse us or make it up to us. She offered free tickets to a show either Beijing opera, Kung fu or Acrobatics.

It was easy to rule out Beijing opera. Neither Warren or I wanted to listen to the wailing & clanging that the opera is famous for. We had heard a part of it during a ballet show and that was the limit of our "cultural immersion" when it came to the opera. Then it was down to Kung fu vs Acrobatics. I decided to go with acrobatics. I thought it would be cool tricks, with crazy flexibility. And I was right about that, except I did not think the tricks will be performed by kids who were barely even teenagers, if that.

Warren and I got to the show late, due to bad directions. We had really good seats. And once the show started, we saw little kids on the stage. This made us uncomfortable - we wanted to enjoy the show but not support children being on stage to perform day after day. And some of the acts, just could not be safe for your body. But the show was pretty good.

I wonder how long the kids were trained for. But when you see a girl doing the following act (and see all her muscles ripple) and she doesn't even look like a teenager, you wonder if that is an indication why China wins so many gold medals in gymnastics:

And then there was this cutest kid who did some daredevil tricks. He was happy, jumping around and making everyone cringe in their seats.

But then, if you had a telephoto lens and could creep on his face, he looked just like another kid, scared to make a mistake.

 There was also a lot of standing on other people's heads, balancing things using your teeth and doing crazy splits. I just would have felt better if everyone was a little older...
And also if they did not have tacky digital backgrounds like a swan (or a blue vase)

There were also a few other acts. One in particular made both Warren and I think about the Human Centipede movie (open link at your own risk).

The show ended with 5 motorcycles in a sphere which was absolutely terrifying. I have a video, but it won't do justice.

After the show, I looked into the legal aspects of allowing kids to perform and there wasn't a whole lot written about it. I just found one article that talked about parents "renting" their kids to be street performers. But I wonder if that is also the story at big establishments in Beijing. These shows are famous, ticket prices go from 120 - 600 yuan ( 20 - 100 USD). Maybe there is a legal way of doing it or maybe no one pays a lot of attention to it, but it is difficult to believe that these kids are still going to school and living a normal life when they are performing crazy stunts on the stage day in and day out.