one world, one dream (part 2)

So we head out into the Beijing streets, which are deluged with torrents of not just pedestrians but every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable - cars, buses, rickshaws, bicycles, tricycles, cycles with strange little cabins attached to their backs for holding passengers and/or massive piles of recyclables, motorcycles, motorcycles with strange little cabins for the same purposes, etc., etc. Think Road Warrior set in a crumbling urban wasteland. We dodge the traffic somehow, with our guidebook in hand, looking for a highly recommended vegetarian restaurant that should be just a block away. We can't find it. We walk back and forth along the block, and though we find the exact street number, the restaurant is nowhere to be seen. Finally we ask an official-looking dude standing by the door, and show him the Chinese characters for the eatery's name in the book. He shakes his head, refers us to the English-speaking receptionist inside the building; she explains that the restaurant closed down. We go off to find another recommended restaurant, which apparently suffered the same fate, judging from the lot of dirt and rubble at the corner where it should have been.

Around that corner, we see a long line of lantern-lit food stalls (we later learn it is the Night Market), and are drawn to take a look, hoping to find some sustenance. What we find instead are shouting salesmen hawking pretty much every sort anything on a stick you could possibly imagine: from marinated beef to shrimp to whole squids to, uh, scorpions, seahorses, cicadas, silkworms, centipedes, and snake! Maya and I walk the seemingly endless line of insane kabobs, jaws on the ground, as the vendors scream "Snake! You like!" "Worm, very good!" and grin at us invitingly/ominously. We (wisely I think) duck into an actual restaurant (where we see the turtle soup mentioned in my last post) and order some not-completely-ridiculous (though not particularly good) food.

Bellies full, we head off to look for an internet cafe, where we can hopefully get in touch with our friend Fish. Our guidebook, which so far has not served us well, claims that there's one at the southeast corner of Tiennamen Square. So we make a long but rather amazing walk along the moat around the Forbidden City...at night...in near total darkness...with the pagoda towers silhouetted against the moonlight.

When we finally make it to the north end of the Square, we find massive crowds of tourists and very aggressive locals who seem to pop randomly out of the throng, trying to get us to buy everything from postcards to enormous kites. We are also accosted by a very cute couple of Chinese girls who ask us if we are tourists and where we are from. They claim to also be tourists, and we are unwittingly sucked into a seemingly very innocent conversation about our and their travels. However, Maya notices some shady dudes lurking behind the girls, eyeing us, and we talk politely while she clutches her bag. After a few minutes, one of the girls asks what we are doing right now and if we'd have any interest in going to teahouse and continuing our conversation there; a subtle look of amazement registers on Maya's face and we quickly extract ourselves: "Sorry, but we really have to find this internet cafe and find our friend," we say - which is totally true. As we walk away, Maya explains to me that she had read about a scam exactly like this, where random Chinese young people come up to you and ask you if you are a tourist and if they can practice their English with you; they invite you to a teahouse, where after a few drinks, an exorbitant bill arrives; when you protest, some strongmen appear and basically force you into paying. We are stupified - and oddly thrilled - that we have actually come across the set-up (and fortunately eluded the payoff) of this very scam.

So we walk across the Square, a strange, otherwordly experience considering recent history, and arrive at the corner where the internet cafe should be. It's closed. What the fuck? Our guidebook is from 2005, and we knew Beijing was a fast-developing city, but this was getting ridiculous. On our book's map, I located another internet place that should be along the way back to the dreaded Fangyuan hotel, but again, it was nowhere to be found.

Finally, around 10pm, we retreat to the hotel and discover that there have been, all along, a few computers right in the lobby with internet access that we can use; Maya logs into her email while I go to our room to call Eveline again - she had told me to call her around 9:45 when she would finally be done with work. Turns out she has a cellphone that we can use while we're in the country; I just need to get it from her and she lives a cab-ride away. Maya meanwhile comes back to the room with good news: She's received an email from Fish, he's fine and in Beijing in a swanky-ass luxury hotel, the Waifujing Grand, where we are totally welcome to crash. And once we look on the map, we discover that the place is literally right around the corner.

So we throw all our shit back into our backpacks and trudge to his hotel (which is massive and gorgeous, with doormen and bellhops, a bar in the lobby complete with classical pianist), where Maya meets up with him in his executive suite (the dude is a fucking VP, and, more importantly tonight, a fucking lifesaver), which, rather absurdly, has the room-number 1234, while I catch a cab to Eveline's place. I hand the driver a printout of the address and directions in Chinese that Eveline had emailed to me, and after a few U-turns and confused stops along the side of the street to re-read the directions, he deposits me in front of a practically unlit skyrise apartment complex (the Chinese don't seem to believe in streetlamps). I stumble around between buildings for a while, trying to locate Eveline's, finally take the evevator of what I think is the right structure. When I step out, the hall is basically pitch-black and I have to almost literally put my nose on each door to read the numbers (I find later that there's a Clapper of sorts connected to the lights, and I just wasn't stomping around enough). Finally I get to what I think is hers, and I knock, praying that she - and not some grumpy old martial arts master pissed to find a white stranger outside - will open the door. Praise Buddha, it is her and I stumble in, give her a hug, and flop onto the nearest chair. We quickly catch up, I take the cellphone from her (which should make life a hell of a lot easier over the next month), exchanging it for the cute "Little Boney" plushy skeleton doll we picked up for her in Japan.

We're both completely beat and it's getting late, so after a little while, I bid her goodnight and somehow manage to hail a cab outside of the strange, dark apartment complex; as soon as I step out of the car in front of Fish's luxury hotel, I get propositioned by some snappily dressed Chinese pimp for massages and "sexing women." I thank him for his generous offer but that's about the last thing I need right now - sleep on a clean bed in a room without worms being at the very top of the agenda - and make my exhausted way to Fish's suite. There Maya and I catch up with the rich bastard (who we love - even more so now) - turns out he was basically unharmed by the typhoon, though it did ruin some of his sightseeing plans. We have a few beers, a few laughs, get a cot for Fish to sleep on (we don't love him enough to snuggle up with him through the night), and Maya and I finally pass the fuck out at in what felt like the softest bed in the world (but actually wasn't, because Chinese seem to hate soft beds even more than streetlamps) around 1:30 in the morning.

It was a long, grueling day - maybe the most insane 13 hours Maya and I have ever gotten through together - but all's well that ends well, and thank god (or Buddha) for good friends far from home.