Golfing Through China: Beijing

When I originally made my itinerary for this trip, I thought of starting in Beijing and ending in Shanghai, but since my family could only come to meet up with me for the first week in August and I felt that my family would enjoy Beijing more, I flipped my itinerary. Now that I've had my time in Beijing, I'm extremely happy to have made this switch. Having spent maybe one month here last year while studying abroad, I've grown to love this city. Even though last year I quickly developed a Beijing cough because of the pollution, and the clear days are few and far between, I came to love the history, sites, restaurants and shopping. The people here are also great, and since I learned Chinese from a textbook out of Beijing University, it was nice to speak the dialect that locals understood. A few times on this trip, after having a rough day in some other Chinese city I would just think about returning to Beijing and could not wait until I could return to some of my favorite places from last year. It has been an amazing finale to this trip.

We landed in Beijing during a rainstorm, which is actually a good thing in Beijing because it usually clears up the air and makes way for the rare clear days. Apparently the weather in Beijing the past few weeks has been really bad, but the day after we arrived we had two straight days of clear skies because of the rain. We had dinner the first night at SALT, a contemporary Western restaurant and one of my favorite restaurants in Beijing. Then, the next morning we started by heading to Tiananmen Square and then entered the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City, along with the Great Wall are probably the two "musts" for any visit to Beijing, and when I went to the Forbidden City last year it was extremely overcast so it was great to go and have clear skies. The Forbidden City, the residence of many Chinese emperors, is a huge compound. It's completely walled-in and is 900 meters by 750 meters. There are over 8,700 rooms and the whole complex took over 12 years to complete. The Forbidden City is pretty intimidating to try to undertake all in one visit, so we walked through the main halls and veered off every now and then to some of the rooms where the concubines lived and some less significant rooms. After the Forbidden City we walked up the hill in Jingshan Park where one can view all of the Forbidden City and then really get a sense of the scale of the palace. After the Forbidden City we went to an alleyway called Nanluogu Xiang, which has some really cool bars, cafes and shops. We stopped in at one of my favorite stores, Plastered, which sells t-shirts with screen-printed Chinese food stamps, product labels, and some tongue-in-cheek designs.

On our second day in Beijing, after finishing our round of golf we headed to the Temple of Heaven, which is where the emperor, who was the son of Heaven, reported to Heaven. He asked for blessings of plentiful harvests and for there to be peace in the kingdom. All of this was very important because when things did go wrong (famine, uprisings, etc.) it meant that the emperor had lost Heaven's mandate and his power and position could then be questioned. Besides the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest and the Imperial Vault of Heaven, there is also the Round Altar, which is where the emperor communicated with Heaven. There's one raised stone slab in the center of the altar that every Chinese person tries to have a moment to stand on or just touch a foot to. I stood there for maybe two seconds (enough time to get a picture) before the next person nudged me off, but it's pretty cool to stand where the Chinese used to think the center of the universe was.

The next day we spent mainly at the Summer Palace, which was the royal summer retreat. The Summer Palace is built around Kunming Lake, which takes up 75 percent of the space. The Summer Palace was extremely crowded, so it was hard to find any peaceful moments, but the grounds are so beautiful that it doesn't really matter. We climbed up to some of the main buildings which are built into the mountains, then did a loop around the outside of the lake and just kind of wandered around the gardens.

The following day we started at Panjiayuan, or the dirt market, which is by far Beijing's largest "antique" market. Most of the stuff is fake, but I wasn't really looking for any antiques so I didn't mind. The market has over 3,000 stalls that sell calligraphy, jade, jewelry, ancient coins, vases, handicrafts and artwork. I only really wanted one thing, and that was a piece of calligraphy that would say "2010 summer golf in China" with all of the cities that I visited in Chinese. I was able to find the same calligrapher who I bought a Tang Dynasty poem from last year and he agreed to write it for me. He screwed up the spacing once and redid it, but the finished product looked amazing. I had him use all traditional characters and I'm really happy with it. We then went to 798, which is an old heavy machinery factory zone that has been converted to art galleries. We walked around there for a while before heading off for dinner.

Today I split up from my family and went off alone to do a few things I didn't get a chance to do last year. I started off by doing a loop around Beihai Park, which is a really nice park that surrounds a lake. There's a small island on the lake, Qionghua Dao (Jade Island), which has the White Dagoba - Beihai's most famous site. Before climbing up the White Dagoba I went up to a small bell tower on the island and hit the bell with a long wooden pole three times, which is supposed to bring safety to that person for one year. Then I went to the White Dagoba, which was built to honor a visiting Dalai Lama. I then went to the Five Dragon Pavilions, which are out in the water and are supposed to form the shape of a dragon, and finally visited the Little Western Heaven, a temple in the park. Unfortunately the weather in Beijing has turned back into thick smog so the park wasn't as nice as it is on a clear day. I then went back to UIBE, where I studied last year, to see any changes to the neighborhood and the campus. The entrance we always went through was closed because they're constructing a new building right inside of it, but I went in the other way, did a tour of campus and then went to the restaurant I ate at almost every day and had some tomatoes and eggs.

Tomorrow I'm playing my last round in China at a course right outside Beijing, and then the next day I'm back to New York.