Kathy & Paul's Adventures Abroad

Located in Beijing’s district of Feng Tai is MaLianDao Tea City. It houses about 100 different tea vendors in a four storey building. It is one of the largest tea markets in Asia with a huge selection of teas and accessories such as teapots and tea sets. This market is only a tiny part of the tea district.

Today Chenxia and Mike drove us to see this amazing market and we spent a few hours just in this one building.
Check out these photos of the MaLianDao market.

Twenty minutes bike-ride from our place there is a morning market where you can get your dentures fixed right on the street. You can buy five inch long things that look like lobster, fresh seaweed, live turtles and fish (killed for free). You can watch a man hitting himself with a snake, another man making fresh noodles, and yet another using a foot-peddle sewing machine.You can also buy a large selection of things I don’t recognize but believe to be food.

This market magically appears every morning seven days a week and by 12:00 p.m. it starts to disappear. The first three photos were taken at 2:00 p.m. and the market is gone. The rest of the photos were taken at 10:00 a.m. showing a bustling and diverse market.

2:00 p.m.

10:00 a.m.

Today the smog is very bad which is surprising because last Friday we could see the mountains from our window. It is the first time I noticed them even though they are only a thirty minute bike ride from here. There are no foothills, they just rise right out of the flat-lands. It was the first day that was clear enough to see them.

The heat in Beijing’s buildings has been turned off for the summer so all those coal heating plants are now shut down. Hopefully this will help to improve the air quality.

The photos below tell the whole story about the air quality.

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Saturday morning we woke to an orange sky and very poor visibility. We later learned that it was a dust storm blowing from the desert. Beijing’s weather bureau gave a rare hazardous air quality ranking. A sand storm in 2006 dumped 300,000 tons of sand on Beijing- yes 300,000 tons!!

These four photos were taken from our window early Saturday morning.

It is now Monday afternoon and the wind is still high, although the intensity of the sand has decreased. However the visibility and air quality remain poor.

These photos were taken from the same window at 2:00 p.m. today.

More photos taken on Monday afternoon:

Paul and I went to visit the Forbidden City last Saturday. Paul had been there before but I was unable to go because I was teaching. Below are some of the pictures we took. Enjoy!

Today we thought we would publish some photos of the daily sights we see on our walks and outings in Beijing.

Yesterday we went to Wumart and bought our new bikes. The first ones we had were very cheap and had no gears so they were very hard to ride. Paul pretty much wore out his with all the riding he did during the first term and Kathy gave her’s away so we could both have better ones.Our new ones are 18 speed sports bikes at 1300RMB or $200 Canadian for two. We checked the Walmart website and found similar sports bikes with 21 speeds for $361 US. Note that Wumart and Walmart are two different chains.

We love our new bikes – they’re very fast and a lot easier to ride. They will greatly increase our range and allow us to see many parts of the city not on the tour route. We like seeing the real Beijing and its many different layers.
Last night we went out to dinner with friends. It was wet and started snowing about 7:00. We were told this was the worst winter in fifty years, but it’s still mild by Canadian standards.

It snowed all night and most of the morning, and now our new bikes are covered in snow. But in a day or two (we hope) the snow will be gone and we will be out touring the city. As Kathy says “Not to worry,we’re living the dream!”

We arrived in Beijing too late for the Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year) on February 14, which is the start of the Spring Festival. It is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays.

The origin of the Lunar New Year can be traced back thousands of years involving a series of colourful legends and traditions. One of the most famous legends is of Nian, an extremely cruel and ferocious beast. The ancients believed he would devour people on New Year’s Eve. To keep Nian away red paper couplets are pasted to the door, torches are lit and firecrackers are set off throughout the night. Nian is said to fear the colour red, the light of the fire, and loud noises. Early the next morning after successfully keeping Nian away for another year the most popular expression heard is “Gong xi fa cai” or congratulations.

Last night was the final day of the Spring Festival, the fifteenth day, known as the Lantern Festival. We have been back in China six days and there have been random fireworks every day. We were told that the Lantern Festival rivals New Years for fireworks but nothing could prepare us for last night. You should know this is not a government sponsored event. It is the average person who buys and sets off fireworks. A city of seventeen million people setting off fireworks is hard to believe and harder to describe.

It started around dusk and ended six hours later around midnight – continuous, massive, unbelievable – they were everywhere.You could look in any direction and there was a light show.

The view from our tenth floor window was amazing! The fireworks sound like popcorn popping – deafening popcorn! Looking down at the street outside our apartment we saw a family of four with their car trunk full of fireworks. Dad was setting them off while Mom and the kids watched. One hundred meters up the road four young men in a white van were setting off large bottle rockets. When it explodes a bottle rocket sends a shower of colour down from the sky. At the same time we could see three or four people setting off five feet long strings of firecrackers.

Block by block all over the city this was happening. It is something everyone should experience at least once. It is hard to describe how beautiful it was but I will make an attempt and say it was like Canada Day fireworks multiplied by 10000!

A new bakery has recently opened a fifteen minute walk from our place or five minutes by bike. It is located next to the entrance of the new Merry Mart grocery store. They even have a website and the address is www.bjxqs.com.cn.

Our friend Mike introduced us to the owner Barry who gave us free cappuccinos, three different cake samples, and some cookies, an unexpected treat which were all very tasty. In conversation with Barry we found out he lived in Australia for seven years and opened the bakery on his return. They carry over thirty beautiful and different cakes in an assortment of sizes. They also sell many pastries, cookies, doughnuts and a type of eclair made with a doughnut-style pastry.

Barry told us both his parents taught at the Beijing university and he lived his entire youth on the university campus. The university has its own community on campus and Barry was not allowed to travel around Beijing by himself until he was fifteen years old.

My favourite - dessert!

So many choices!

North American style fast food is infusing itself into the Chinese culture. The first and most popular was K.F.C. followed by McDonald’s and Dairy Queen. A meal deal at KFC costs about 25 RMB or $4.00 Canadian. Yesterday at Dairy Queen we paid 41 RMB for two large blizzards, about $7.00 Canadian.

By Chinese standards Western food is very expensive. To put it in perspective, for 20 RMBs (a little over $3.00 Canadian) you can fill two average sized shopping bags with fruits and vegetables at any of Beijing’s thousands of local markets.

When asked to list their favourite foods, most kids in Kathy’s eight classes said fries, burgers, or both. The love of fast food is growing rapidly among the young.

The original fast food vendors are the street merchants. They are and will continue for a long time to be an integral part of Chinese culture. In this post you will see a small sample of some of the many vendors who ply their trade on a daily basis on the streets of Beijing.