Tianjin & Beijing

These have been a super busy few days for me. In New York, I spent the day with friends going to lunch at Cafe Zaiya and dinner at Yakinuki (a Korean/Japanese barbeque) as well as visiting Central Park, MOMA, and a Karaoke joint.I flew from New York to Beijing--about a 13 hour flight. The cool thing was that I sat next to Chinese-language students from Bard College. They were studying in a summer program in Qinghai. Then I looked around my flight, and I realized many of the students were young Americans. I guess Chinese language study just keeps getting more and more popular. I got to Beijing and basically passed out in my hotel room for the night.

The next morning, we took a bullet train to Tianjin. The drive between Tianjin and Beijing takes about 2 hours. The train got us there in less than 30 minutes. It was a surprisingly comfortable ride for a train going over 320 km (approx 200 miles) an hour. We spent the afternoon in Tianjin visiting various important houses. During the early republic, warlords often set up their home or vacation home in Tianjin, so the area around Tianjin has beautiful architecture. We also visited Puyi's house in Tianjin (after he abdicated emperor-ship to the Republic of China/KMT). This house is also featured in the film, The Last Emperor. The other major thing about Tianjin was their food culture （丰富的食物文化）. We actually visited this shopping mall that sold only food specialties. We tried these fried twisty dough things that are Tianjin's specialty (特产). In addition, we also tried cold noodles, sweetened plum drink, sweet sesame soup, fried red bean paste-filled mochi, and this green-bean flavored pancake with egg and sauces on top. I personally was not the biggest fan of Tianjin style food because I'm used to southern Chinese food, but it was an interesting experience.

In Beijing, we visited the Forbidden Palace, Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Bird's Nest, Great Wall, and others. They were super touristy places, so I don't have much to say about it. In the evening, we went to a pretty cool acrobat show with spinning plates, people contorting in strange directions, and Monkey King's fighting each other. We also tried the world-famous Peking Duck of course along with other Beijing specialties such as their rice wine. (I say rice wine but it had a 56% alcohol content!!)

Tomorrow we fly to Shanghai then drive to Suzhou.