VacAsian Day Six (Thursday, 8 May, Beijing)

Breakfast today introduced us to fruits you are not likely to find at H-E-B, Harris-Teeter, or ACME, namely, mangosteen and dragonfruit. The former (whose debut album "Greetings from Raspberry Park"... well, it didn't do so well) resembles a small pomegranate on the outside, but the similarities end there. When squeezed open, a gooey white fruit oozes out, reminding one of the appearance of the first parasite in Ridley Scott's "Alien." Once he got past the initial visual assault, Huey tasted the mangosteen and admitted that it is tasty, citrusy and sweet, like tangerine. Dragonfruit, on the other hand, wins the award for "Best Achievement in Dissonance Between Outside and Inside Appearance": the outside is exotic and tropical, the inside looks like a bowl of cold grits with poppy seeds mixed in. (We're not making this up. See the pictures.) The taste? Not unpleasant, but utterly forgettable.

Robin had her first seminar today, so, on behalf of both of us, Huey gave in to the requests and "peer pressure" to create this blog. We ventured out of the hotel for the first time today to visit Tianenmen Square, The Forbidden City, The Drum Tower, and to travel by rickshaw to the Old Hutong section of Beijing.

The tour began in Tianenmen Square, which is the monstrous open area leading to the main gates of The Forbidden City, former home to China's emperors. Tianenmen Square is regarded as the largest public square in the World, and is, of course, the site of the anti-government student demonstrations of the late 1980s that ended in violence and shined a bright light on China's human rights shortcomings (which, ironically, are in the news again).

The Forbidden City was as awe-inspiring and breathtaking as one could imagine, the kind of place one has to see to believe and truly appreciate. Pictures cannot even begin to capture the grandeur, scale, and significance of the site (though, we'll be posting pictures of, among other things, The Forbidden City, shortly).

From The Forbidden City, we visited The Drum Tower, which is just what one might gather from the name: a roughly 20 story tower (requiring a climb of 69 steep, tall steps to the top) from which huge drums are beaten at half-hour intervals in observance of an ancient time-telling ritual.

Climbing down The Drum Tower, we jumped in a rickshaw at the base and rode around The Old Hutong District of Beijing for about a half hour. The word hutong translates to "water well," but it has come to refer to a preserved traditional Chinese neighborhood in which certain age-old structural and social conventions are still observed and celebrated. We visited the home of a family that observes and preserves the hutong tradition, and we were fascinated by the mix of old world and 21st century conveniences, like a cabinet of US and Bollywood DVDs sitting on a floor made of stone tiles hundreds of years old.

Dinner that night also found us stepping outside of the norm. We joined a group of Robin's classmates, led by a Chinese native, at a Shanghai-style Chinese restaurant called Shanghai Shi Ku Men. We were escorted by the hostess down a set of stairs to a maze of hallways that lead to our private dining room, which featured a huge round table set for 10 with a glass "lazy Susan," a separate sitting area, a private restroom, and two dedicated servers. Robin's classmate ordered for us in Chinese, and the seven of us indulged in an impressive variety of appetizers and entrees, family-style.

We walked back to the hotel from the restaurant, passing through the "food market" section of Beijing. Cart after cart of vendors offered everything from deep-fried squid, snails, sea horses, and scorpions to candied apples and strawberries. The smells wafting by us ranged from "I want that!" to "What died?" and the din of the vendors trying to get us to buy their grub was almost deafening.

We also stopped in at the Beijing 2008 Olympics store in the Wangfujing Shopping District adjacent to our hotel. We picked up a few things, so some of you reading this "may already be a winner" of some pretty cool 2008 Olympics stuff.