Yesterday was an utterly lovely day.
It began with rain, lots of it, as the bus took us to the hutong area. Wasn’t looking promising for a rickshaw ride. When we got near to our destination, we idled by the curb waiting for another bus to catch up and the rain to stop. Grace pointed out a nearby Starbucks and grinned wickedly when the coffee drinkers moaned.
Coffee! The restaurants we dine at don’t serve it. It doesn’t appear to be available in the supermarket down the street, unless instant Nescafe counts. (And it’s getting pretty close to counting.) A few of us considered making a break for it, but we behaved and waited like good children for our fellow tour groupies to show up.
As soon as they did, the rain let up, and we paraded past workers waiting for buses into a long alley lined with several dozen bicycle rickshaws. Friendly drivers invited us to board, two to a vehicle. They practiced their hellos, we practiced our ni haos and xie-xies. Then one by one, the rickshaw operators hauled their rigs out of the lineup and we began our leisurely tour.
The hutong alleys are very narrow and uniformly gray, with touches of color from potted flowers, the odd climbing vine, and banks of weeds growing out of the roofs. Trees rising from unseen courtyards provide shade. There is only room for the rickshaws to travel single-file. It’s a comforting, rather than a claustrophobic closeness. Your neighbor’s doorstep is only a few feet from your own. But before this description veers too far toward the lyrical, let me assert that, while the place surely has charm, it is also ramshackle and in some places downright squalid. Most of these neighborhoods have been bulldozed to make room for modern apartment buildings. But enough still remain to house one million people, mostly older folk, forming a kind of retirement community.
We were due at the Wu residence, a hutong household in the traditional style of rooms laid out in a square around a courtyard. Mr. Wu, a retiree who makes money opening his home to tourists and film companies, spoke to our group through a translator about his family and his home, while his daughter (or granddaughter) served us tea. He explained the layout of the rooms as they were traditionally used: the North room was for parents and grandparents, as it was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The East room was for the boys of the family, the West for the girls. The South room was smaller than the rest, and therefore for the household servants. The translator asked us if we could guess why boys had the East room and girls the West, and then explained that in “old China” boys were the prized sex for whom the (family) sun rose.
After saying our thanks and goodbyes to Mr. Wu, we boarded our rickshaws again and left the neighborhood. On the way out. we passed a small shop that made us smile: Hutong Pizza.
Afterward, we climbed 69 steps to the top of the Drum Tower. After the previous day’s climb, the 69 steps were a piece of cake.
At lunch, our friend Brenda asked us if we’d like to skip the scheduled visit to LuiliChang Street in favor of accompanying her to meet a friend of a friend at Jingshan Park. The man we were to meet is an English teacher at Beijing University. I’ll leave it to Brenda to write more about him, but I will say he is a charming, 40ish Beijinger who showed up with his delightful son, and we had a fine chat about our visit to Beijing, and his stay in New Haven on a Fulbright scholarship.
Getting to the park by taxi turned out to be very easy. Brenda had had one of the tour guides write the destination in Mandarin, which she showed to the driver, and it was only a few minutes from the restaurant, so the fare was quite cheap. Getting around by taxi seems pretty inexpensive in general in Beijing, and now that that ice has been broken, I hope we do it again. It’s a relief to get away from the tour bus for a few hours.
The climb to the top of the hill of Jingshan Park was arduous in the heat, and given our sore muscles, a bit of a trial. But once there we were rewarded with a stunning view of the Forbidden City. We stayed awhile, chatting with our new Beijing friend and his son and marveling at the view.
Then back to the hotel for a rest before the solo concert.
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