The Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010

Day 4, Friday. I wake in the night with a fever and sleepily try to calculate how much of Owen’s kiddie Tylenol will make an adult dose. Several teaspoons of grape-flavored syrup later, I stop shivering and fall asleep. Luckily, I feel fine in the morning, though a little annoyed when Eric tells me he had regular acetaminophen in his bag the whole time. Jun takes us to the Tianjin Museum, whose major exhibit concerns the history of the city. Tianjin was a center of colonial power in the early twentieth century, which made its political and economic history quite remarkable. I wish I could give more details, but since I mainly spent the visit trying to keep Owen under some kind of minimal control as he careened around the halls, I didn’t get to read much of the signage. What I did see was amusingly heavy-handed in tone (though unusually correct in its English): “The courageous people of Tianjin fought a mighty and tragic battle to resist the imperialist aggressors,” and so on. Or later, in the exhibit on the Communist era: “Secretary Blah of the 7^th Congress of the 2^nd Plenary, under appointment by Chairman Mao, correctly applied administrative policies to correctly solve Tianjin’s municipal challenges” (yes, “correctly” appeared twice in the same sentence). I also learned that the Chinese name for World War II is the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Somewhat to my surprise, Jun is openly cynical about the propagandistic tone of the interpretive signs. In addition to the historical exhibit, there is also a nice array of art, some quite old: calligraphy, painting, sculpture, porcelain and the like, unfortunately with very little English captioning so I am mostly reduced to admiring the aesthetics only, without context.

For lunch Jun takes us to what looks to be the flagship restaurant for a famous dumpling chain called Gouboli. The name means something like “Dog is too busy.” Apparently when the place got started about 150 years ago, it soon became so popular that people started joking about the owner’s terrible customer service (as in “That dog, he’s too busy to serve us properly”) and it stuck as a name. Sort of like if The Varsity in Atlanta actually got renamed “Whaddya have?” However, the place is no longer famed for its rudeness, and lunch is spectacular, with dumplings prepared tableside, followed by a singer playing some kind of castanets and singing, Jun says, about the history of the restaurant. At the cook’s invitation, Eric attempts to make one of the trademark 19-crimp dumplings, which is even more difficult than it sounds (he terms the result “The Dumpling of Shame”). Owen completely digs the singing, but the only thing he will eat is a sort of candy bar that tastes like a churro might if you kept cooking it until it was solid crunchiness all the way through. Again, the waitresses make an enormous fuss over him, presenting him with a stuffed toy pig from the gift shop and giggling with glee when the question “How old are you?” elicits the response, “I two!”

After lunch it is time for our drive to Beijing. The same driver who brought us from the airport on Wednesday takes us back. The sky grows increasingly yellow as we approach the city. There are literally miles upon miles of high-rises, enormous complexes of towers that look like they could house the whole population of Dundee. Suburb is certainly the wrong word for it; banlieu is closer but the working-class dinginess of that term is not reflected in these rather obviously new developments. The traffic on the ring road would be terrifying if we were moving faster than 15 mph, and is still alarming even at this low speed. Our driver is the king of aggressive slow-motion merging. There are car dealerships lining the highway – Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Honda – and we pass a Wal-Mart and an IKEA. There are billboards everywhere, many for vacation homes. It is, frankly, as capitalist-looking a place as I have ever seen.

Eventually, the driver points to the right and says “O-lym-pi-co!” And there across the street is the “bird’s-nest” stadium that you will vaguely recall from the 2008 Olympics. From there it is only a few more minutes to our hotel, which turns out to be a Best Western (again, we have no idea where we are going until we get there). It looks a bit dated from the outside, particularly the huge neon letters spelling out “Princess Restaurant” across the top floor, but when we get inside, the place is opulent and spanking new. Oversized revolving doors with large floral arrangements sandwiched between the panels lead to one of the most exuberantly designed lobbies I have ever seen. Stripes of maroon, gray, and ecru marble run across the floor and up the wall, to be swallowed by a curving, swooping bank of pin lights behind the check-in desk that arches up to become the ceiling. The counters are all made of some silver metal and shaped like lava flows that froze midstream in teardrop shapes. One of them holds live goldfish. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it outside of Las Vegas. Thankfully, our suite is done up in a more subdued fashion, with soft beige textured walls and cherry wood accents. Photos from the Olympics hang on the walls. It is clearly brand new and as posh as any place I can remember staying. Both the living room and the bedrom have flat-screen TVs; the main bathroom includes an oversized soaking tub and a separate shower with one of those shower nozzles the size of a dinner plate; and so forth. There are also two different in-hotel massage services advertised. One depicts an athletic white chick in yoga clothes being stretched around by a pudgy-faced middle-aged woman. The other shows a young Chinese woman pouting at the camera, back arched, wearing something that looks like she’s auditioning for The Flintstones: Stripper Edition. The ad copy reads [all typos verbatim]: “we have so many beautiful and young girls, they are very sweet , cheerful ,bright and from different citys . you and choose any kind of girls as you like,they will give you honestly serveice,justa call for a service…” Uh-huh.

Our friend and host Guangsho meets us for dinner around six. He confirms our guess about the contrast between the hotel’s exterior and interior; it opened in 1980 but was refurbished and reopened in 2007. The guest services book mentions a Western restaurant in the lobby, and since we think it is about time Owen ate a full meal, we suggest that. On inspection, however, it turns out that the book is a little out of date, and the restaurant has been re-themed as Korean barbecue. The concierge writes down an address for us and calls a taxi. After a few wrong turns that give us a better look at the Olympic park, the driver deposits us at…wait for it… another T.G.I.Friday’s. Well, what the hell. We go in.

It smells good in there. Exactly like, well, a suburban American bar-and-grill chain, which of course is what it is, only in Beijing. Most of the patrons are Westerners. The two guys at the table behind me are discussing the rise of the Tea Party in Republican politics. Eric, Owen, and I all get cheeseburgers and fries. I am somewhat embarrassed by how much I enjoy this meal. Eric makes me feel better by pointing out that we haven’t really had food like this since the beginning of July – Scottish burgers are just not the same! So it’s not three days of Chinese food that I’m reacting to, but several months of British food. Owen is clearly in heaven and announces, “I want ice cream!” as soon as his dinner could reasonably be called finished. He and I split a sundae for dessert. It is blissfully relaxing not to be wheedling the kid to eat. We head back to the hotel extremely full and excited about tomorrow, when we will be visiting the Great Wall.