As I mentioned in the previous post, we stayed with Yanmei’s niece, Chingching. Sunday night Chingching and her husband took us out for Beijing style hotpot.
I should have taken a picture when all the meat was on the table but I forgot. I could tell the restaurant was good because the place was huge, but it was still crowded. Very good meal.
On Monday, first we visited Yanmei’s parents and they served us a feast for lunch.
You can see where I fumbled with my chopsticks and dropped some zucchini on the table.
After that nice visit we went to Yanmei’s big sister’s (Chingching’s Mom) place. They were also looking after Chingching’s son while she was at work. That makes Yanmei a great aunt, and me a great uncle I guess.
Yanmei’s big sister with her grandson. We had another feast for dinner.
After that we went to visit Yanmei’s younger sister. Since China ended the one child policy in 2016, she decided to have another baby, and they had boy. We only stayed a short time because they were about to have dinner and they had guests.
We made it to Beijing successfully, although Yanmei now has a cold that started in Kunming. Strangely, it is different than what I had. I thought she would catch what I had, but she resisted that and somehow caught something else. She has a cough and sore throat, whereas I had sneezing and sinus congestion. We are staying at her niece’s apartment.
Yanmei was reluctant to come to Beijing because it is “too cold.” But I’ve been checking the Beijing weather on my phone and most days it has been 55-60F (13-15C), not hot or warm like most places on this trip, but also not winter weather. I convinced her it wouldn’t be too bad, and as a compromise on the last day in Kunming we went shopping for a winter jacket for her.
We arrived late Friday afternoon and it was pretty chilly, about 45F. Then Saturday morning I got up and looked out the window and it was snowing, heavily. Good thing she has that winter jacket! Although at least it was warm enough that the snow didn’t accumulate, it just became slush that melted to water later when the snow turned to sleet. Lovely day.
The good news is Yanmei saw her son and he is doing well and looks tall and handsome.
It's actually pretty interesting living in an apartment instead of a hotel. It gives us a feel of what it is really like to live in Beijing. Of course Yanmei already knows this, but for me it is new. Similar to Taiwan the bed is very hard, like a box spring with no mattress. Even Yanmei doesn't like the hard beds anymore. To make it a bit more comfortable we moved the pillows from the couch to the bed.
Left is kitchen, right is bathroom, 2nd right is bedroom
The apartment is pretty nice, I'd estimate about 500 sqft, maybe a bit more. It even has a clothes washer, although no drier, so we hang our clothes everywhere to dry.
Kitchen
The TV has a lot of channels. There are at least three video game channels and two channels that always show games of Go. I've found I can watch NBA playoff games live in the morning (we're 12 hours ahead) but with Chinese announcers. I discovered one channel that plays Hollywood movies undubbed from 6pm to midnight. Since there is no Internet I watch that channel a lot. Finally saw Rocky V, and a pretty good movie called Doubt, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Yanmei recently discovered an English news channel.
Bathroom, washing machine but no dryer
We live in a pretty dense apartment complex. On the first floor outside there are restaurants, convenience stores, phone shops, etc. Since the weather is nice the restaurants set up tables and chairs outside. It always seems pretty active, even at say 9:30pm on a Tuesday night there will be people out drinking and eating on the patios.
The common hallways in the building have sound activated lights. I understand it makes sense to have the lights go off when no one is there, but sound sensors don't seem ideal. When we come back late at night we have to make noise to make the lights come on. Usually it takes stomping our feet loudly.
There is a morning market that sets up across the street every day. Originally Yanmei liked this, but then we found their produce wasn't good quality so we stopped going there. About a block away is a WuMart, which is a lot like Walmart, they sell just about everything (except deodorant). We ended up doing most of our grocery shopping at WuMart.
WuMart or Walmart?
We also bought a rice cooker there. After using it twice it didn't work very well so Yanmei wanted to return it. One of the things Yanmei likes in the US is most companies have a good return policy. In China they generally don't have this, but WuMart had a sign that said you could return within 14 days, so she wanted to return it. We took it back and she ended up in a heated discussion with two people at the customer service desk. BTW, this is a $15 rice cooker, not a big ticket item. Finally she told me they didn't believe it wasn't working and wanted to test it. So they actually got some rice and water and set about cooking a batch of rice! We didn't want to watch rice cook, so Yanmei gave them her phone number, and we left. They called about half an hour later and said it was working fine and said we were using too much water, so they wouldn't accept the return. So we just abandoned it at the store, no refund.
For some reason deodorant isn't common here. I wish Yanmei had told me that, I would have brought extra. She said Chinese don't have that problem, but based on some of the taxi drivers or the crowded subway on a hot afternoon, I have to disagree. 🙂
The nearest subway station is about a mile away. We take the subway almost everywhere we go. Since we don't want to walk a mile we take an unlicensed taxi every time. These are lined up outside the apartments waiting for customers. They are regular cars with a red LED light hanging from the rear view mirror that indicates they are for hire. It costs 10 yuan for a ride to the subway, which is about $1.50, so worth it. Where we are there do not seem to be many licensed taxis. Downtown there are a lot of taxis but they are almost impossible to flag down. They all use smartphone apps like Über. If you don't have the app you are not likely to get a cab. I should also mention all the taxis have seat covers which block the use of seatbelts in the back.
The Beijing subway is very good. It seems less crowded this time, although still busy. Yanmei said the price is more than double what it was 2 years ago, so that may explain it being less crowded. All bags have to be scanned, and some stations have an airport style metal detector with guards with wands. One time we went at rush hour and it was crowded so they just let everyone through without scanning anything, which makes me wonder what the point is. As an aside I feel the same way about airport security. Suddenly at Christmas because it is busy and people are running late we no longer need to remove our shoes, jackets or laptops, and we use the old metal detectors instead of the body scanners. So why do we need all those checks the rest of the year?
Some of the lines have screens in the tunnels that play ads. They must sync the refresh rate of the screen with the movement of the car because the images appear steady while the car is moving.
Subway ad in tunnel while moving
All the stations are announced in Mandarin and English. Amusingly I can understand the Beijing subway announcements better than I can understand the BART or TTC station announcements, which are usually garbled or at much too low volume.
The city is huge. For example it took us two hours and two transfers to visit one of Yanmei's friends who lives on the other side of town. We live near Huilongguan station on Line 13.
Based on purely anecdotal evidence I feel like there may be a real estate bubble here. There is still a lot of construction going on and many of Yanmei's family and friends already own second apartments. I don't know what the prices are like, but when everyone starts buying investment properties it can be a sign of a bubble. Also I think the stock market is in a bubble too. I heard on the aforementioned English news station that the Shanghai stock index is up over 110% in the last 12 months, despite the Chinese economy having its slowest growth in a decade. They also said over 45% of the listed stocks have P/E ratios greater than 100! That is a recipe for trouble, see the dot com bubble. We'll see, maybe everyone is buying properties because they doubled their money in the stock market.
Posted with Blogsy