We visited the Beijing zoo today. The very first thing we did was visit the Pandas. I’ve seen plenty of pandas in pictures but it is so much different to see them in person. The panda exhibit was very crowded and there was a lot of pushing and shoving to get to the front. Still not used to the closeness, I was worried the rest of the day would continue to be a struggle to see the animals. However, once we got outside the panda exhibit, it was much less crowded.
The rest of the zoo was very much like any zoo I’ve been to in America, except they had animals like raccoons and squirrels on display. Thinking about the strangeness associated with that, I began to realize why it is so interesting for some Chinese people to see westerners. I thought about why we find it so interesting to look at tigers or rhinoceroses; I believe it is because we don’t get to see them in person. It is neat to be so close to something that you’ve only seen in pictures. It sounds strange to compare our group to the animal exhibits in the zoo, but I kind of feel like that may be how we are viewed by Chinese tourists to Beijing. “Let’s get a picture with the zebra!” or “Let’s get a picture with the blond girl!” It can be kind of neat to be such a celebrity.
In the afternoon we went shopping at a wholesale market. I’ve never been in a shopping center quite like this one. It was incredibly crowded, and very intimidating, but we managed to find a few things we were interested in. The main challenge we faced at the wholesale market was bartering. At first we thought the language barrier would be a detriment, but soon came to find it to be an advantage. It allowed Karen and I to communicate with each other about what we thought we should pay so that the vendor could not understand. Also, if the vendor tried to tell us something about our price being too low, we could just shake our heads and say we didn’t understand. I recognize that, because we are clearly westerners, we are probably not getting as good of a deal as people in China get, since the vendors know we will be willing to pay a higher price. But I also recognize that we are still getting an extremely good deal compared to what we would pay in the United States.
Since we accidentally slept through dinner last night, tonight was the first night Karen and I had to order dinner on our own. We had been planning on going to the noodle place that Ruby, our guide from Tsinghua University, had pointed out on our second dinner. However, when we got to the restaurant and looked at the menu, we saw that there weren’t any noodle dishes on any of the pictures in the menu out front. So Karen and I decided to go to another place. The place we decided on had a few pictures of food displayed on the outside of the store and they looked appetizing. They handed us the menu, which had English translations, but we didn’t understand what kind of food we were ordering. The menu just had a bunch of lists, some were just meats, and some were vegetables. I looked around and noticed that on every other table there was a large bowl with all kinds of vegetables and meats in it. We figured that we were supposed to pick some of the foods off the lists and combine them into a stir fry type meal. The waiter came up and the first thing we ordered was our drinks, which went smoothly. Then we attempted to figure out how to order. The waiter took us to the first page and pointed out a scale for spicyness, we choose just regular “spicy.” We then pointed to something called meatballs, which didn’t look like meatballs at all. The waiter shook his head and then turned the page to a list of meats. We choose some sort of duck meat then turned the page and picked cucumber and asparagus to go with it. Thinking we had succeeded, we closed the menu, but the waiter opened it up again and pointed to another page. This time we just picked the first thing on the list, rice. Having successfully ordered, we realized how expensive our meal was going to be, about 60 yuan, usually meals are much less expensive. We began to feel uncomfortable for coming to a place with food we weren’t even sure we would like, at expensive prices, but we were consoled in the fact that 30 yuan is still only about 5 US dollars.
About ten minutes later our food was brought out. We were right, a large bowl with duck meat, cucumbers, asparagus and hot red peppers. Better yet, we liked the food. It had the characteristic Chinese food taste and was also very spicy. So in the end, dinner turned out to be a very rewarding experience.