On Monday we were not particularly active. My illness was under control but Shining girl had been sick in the night and it was her turn to sleep all day. I went to the bank and spent a long time in the business of persuading them to give me the money I had waited for so long. That’s a saga in itself.
Afterwards I walked down to the Xiushui market and ran the gauntlet of insistent vendors to buy a nice Columbia lightweight shirt, or reasonable facsimile thereof. I went back to the hostel to check on SG then went looking for somewhere to buy medicine. My first stop was at the Pacific Centre, a nearby department store, and to my surprise I discovered a supermarket as well. This is a place I went to numerous times during my previous visit to Beijing but had never discovered that in the basement at the left-hand area there is a supermarket that caters well to Western tastes. I bought yoghurt, good bread, fruit, Evian Water…. And carried it all back to SG, who proceeded to devour a long French loaf.
The next day we went to The Forbidden City. We entered from the back and walked through to Tian an Men. It was crowded with bus loads of people and the day was hot. Many of the buildings were shrouded under cloth for restoration and I had the thought that we should have been charged only half price as we could only see half of it. I took some photos but my main subject was my lovely daughter. Somehow the fast buck side of Beijing clouded my experience of Beijing this time and I couldn’t make my self shake the mood off enough to enjoy what could be seen. SG does not know enough history yet to fully appreciate the Palace but enjoyed it nevertheless. Weather and the tide of people who flooded Zi Jin Cheng took the edge off its beauty and left us without that sense of awe I had in winter, when fewer people were around.
Knowing what really interested her I suggested we could go to another market, Hong Qiao, so we took a cab there. She was in her element and we made a good deal on an iPod. A nice young fellow let us bargain him down but he didn’t have the colour SG wanted. He would get a messenger to bring it in ten minutes he told us. More than half an hour later we were still waiting and SG went off to see if she could get what she wanted at another stall. She came back and said she had succeeded and the stallholder was still saying ten minutes. I gave him five minutes to have it. Five minutes later we went and bought it from the other shop.
We had heard from other travellers that both the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven were covered in scaffolding and SG was dying to go back to Xiushui Market, so we decided that the heat was too much for us and we would shop instead of seeing the sights. Our first stop was for me. I wanted to go to the Foreign Language Bookstore and buy some more Chinese language learning materials so we went off to Wangfujing Street and I bought more materials for studying Chinese and had them mailed to Wuhan.
Then we went for a shopping marathon to Xiushui Silk Street. I participated and found a few more nice things for my home and as presents to be taken back to Australia. SG bought more clothes. She had become more aware of what kind of designs would suit her. We also bought her another small suitcase so she could get her Chinese treasures and the gifts we had both bought for family back to Australia. We dropped our shopping bags at the hostel before going out again.
As we walked around the outside of the Zhaolong Hotel building from our hostel we had what was for me perhaps the most thrilling moment of our trip. We saw a small animal on a piece of lawn. I had caught a glimpse of something running quickly across my path and into some shrubbery on my winter visit but couldn’t identify it. This time it stopped and I looked at it and it looked at me. It was a small red coated animal like a weasel, stoat, ferret, or mink or marten – that family anyway. It was living and foraging at the base of a five-star hotel in the centre of Beijing. Amazing!
We took a cab to The Big Easy, the New Orleans restaurant and live jazz venue I discovered before. It was great again and a big black American woman sang while a Chinese jazzman identifiable by a little moustache and tiny goatee played the piano very well. The Big Easy provides drawing paper as a tablecloth and wax crayons to draw with so we had fun drawing pictures of each other and playing squiggle.