We are staying at a hostel which is conveniently situated, clean and has a bar and restaurant. When I wake up, I go to the bar to smoke a cigarette and then go to the communal bathroom to brush my teeth. I find myself dozily trying to light my toothbrush.
Today we visit the Temple of Heaven, a Taoist temple built in the 15th century around the same time as the Forbidden City and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has vast grounds and is a popular communal park, although entrance is not free, at least not for tourists. There are a number of groups of people performing strange routines, dances, exercises and games. There are also some impressive buskers and the temple near the entrance is surrounded by lines of people.
However, the main attraction for me is the long walk along the centre of the grounds featuring the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, a magnificent triple-gabled circular building, 36m in diameter and 38m tall, built on three levels of marble stone base, where the Chinese Emperors prayed for good harvests. The building is completely wooden, with no nails. Also, here is the Imperial Vault of Heaven, a smaller version of the above, as well the Circular Mound Alter, an empty circular platform built on three levels of carved marble stone.
Laurie and I stop at a Pizza Hut for a pizza, although Laurie being on a western food fast, I am the only one to eat. It’s a nice base, but the pepperoni has a strange taste. It’s a shame as it could have been my best pizza on the trip yet. At more than £10 (114 Yuan) for the pizza, some garlic bread and a salad, it is by far the most expensive meal I have had in China, and probably in the whole of Asia so far.
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| Ice rink in a shopping mall |
It’s Meg and Dave’s leaving do tonight and I have to go out to buy some fancy dress. However, in a shopping mall near the hostel I am greeted by a friendly man who chats to me for a while before revealing that he is a professor of art, and he has an art exhibition on the top floor. I go along with him, and I must admit I find the art quite beautiful, most of it being of colourful scenery and traditionally Chinese architecture. I had been meaning to buy Meg and Dave some leaving presents, so I bought some without being sure whether they would like it. They are both recent graduates of Architecture, but are modernists (or is it post-post-modernist), especially Meg. In the end I buy them some books and end up sending the art home as a Christmas present to my artist cousin.
There are English language book shops in Beijing, and some of the books I find are surprising, considering the vandalistic censorship by the border guards we experienced when we entered China. For Meg, I buy Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Meg having read and made countless notes in her copy of Fountainhead earlier in the trip. I suppose Ayn Rand’s extremely anti-bureaucracy capitalistic philosophy could also be interpreted as hard core belief in a natural elitism, although I am still not sure this quite fits in with the Chinese model of government. I also find Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as well as history of philosophy which turns out to have been written by an American leftist in the 1920s which I find comically outdated, so much so that it could have been a satire of philosophers and historical philosophy. Sorry for the book report.
Having no idea what I was looking for as a fancy dress costume and not wanting to be too unoriginal, I hit upon the idea of dressing as Meg. This will require me to ‘borrow’ a pair of blue tights she used to wear a lot in warmer climes. It will also require me to get a haircut, as mine is far too long to get into her customary spiky style. When I find a hairdressers, it is plush looking one to which I have to go up an elevator into what looks like floors of offices above the shops on the street below. As is the case in the UK, I find that hairdressing is a popular profession of choice for the effeminate / stylish male. I signal to them that I do not want them to wash my hair, but I still find myself paying 80 Yuan for the haircut. I have found the rest of China to be incredibly inexpensive, but it would not surprise me if the general cost of living in Beijing reaches western levels within a few years.
When I get back to hostel, I ask John and Tracy to help me acquire Meg’s tights, as they are rooming with Meg and Dave here. Tracy leads me to the room and I let her rifle through Meg’s bag as I didn’t want to risk getting caught doing something quite intrusive....
I have written a song in homage to the occasion entitled ‘The Ballad of MegaDave’ and go back to my room to practice it and get changed. Clothed up in the tights, I go down the hall to Rhi’s room, who has become my make-up woman when the occasion, um, demands it. She also helps me to do my hair, but when I eventually emerge in the bar where the party has already started, Meg tells me that I look like Robert Smith. She only cottons on to what I was attempting when she spots the tights.
I do the song as a surprise after we had a meal in the bar (sample line: ‘She can be quite bouncy, just like a tigerrette, you can tell she’s really drunk when she smokes a cigarette’).
The atmosphere of the party is far from spontaneous, but ginger Caz seems to be having fun. However, things get going when some of us decide to go to a club. I am not sure what the passengers on the Beijing underground system thought of a bunch of gang wrestling westerners dressed as, amongst other things, a panda (Louise), a wolf (Caz), some sort of Avatar or somesuch (Rhi), a Grinch (Joost), Chairman Mao (Belgian Sam), a brown bear (Dave), Peter Pan (Meg), and, er, Meg (me).
Whatever it is, it’s nothing compared to patrons of the club we go to. The one we choose is full of what in England would be dismissed as vulgar ostentation, with people gathered around the bar drinking their hugely expensive cocktails (£5 being hugely expensive in China), all the men dressed in sharp black suits, people getting huge racks of some pork or beef with champagne delivered to private booths at the top of the club. The women there were in their sparkly best. At home you might say they looked like the more expensive brand of prostitute, and come to think of it, maybe they were. I get told later that this is a known hang out for the offspring of high ranking government officials and billionaire businessmen. None of them are dressed as Chairman Mao though. Nor as a Grinch. Nor as Peter Pan. Nor as Meg.
The club is shaped like a circular arena, with the dancefloor and a small stage at the bottom. It emerges that they have some professional dancers who come onto the stage periodically to provide some spectacle. The dancers are westerner dressed in glitzy ballroom style dress. The lead male is black American, I think, and the lead female is from Leeds. This leads me to the conclusion that, despite looking like a bunch of idiots, we as westerners must be cool. In fact, if we had gone back the next night, I am sure that there would have been loads of people dressed as Peter Pan. And as a Grinch. And as Meg. Not Chairman Mao though.
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| a Leeds lass |
Actually I was quickly disavowed of this notion as, when the dancers prepare to make their entrance, those of us dancing on the stage are swept violently off by bulky hands and arms of the big burly bouncers without so much as a whisper of warning. I immediately decide that I have to get out of this garish place, but then realise that I have no recollection of how to get back to the hostel and don’t have the confidence to try communicating my destination to a taxi driver. Not at this time of night and not in this state anyway.
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