Beijing Half-Marathon

No, I didn't run it. Only someone completely out of their mind would run for miles along the streets of Beijing.

Luckily, there's one person in the program who fits that description, and his name is Miles Grimshaw (blogger extraordinaire... I guess). You can read his much more personal account of the morning here.

Miles, whether due to his captivating charm or outright bribery techniques (the promise of buying us food), convinced my friend Liz and me to wake up at 6 AM this morning to travel to his race's starting point at Tiananmen Square. As if the 6 AM wake-up call wasn't bad enough, one look outside indicated that it was going to be a gloomy, miserable day. And gloomy it was. The only brightness to be seen amongst the racers were the points of fluorescent yellow that marked the officially distributed tote bags. You can see as we're exiting the subway just how many tote bags were on their way to the starting line:

Early Morning at Tiantan Park

After watching the Chinese do their flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square, Nicole and I grabbed more food and got on the subway for 潘家园, otherwise known as Pānjiāyuán, Beijing's famous flea market. By this point, it's about 6:45 AM. We finally get off the subway and take a 15 minute walk to the gate of the flea market, only to find out that it doesn't open for another hour.

So what do we do? We consult this bus schedule below...

...and choose the one that says 天坛北门. Can you spot it?

Red Flag Over China

This past Tuesday, I got it into my head that I wanted to see the the Chinese flag being raised over Tiananmen Square at dawn. It's actually incredibly important to the Chinese people that they see it at least once, and I figured there was never as good a time as any to witness the occasion than National Week. So I mentioned my plan to my friend Nicole, and the both of us decided to pull an all-nighter and catch the first (5:10 AM) subway from the university out to Tiananmen Square.

The flag is raised at Tiananmen exactly at sunrise every morning, every day of the year. That means 4:30 AM during the peak of summer, and about 7:30 AM for the dead of winter. On Wednesday, October 6th, when we went to see the flag, it was scheduled to go up at 6:15 AM.

So, come 5:15 AM, we were up, alert (ish) and ready to venture out into Beijing. The subway was, predictably, almost totally empty. I was torn between frolicking among the empty cars or laying out on a string of seats to sleep.

Defying Gravity

The day after we got back from Inner Mongolia was not as restful as I thought it was going to be, but I'm not complaining. HBA had organized an excursion for us to go see the famed Chinese acrobats at Chaoyang Theater. It was a great chance to catch up with the rest of our 同学们 tongxuemen (fellow students), as this was the first chance we had to discuss our experiences together. Through talking with my friends I learned that HBA students had the opportunity to do all of the following:

• Learn 功夫 gongfu (KENG FU!!) from actual 功夫师傅 gongfu shifu (keng fu masters) at Shaolin Monastary.
• Watch Russians practice their mindreading skills at said Monastary, which consisted of them staring at each other all day.
• Get VIP trips through the USA Pavilion and the Russia Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
• Hang out at Nanjing Road, Shanghai's version of Times Square, almost every night, and see Shanghai's skyline from the deck of a cruise boat.
• Develop connections with some of Beijing's most wealthy and successful businessmen.
• Meet the locals of a small Chinese village and live their lives for a few days.
• Attend school with the local children of said village, learn that Chinese children must attend morality class.
• ... and then there's my seven-blogs' worth of stuff in Inner Mongolia :)

But I digress. This entry is all about the acrobats.

The Magic Erhu

No matter how I try, I will never do justice to the experience of a Beijing Opera performance with mere words. So I've employed a little AV assistance to try to recreate it as much as possible.

First, a disclaimer. Before watching the videos, I highly suggest putting on earphones if you're in public, or turning the volume down a bit if you're in the privacy of... somewhere private. Beijing Opera is not exactly known for being quiet.

Now, for the performance itself. We actually ended up going to Liyuan Theater, the same theater that I attended with my mom, so I was already pretty familiar with what was going to happen.