Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Life in Beijing - Continued

Living in Beijing, I was introduced to some activities that were not known to me previously.

Hotpot is a very interesting (and tasty) way of eating.  You sit at a table with a built-in stove.  A pot with boiling water or oil (or both) and some spices is placed in the middle.  Then you make your selection of food out of the menu: lamb, beef, pork, chicken, vegetables of all kinds, fish-balls, etc.  When the liquid in the pot starts to boil, you start cooking your order.  When it's ready you pick it up and dip it in sesame sauce and eat it.  I recommend not to go to a hotpot place when you are really hungry, simply because you end up ordering too much.  It's fun and it's tasty.

Driving in Beijing is another interesting experience.  Traffic rules are slightly different.  Being a foreigner, I am not sure sometimes whether the rules are different, or whether the rules are the same, but they are simply ignored.  Let me give you an example.  Suppose you want to cross a busy street.  You wait for the light to turn green, and then you start to cross.  Chances are, if you don't look around you, you will never make it to the opposite side.  The reason is that (apparently) it is legal to turn right on red (like in most parts of the US), but the cars (vs. the pedestrians) have the right of way.  Also, cars can make a left turn into your crossroad, because they have a green light as well.  So, if you are in the middle of crossing and a car comes by, and you think that you should continue and the driver will give in - well, don't count on it.  Did I mention the official three lane streets and the unofficial three "other" lanes?  In which cars are driving so close to one another that you often feel that you can pick the next driver's nose if you wanted to, and if he wasn't busy doing it already?

Foot massage is one of the best ones.  Indeed, I have heard from people who came back from Thailand about "body massage" but that was classified in my mind as a different kind of activity altogether.  The first time my wife and I went to get a foot massage I was curious and somewhat cautious.  I had no idea what to expect.  We went to a massage parlor which is a part of a chain named "Tai-Pan".  We were greeted and lead into a semi-dark room, equipped with a few really comfortable armchairs, quiet instrumental music played in the background, but most important of all, it had one very rare commodity here: quiet.  A few minutes later, a man and a woman entered the room with large buckets full of steaming hot water with some flowers floating around.  While our feet were soaking in the hot water, we were getting a back and shoulder massage.  Shortly after that, a professional, medical, foot massage starts.  The pressure on the feet can sometimes be really painful.  That's why I can't understand for the life of me how come in the middle of a relatively painful foot massage, I not only fall asleep, I snore.  It was embarrassing the first time, but since my wife and I ask for the same professionals (I avoided writing "masseur" and "masseuse" on purpose), nobody is getting excited about it anymore.

Then there's the pre-paid stuff. I am used to pay for the services I already consumed, rather than pay for them in advance. Let me give you an example. In order to use electricity, you have to go to the bank and “load” a magnetic card with electricity. You then have to go back home and feed the card to the electric meter. You now have a certain amount of “units” of electricity. How do you know that you have run out of power? Simple, the light goes off when you are about to take the towel of the rack after taking a shower at night... Same thing goes for gas, three kinds of water supply (hot, cold, and recycled). Frankly, once you get the hang of it, it really is no big deal, but until then it is rather annoying.

Back home we used to go to the movies and rent DVDs.  Here we simply buy them.  In fact, we have developed a system of "programming".  The kids get to watch one of their favorite shows: "Tom and Jerry", "Pink Panther", and believe it or not "Mr. Bean".  After dinner and showers, my wife and I put on two episodes of the shows we are following at the time.  For the longest time we were watching "the Sopranos", "CSI Miami", "CSI Las Vegas", and as of last month "Six Feet Under".  Again, as other things - we learned to enjoy this self controlled entertainment.

Frankly speaking, there's only one thing that I miss from home and from the US.  I'd bet that you'd never guess what it is.  Daylight Saving Time.  The sun rises here at about 5:00 AM.  Unfortunately, once the sun is up, so am I.  I simply can't sleep well knowing that the sun is up.  The earliest the sun rises here is 4:46 AM.  It isn't a reasonable hour to wake up.  For comparison - in New York, the sun rises a full hour later.

Posted at 06:57PM May 09, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[2]