Welcome to Beijing

Saturday, April 29 2006

My flight got delayed for an hour. Nice way to start off a much anticipated trip. Apparently we were waiting for 9 passengers who seemed to have problems locating the departure gate. They were obviously greeted with death stares as they walked down the aisle on the plane to get to their seats.

Met Lanna at Beijing Int'l Airport around 5:30pm. Got a cab to Capital Bio (where she works and lives), which took us about 45 minutes. The minute we started talking to the cab driver, I knew this trip was going to be an adventure. I'm Chinese, but I speak Cantonese. My ability to converse in Mandarin is quite limited in my own country, now imagine me in China, where they have different accents and dialects. Between me and Lanna, she's the one who's spent a year living in Beijing. But of course wherever we went, people would talk to me because I'm Chinese. When I open my mouth, out comes the Malaysian Mandarin accent. Most of the time they get it, other times they either correct us or just stare at us blankly. Sometimes they pass comments like "But she looks Chinese", or "I think she's Chinese" in Mandarin, thinking I don't know what they're saying. In fact, I actually understand more than they think I do. And at times it's best to pretend to not speak the language totally, so you appear to be less of an idiot when they prolong the conversation.

We get into the cab, and Lanna starts pulling out her Lonely Planet phrase book, various maps of the city of Beijing, and her Oxford English-Chinese dictionary. Very amusing really.

Arrived at CapitalBio, near the Life Science Park, at around 7pm. This place is huge and quite impressive. Lanna's boss, David Sun, had arranged for me to stay at one of their guest rooms - I like to call it a really nice apartment. It was like living in a five star hotel suite. By the way, CapitalBio is a life science company which develops and commercializes biochip technology products.




Lanna; an exhibit of their products on the ground floor; indoor garden/fountain area and the view outside the building


On the 4th floor of the housing area, they have several guest rooms named after different places like Paris, Rio de Janeiro, etc. David Sun put me in the Paris room. Pretty nifty, eh? I didn't want to leave.


At 8pm, we caught a bus to Hou Hai Lake. The bus ride was an adventure. We passed a place called Cow Village. Lets just say that the smell of the place was more memorable than the sights. Hou Hai is a really hip and trendy place, catered to tourist and expats mostly I think. The restaurants have really cool decor, and you can get anything from local to fusion to western food (there's one that's called Sex and da City. Go figure), souvenir shops, pubs and bars, and to top it all off, this whole area is surrounded by a lake. Really puts Third Street Promenade to shame.

Know what's in the second picture? Starbucks. Yes. That is a Starbucks coffee shop. In traditional Chinese architecture.


Lanna suggested dinner at Kong YiJi restaurant - listed as the most famous HangZhou restaurant and one of the best restaurants in Beijing, also a favourite among expats and foreigners. I suggested walking to the restaurant since it looked so close to where we were on the Hou Hai Lake map. Lanna suggested the trishaw. It was a 15-20 minute trishaw ride, and we would have never found this place if we had walked. When we got there, we asked for an English menu. I laughed when it came. See that notebook Lanna's reading? That's the English menu - there is only ONE of it in the entire restaurant, and it's no more than a beaten up notebook. We didn't want to end up with a table full of animal intestines, tongue, tail and whatnot, so we decided it would be best to know what we're actually ordering. The food was delicious I have to say but they served the smallest bowl of rice I've ever had.