Beijing Part I - A City of Skyscrapers

Beijing Part I - A City of Skyscrapers

I had been wanting to visit China for a long time and the chance finally arrived when we had a long weekend last week. We toured at our own pace and enjoyed it a lot. Although we were only there for 3 nights, we fit a lot of things in and came back feeling very good about it.

Gimhae Airport, Busan's international airport, recently constructed a brand new international terminal which we hadn't seen. It's a lot bigger and nicer looking than the last one. We took off from the airport in the afternoon and Heather was nice as always and let me sit next to the window. I like looking at clouds.

Although it's become fashionable to complain about aeroplane food these days, I always look forward to receiving my tray. This is the lunch provided by Asiana Airlines, bulgogi and rice with sides. I like how everything always comes in a packet and take pleasure in finishing every piece of food and then folding up the wrappers neatly. The air hostess seemed particularly delighted that I had left my tray so clean. Heather was noticeably less amazed.

Touching down at Beijing Airport I squinted out of the windows to get my first look at the capital. A Samsung billboard greeted us on the tarmac, which was an interesting reminder that we weren't too far from home. It was about a 2 hour journey.

We caught the airport limousine bus to our hotel after a short while. Some of the expressways in the city are very wide and the first things I noticed were the size and differing architecture in the buildings. That and the number of large birdnests I could see in the trees. I counted more than twenty on the way in.

The apartment blocks are similar to the ones in Korea, just a lot taller. When I see buildings like this I think back to the tallest building in Adelaide, the Santos building, which has only 27 floors. Many of the apartment blocks in China are more than double that.

This mysterious building near our hotel was still under construction. I'm no engineering expert but it looks like they need another column or something. I guess someone knows what they're doing.

This is the China World Trade Center Tower 3, which is also still under construction. It's due to be completed before the Olympics and will be the tallest building in Beijing at 330 metres. Inside there are going to be 30 elevators and a hotel lobby on the 71st floor. Right now it looks like a giant dalek.

This is the view from our hotel window, which was within the surrounds of the WTC complex. There were quite a few hotels in the area and most seemed to have been built within the past decade.

Our hotel was the Traders Hotel in Guomao which was very nice. We took a package to Beijing that included airfares and accommodation for three nights for $700 each. Originally the price was $500 but then the travel agent mysteriously inflated the price. It was still a good deal though. I'd recommend this hotel to anyone who can get a decent price because it was very comfortable and centrally located.

Our room, which was cosy enough. Flicking through the channels of Beijing TV, I found it surprisingly similar to that in Korea. What I like most about staying in hotels is how you leave the room messy and come back later in the day with everything neat and tidy. If I lived that way for a while I'd turn into a brat.

I also like taking little bottles of shampoo and soap home with me. When I was young I used to collect 'packeted things', which were defined as anything small that was packaged and unopened. I had a couple of hundred items from various places.

After we freshened up a little, we headed for the Beijing subway to have a look around the city. All around Beijing now, signs of the upcoming Olympics are very obvious. The city feels like it's undergoing change and it would really be exciting to come back when the games start.

A view of Guomao subway station. Although Beijing is so large, it has about the same number of subway stations as Busan, which made things simpler. Seoul's subway line map is grotesquely complex and looks like a colourful flying spaghetti monster.

The subway cars themselves weren't too bad either, just a little creakier and the brakes whistle when the train stops.

The first area we went out to was WangFuJing. It's best described as a very western influenced part of the city with a lot of recent constructions. The street layout has been carefully planned and it felt more like a European city than a Chinese one. Heather said it reminded her of Paris.

Throughout WangFuJing are plenty of shops selling exorbitantly priced imported products, like Rolex watches and Calvin Klein. The area is quite nice to walk around in and I ended up buying a hat. In comparison with Seoul, WangFuJing would be the Beijing equivalent of Gangnam.

If you ever make it to WangFuJing someday, which you definitely should if you go to Beijing, take the alley right in front of the huge Nikon billboard. It's surprising how drastic the scenery changes. Within 100 metres the bulildings change from large pristine monoliths to the kinds of shops you'd see in Chinatown back home. Actually it really did feel just like Chinatown. Funny that.

These two actors were performing a traditional Chinese play with high-pitched dialogue. Below were pedestrians busily finding a good place to eat.

Slightly famished, we sought a regular restaurant to grab a bite to eat. When travelling overseas I always enjoy eating at cheap local places. The waiters in the red coats at this restaurant were busy seating customers who were flowing in and out like baitfish. We were seated on the same table as a Chinese family which was interesting.

This is what we ordered. On the left is a regular noodle soup, which wasn't too bad and closer to the photo is a coriander and dumpling soup. Coriander is completely absent from Korea and Heather hates the taste of it. I originally disliked the taste, but after getting used to it I can now eat it with just about anything. We also had two skewers of barbecued lamb which were really good. The entire meal cost us $4.

After that we headed out to the Sanlitun district, which we had heard was famous for its bars. We asked some friendly German tourists for their recommendation of a good watering-hole and they suggested this place, Bar Blu. It was a nice enough place and we enjoyed a Caipirinha, the same cocktail we enjoyed in Osaka. Here's Heather, posing for one of my experimental camera shots on 'twilight mode'.

Within the Sanlitun area are some bars with employees who stand on the street. It seems that their sole job is to 'coax' people into entering their particular bar. In Beijing, coaxing means dragging you by the arm despite your efforts to continue walking down the street. If you continue to resist, for approximately 30-45 seconds, they let you continue on your way. We humourously fought our way past the first batch but were quickly swept into the second bar. We were looking for a drink anyway.

This bar was quite nice, pricey by Chinese standards, but average when compared to Korea. The good thing about it was that it had continuous live entertainment, including belly dancers and this band which was quite good. The guy on the left sang 'One Night in Beijing'. How very appropriate.

After a couple of drinks we wandered out onto the streets where the crowds had died down a little. Up the road was this long line of street vendors selling all kinds of food for as far as the eye could see. Street food in Beijing is more varied than that in Korea.

Then we caught a taxi home. From my experiences, crime in Korea is so low that it's something I barely think about. People will steal things of course, but I've never felt threatened late at night. Beijing has a slightly different feel to it, which was very evident in this taxi. The driver was encased in a virtual prison to prevent people from robbing him. Not all of the taxis we caught had this kind of fortification though.

The next day we woke up early to head to the Great Wall. While we were trying to figure out the bus route, we bought some meat-filled buns for breakfast from this place. They were fairly average, but were filling and only cost us 45 cents each. I love travelling cheaply.

Check out the wad of cash in the street vendors right hand. I saw this a lot in Beijing, huge wads of cash being pulled out whenever change was needed. I'm not sure if they did it out of necessity or to show off, but I was certainly impressed. I added it up in my head and realised that a handful of money like that only works out to be about $50. But that can still buy you a lot of stuff if you shop at the right places. I'll show you some bargains in the next post.

Well this is the first of three Beijing posts that I have coming along. Stay tuned.

See you soon!

New Year 2008

Well the last blog post left you hanging in Seoul at the GOA'L christmas party, right before I lost my camera. Luckily enough, Emily (Heather's twin sister) who lives in Seoul, got in touch with a guy who found my bag with everything in it and she posted it down for me. Thanks Emily!

This is one of the photos that was in my camera when it came back. Later that night in Seoul we went out to this Spanish themed bar and it had a drinking area where everyone sits on swings and the floor is covered in sand. Pretty cool. We lounged around there for a while drinking wine.

That's Emily on the left and Eric on the right.

Christmas and New Year came and went in a typically Korean fashion. Christmas is mainly celebrated as a marketing ploy, hence the pretty lights outside the department stores. New Year's has slightly more significance, but we still worked on the first of January. For christmas I didn't have my camera, but we ate a turkey dinner at Jordan and Michelle's house which was cosy and enjoyable.

The end of year CDI gathering was at the Grand Hotel this time. It was a pretty flashy event and quite better than last year's. Our company has grown a fair bit in a year and is still expanding. If you remember way back when I arrived down here, we were the first batch of teachers to work at the newly opened schools. At that time there were 4 Chungdahm schools here, but now there are 8 and they're still expanding. In this photo are the Korean staff from our branch in Saha-Gu (represent).

And here are the big shots, all the managerial staff from the various branches. Some of them are a little odd.

I never got around to eating any of that cake. Then again I'm not really a cake person. They also provided us with all the free beer we could drink plus some left over, so I got to walk out carrying a six-pack. Now that's what I call company perks.

Over the course of the night, there were various competitions between the branches. I participated in this one, the four-person drinking relay. The race was between all the branches, with four people in each, taking in turns to drink 500mL of beer in the fastest time. I'm not that good at drinking quickly, but we still won. Apparently there's a method for drinking super-quickly that's eluded me over the years.

Then they had a dancing competition where two teachers had to dance within a box. That's Logan and Nicole in the white box. We won this event too because Logan took off his shirt. We ended up winning the whole night overall actually.

Another competition was the arm-wrestling. Johnny Diamond went in this event for us but he came second. We say the other guy was cheating, of course.

This is Mr Kang, the CEO of our company giving a speech. I couldn't understand a word of what he was saying because he speaks in a complicated form of Korean. When he finished, the foreign teachers all clapped obligingly though. Logan told me he was saying "Hey everybody, I'm rich, so clap."

The food was good. I've found that expensive buffets are great in Korea, but they all tend to be uncannily similar. I theorize that there's an elite buffet school somewhere that pops out all the chefs for the expensive hotels.

While being quite common in Seoul, snow is a rarity in Busan and I've only seen it in light sprinkles twice this year. It still gets me excited though, because I spent a good 25 or so years of my life without seeing it fall from the sky. I was catching it in my mouth and eating it, until Heather told me it was polluted 'black' snow. Great.

Here's Jin and David from the Dongnae branch after we ate a seafood barbecue. It was still snowing lightly in this picture but it didn't really show up in the photo. On the right is my girlfriend hugging Emily. For some reason, she always ends up hugging that girl at some point in the night. She's a very huggy person in general.

Charlie's Angels? More like Mr Kang's Angels. This is Becky, Christine and Emily with Heather in the middle and they all work at CDI. It's always funny to watch Korean girls meet up and talk to each other, because they get excited easily and remind me of squeaky guinea pigs.

Heather's mother has a clothing shop in LotteMart that she opened a few months ago. Heather and I hung around there for a few hours one night and I was persuaded into trying on, and somehow purchasing this suit. I've never really worn suits, so I asked what the purpose of me buying it was. 'In case there is a wedding', was the answer. Hmmm.

Our company has recently expanded into a lower age group market for English tuition by opening up two new 'April English' schools in the city. These will cater for younger learners, with the program being more interactive and simplified. On the weekend they held an open day that I went along to. This branch is in Guseo-dong, near Pusan University.

The interior design is much brighter and more appealing for younger kids. I was quite impressed. I like the apple theme.

Library and seminar room with lots of CDI and Disney-related publications.

The parents lounge was especially nice, with some sort of modern pre-school feel to it.

Best of all, some of the classrooms have these blue screen 'ChromaKey' walls. An overhead camera records students giving presentations such as news reports here. Then the computer adds a selectable background and uploads the video. When the kids go home, their parents can watch their performance at home, with something like a news studio or the river Thames in the background.

This is Jajangmyeon, a Korean interpretation of Chinese food. The sauce is thick and mild and it usually has a seafood theme to it. We found a place near our apartment that turned out to be good value for money. You can get enough for three people as well as dumplings for around $11.

In the basement of the Lotte hotel near my apartment, we recently found a nice little bar. It's more expensive than most places, but isn't as crowded and has live jazz music on some nights. These guys were playing some sort of freestyle jazz and they were pretty good.

This is Aimee. I met her at the open day for the April English branch and she's from the US. After a while she told me that she randomly found my blog on the net one day while she was browsing and that gave her the idea to come and teach at CDI. And now here she is! It's good to know that the blog is informing others around the world, rather than just being a place for me to ferret away my photos. There's two more who have contacted me too, Liz and her boyfriend from Australia, who will also be coming over in February. Good stuff.

If you've been lurking around or just waltzed in and are looking for a change in your life, try coming to Korea. For most people it's an interesting experience and a nice break from life back home.

Get in touch. Seeya!

Guns, Thanksgiving and More Intestines

The end of the year is rapidly approaching. Seems like yesterday that it was New Year 2007. One day I think I'll wake up in Korea all of a sudden and say "Hey, wow... it's 2017 already and I'm 35".

Hopefully by that time I will have bought a house or something.

Is this yet another new addition to the household? Thankfully not. This 4 month old pup actually belongs to a friend of a friend and was just over for a visit. Because it hasn't been in the world very long, it didn't know how to get down if we put it on the drawers like this. It just stood and stared at us until we picked it up. I don't think I was too much brighter at 4 months of age too.

A while back it was (American) thanksgiving day, which is always a novelty to us Aussies. Devin and Tamara from the Gwangan branch hosted a turkey dinner at their house for all of the teachers at CDI. It was really good food.

More than 40 people showed up, but luckily they have a huge apartment. The logistics involved in catering for such a large group is always difficult, but they pulled it off flawlessly. There was plenty of turkey, salad, mashed potato, gravy and pie for everyone. I ate until I could eat no more, and then I felt sleepy and went home.
Have you heard that turkey makes you especially sleepy because it has the hormone tryptophan in it? I heard that a long time ago, but more recently I heard that it's an exaggerated claim and that turkey meat has about the same amount as pork.

In Beomnaegol, there is a cave bar. It's an artificial tunnel dug into the mountainside that used to be an old ammunition depot or something during the Korean war. It's pretty difficult to find if you don't know the way, but a large group of us managed to make the trek from the subway station. You can order food and there's usually water trickling down the sides of the walls. On the right hand side between the stone fence and the wall is a pool of water that has some dead bugs and stuff in it.

The speciality drink in the cave bar is dongdongju, homemade rice wine that is very similar to makkoli. It's the white liquid in the bowl there. As with makkoli, it tastes quite sweet and seems pretty mild until you stand up and try to navigate somewhere. Of all the alcohol in Korea, this stuff requires the most caution.

Who's that meat-head with a gun? Well, it's me of course. A couple of weeks ago we went to a shooting range down near the beach. The price was around $40 for ten bullets, so I chose a 9mm Beretta because it was cheapest. They also had Desert Eagles, Magnums and a Scorpion sub-machine gun for hire. I'm not particularly gun-crazy, but I think that you should try everything at least once in your life. Except things like suicide, cannibalism, reiki, etc.

In the lounge you can see everything on CCTV. The guns are really loud and had much more recoil than I expected.

Here are some of the more hilarious targets you can choose to fire at. Jordan chose the one on the left and managed to shoot the monkey-man in the eye, as well as the hostage. I'm not sure what the scenario is supposed to be for the poster on the right though. Kill or be killed, it's a dangerous world. I'm surprised they didn't have any 'terrorists'.

We recently realised that there's a ten pin bowling alley right near our house. The computer system is a bit old and you can't enter your name on the screen, but it's cheap and fun. Also, when the game's finished you can continue playing for free until the attendants tell you to stop. In this photo, Johnny-boy Ngo (my flatmate) is pretending to throw a ball at another guy we call 'Johnny blonde'. There are a lot of Johns in Korea, so we have to give them different nicknames. At Dongnae branch there is a Korean John that we call John-Actually (because he has a habit of using the word 'actually' to start every sentence) and at our branch we have a John that we refer to as Johnny Diamond. If you're called John and you're coming to Korea, think about choosing a nickname for yourself.

In some of the busier subway stations in Korea you can find ticket outlets for the movies like this one. This way you can figure out what you want to watch and get the tickets before reaching the cinema.

Here are some of my co-workers reading on the subway as they like to do. From the left is Nicole from New York, then Michelle from Ireland and Jordan from Canada. I haven't read a fiction novel since high school, partly because I'm usually busy and partly because I find Wikipedia much more interesting.

And here are the other two teachers that I work with, John and Logan from Philadelphia. At the U2 bar in Haeundae, when there's no band on stage apparently foreigners are allowed up to pretend they're rockstars for a fleeting moment. Well, no one complained anyway.

My students these days are usually pretty good. After teaching here for over a year, I've come to learn a few tricks of the trade and the job gets easier. When the students misbehave in class I make them write out lines like these during their breaktime. These two were written by some naughty elementary schoolers who were noisy and forgot their homework. You can click the photo to enlarge the text.

Last blog post we saw an intestine dish called makchang. In my quest for more intestinal knowledge here in Korea, I recently stumbled across a new kind of intestine called yang-gopchang, which is larger and comes from a cow instead of a pig. It's slightly pricier and slightly chewier. Restaurants in the Hwamyeong area of Busan specialize in this particular variety.

And here's Emily and Miya from the Hwamyeong branch. They're particularly happy in this photo due to the delightful anticipation of consuming aforementioned intestines.

Last weekend we went up to Seoul for the GOA'L christmas party which included a nice dinner and lots of merriment. Unfortunately I managed to leave my bag there and Heather's sister is going to send the contents down sometime. In the bag was my camera and MP3 player, so this blog post is missing a few of photos (I was lucky enough to put the memory stick for these photos in my jacket pocket). But that also means I missed out on taking some shots of Eric and Maria who came down from Seoul this weekend to visit. C'est la vie.

Hopefully it will arrive soon and blogging may continue.

Seeya!