Yup, it's still exciting to be here. Even though I didn't get near a stadium all day. There wouldn't have been any point in doing so: the opening ceremonies are tonight, and it seems like everyone's who's in town for the games -- athletes, coaches, friends, fans -- were at the Temple of Heaven this morning. And happily so was I. And so, it seemed, were all the city's hacky sack players, ballroom dancers, tai chi practitioners, poker players and accordionists (yes, there was a coven of them about 200 yards from the East Gate, all playing different tunes at the same time and grinning at one another).

For those who've never been to Beijing, the Temple of Heaven is one of the largest temple complexes in China, created during the Ming Dynasty at the same time as the Forbidden City. And though it's one of the most important historic sights in Beijing, that fact is ignored by most Beijingers, who come here solely for the beautiful park in which it's set. They use the park for every recreational activity imaginable, including many that we in America would only do at our home or in a friend's home or gym, wanting a bit more privacy. So though you'll see exquisitely painted temples (the largest, the Temple of Good Harvest, was built without a single nail!), the real delight here is wandering through the Fellini-esque landscape of people amusing themselves (often in what seems like cinematic slow motion, doing tai chi or a dance that's done with a curved paddle and a ball, which practitioners deftly flip as they slowly carve the space with their arms).



Though I've been to Beijing before, I hadn't made it to the Temple of Heaven, so I can't say for sure, but it felt like some of this action was heightened for the Games. You literally couldn't walk ten feet without seeing a septuagenarian acting like a circus performer and flipping the disc with feathers they use for hacky sack from behind her back and over her head to the next player (often with a crowd of Westerners standing around and applauding); or an oompa band (tuba, other horns, drum) leading a huge crowd of people, each carrying a book of lyrics, in song on a lawn.

I got to the Temple on the subway and learned a universal truth about public transportation: if your look of confusion is extreme enough, someone will stop to help you. (I've been on the other side of this equation in my hometown of New York City, where the subways today are peopled with baffled-looking Europeans, thanks to the weakness of the dollar). Although there's pin ying (basically Chinese words written out not in characters, but in western lettering) on all the platforms and maps down below, the vending machine for tickets was all in characters and stopped me dead in my tracks.

Luckily, a sharp-eyed guard noticed my distress and ran over to grunt me through the process, pointing here, counting the number of stations on the electronic map and finally grabbing the money out of my hand, counting it for me and heading over to a ticket counter to pay (with me padding along behind; I soon learned that all rides are just 2 yuan -- about 25¢). Down on the platform, I found that the pin ying characters the desk clerk at my hotel had written out for me didn't match anything on the map (a common problem with pin ying, which everyone writes differently) and a helpful passerby was able to set me right. I'm proud to say (beaming with pride in fact), that I was able to ride the subway later in the day without one person having to ease me through the process.

I grabbed lunch at a mall in Central Beijing. The restaurant that I'd read about being there was gone (a problem in Beijing, a city changing so rapidly that restaurants often go out of business before the first reviews on them are even printed). So I looked at my options on the food floor (half stands, half sit-down restaurants) and was surprised to see that I had almost no Chinese choices. The Japanese may have lost World War II and their physical hold on (areas of) China, but their culinary influence here is staggering. Of my six options, four were Japanese (including one of those conveyor belt sushi places) and the place I finally picked for its "Chinese-ness" turned out to have devoted half of its menu to Ramen and sushi. Amazing. The rest of the mall, which I toured briefly, seemed to have been airlifted from Beverly Hills -- all marble with massive sculptures hanging between floors, the goods from Max Mara, Armani and their brethren.

For the remaining afternoon hours, I decided to explore the Beijing arts scene and so headed over to the former weapons factory that's been transformed (along with the surrounding area) into an enclave of hip galleries. Full disclosure: I get a bit bored by most (but not all) non-representational art. I tend to find abstract art yawn inducing, and art that comments on what art's supposed to be about just plain annoying (okay, you've created a huge ball of twine and placed it in a gallery, bully for you!). There was little of that tripe in the art galleries here, in fact, I can't remember when the last time was I laughed out loud this often in an arts setting. With the fodder of the not-so-distant Cultural Revolution (along with the contradictions of modern Chinese life), Chinese artists have created pieces that are surreal, sardonic, beautifully executed (and often drenched in red), and sometimes, moving.

Mao's face appears often, usually fractured or looming, almost like the sun over a landscape. In a series of sculptures were female Chinese soldiers in ballet shoes dancing with Marilyn-Monroe-esque Statues of Liberty. There were also paintings of babies in Mao-era military uniforms stomping one another and planets entirely made up of laughing Chinese faces. Nothing was spared from skewering, not even the Olympics. Two of my favorite paintings were inspired by Mattisse, with his dancers wildly gyrating around the Olympic rings; and a scene of sumo-sized Olympic athletes, naked and somewhat porcine in their features, getting ready to start the games. Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but what was most interesting is that the Chinese government seems to be exercising little to no censorship over these works of art. They turned on its head all of my preconceptions about what modern art in China would be like.

As I was leaving the galleries, I passed a little coffee shop with the cheerful sign posted in the window in English: The Opening Ceremonies are Tonight -- Let's Expect Them!! It was one of many examples of Chinglish (poorly or oddly used English) that I've seen -- I've included a few more at the bottom of this post. But because this has gotten long-winded, I'll finish for today, by talking about the Opening Ceremonies, which I saw on a large screened TV in USA House, the merchandising center for the US Olympic Committee and a place where Olympic families and sponsors gather. It was the capper to my day of discovering the ebullient if highly commercialized side of "Communist" China. For a society that's destroyed so many of its historic buildings (and continued to destroy the traditional neighborhoods of Beijing, called the "hutongs," to make way for Olympic stadiums and office buildings) I found it odd that the ceremonies seemed to harken back to images of Imperial China -- almost exclusively. All of those scrolls, and traditional musicians, and Chinese opera singers! It was a long-winded, but fascinating look at China's mixed up soul, don't you think?

Chinglish Sightings:

• In the subway: door is at fault when red light lighting ("Off with its hinges," I thought)
  
• These words formed the design for a pair of pants I saw a teen wearing in the subway: "16 centuries the France King decides to be at Saint Saveur De"
  
• On a large building: The Cat Lifestyle Mall
  
• On a small building: Sexual Appliances Store (which was right near the "Blue Zoo Beijing")

That's it for today!

Write and read comments about this post.

Labels: arts, beijing, chinglish, pauline olympics