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We arrived in Beijing, China after our two weeks in Japan.  China has been, I think, more different from my preconception than any other place we have visited thus far.

Upon reflection, I am not really sure what it was that I expected.  Perhaps it was people dressed in drab gray clothes, acting repressed and busy going to political party meetings.

What I didn‚t expect to find was a vibrant city like any other world-class city with wide streets, bright lights, bustling shopping centers and its citizens dressed no differently than in, say, Seattle.

Another thing that I didn't expect was the bitter cold.  We couldn't squeeze China into our summer plans and knew the few weeks we spent in China would feel frosty since we didn't have the right gear.  We thought we could "tough it out."  However, when we hiked along a rural section of the Great Wall we found streams that had frozen solid.  There ain't no toughing this out.  We have been stocking up on stockings, gloves and long underwear.

I have always liked Chinese food.  Unlike Japan, we haven't had to stoop to McDonalds (there seem to be at least four poised around the perimeter of Tiananmen Square).  Nevertheless we have had to exercise caution when it comes to eating.

September and I spent a few days in Hong Kong in 1993.  It was then that I realized that the California variant of Chinese food is distinctly different from the real thing.  So in Beijing when I saw Crunchy Bovine Intestines and Goat's Penis on the menu, it wasn't a surprise.  But with a bit of effort we usually manage to order something that we all like to eat, though this often means drawing pictures of vegatables, walking around the restaurant and pointing to something another customer is eating, or in some cases, earnestly pantomiming a chicken.

It isn't just Crunchy Bovine Intestines that one needs to be careful of, either.  A fellow traveler we met in Beijing witnessed a dog being slaughtered in front of a restaurant just down the street from our hostel.  The English menu in front of the restaurant simply read "sweet meat" but we took note of the picture of a dog at the bottom of the Chinese side of the menu.  Suffice it to say we never ate there.  I have observed that China doesn't have a feral dog problem.

Once we have successfully ordered our food, actually eating it has caused us to lose any tiny shred of dignity we may have had left.  We seem to be the evening entertainment wherever we go.  For example we went to a large "hot pot" restaurant where you cook your own food in what is essentially a boiling fondue pot.

It was bad enough that I handed what seemed like a note from my mother to the waiter explaining what we wanted and how we wanted it, a friend having been kind enough to write out the Chinese characters for us in advance.  But then as soon as the food started to show up, a crowd of waiters and waitresses gathered around to watch us try and feed ourselves.

I think I am fairly adept with chopsticks, but this was my first (and last) attempt at cooking noodles with them, especially for an audience.  Has anyone ever tried retrieving noodles from boiling broth with chopsticks?  After trying it, I wouldn't have thought it possible.  After several failed attempts from all of us, including dropping some in the fire which caused our audience of waitpersons to practically double over with laughter, we got a first-hand demonstration from the restaurant staff of the proper noodle retrieval technique, using a combination of chopsticks and a slotted spoon.  However, after we had dropped our third slotted spoon into the deep, boiling broth the staff had pity on us.  After that, every time they saw that one of our plates was empty, a waiter would rush up to the pot, expertly fish out another few morsels of food, and serve them to us.

Some stereotypes that we had of China proved accurate.  For example, there are soldiers everywhere from the supermarket to Tiananmen Square.  I confess that I am uncomfortable picking out the best bananas when a pistoled solider has his eye on me.

Other stereotypes are proving accurate as well. Prices for almost everything are ridiculously cheap.  For example, our hot pot restaurant provided a lot of great food and fed four people for under $10.

We were strolling through an outdoor shopping district minding our business and not really looking for anything in particular when I received a tug on my sleeve and a whisper in my ear, "Psst.  Hey buddy -  I have the latest Harry Potter!  DVDs only 8 Yuan" (about $1).

The young man opened his ankle-length coat a bit to reveal a decent selection of late-release movies on DVD.

"You come my shop.  I show you.  Very good quality!  I have very more at my shop!"

September and I cast a wary eye at each other but followed him to his shop anyway, trailed closely by the children.  He zipped off down a narrow dark alleyway and turned left, right, left, then went straight for a while then left, right, right, then down to the dead end of a dark and narrow alley.

By this time alarms had been ringing in my head, "Danger! Danger! Danger Will Robinson!"  If the guy was setting us up to be mugged, he certainly did it right.  We went into his "shop" where there were several harried-looking folks in a small room containing bunk beds, a one-burner stove top and a small refrigerator.

Past the cramped living quarters was a small DVD warehouse with copies of every DVD known to mankind, and some not yet known, such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was still in its debut weekend in the theaters in Beijing.

We try to travel light, which means we do NOT bring with us a TV and DVD player.  But we also knew our hostel had a big screen TV and DVD player in the basement.  We had already seen Harry Potter 4 in a Beijing theater, but for a buck, why not watch it again?

Katrina and Jordan both protested loudly, right there in the shop, ranting "These movies are COUNTERFEIT!"  "You are encouraging people to copy movies illegally!"  "I can't believe you are doing this!"  I regretted the lecture I gave the kids on intellectual property rights on the plane flight over to Beijing.  The kids had no sense of embarrassment when it came to berating the actions of the shop owners right in front of them.  We bought the DVD anyway.

Katrina was mortified that we had bought something on the black market.  We tried to justify our actions by telling her that we fully intended to buy the official version back home once it became available, but in her eyes, we were guilty of crimes against humanity.  She defiantly pledged not to watch the movie.

We got back to our hostel and put the disc in the player.  It turns out that it was a poor quality DVD with a blurry picture, washed-out color, and a Chinese-only soundtrack, and incuding English subtitles that looked like a computer translated the original English to Chinese and then back to English.  It was fun to watch just for the entertainment value of the subtitles.  For example, "mudblood" became "melon" so that the slur, "You filthy mudblood!" became "You dirty melon!"  Harry Potter alternated at random between Hally Porter, Harvey Pot, and Hookey Poot.  Snape became "Snap," who threatened to give out detentions to any student who "unwise follow not my saying to you!"  Best of all, Professor McGonagall became Professor Mickey most of the time.  You just can't visualize a stern disciplinarian with a name like Mickey.

In the end, Katrina was somewhat mollified by the fact that we were cheated out of our dollar.

As we got far past Beijing for our hike along the Great Wall, it was clear that the affluence of the city doesn't extend out to the countryside.  Various peasant women accompanied us along most of our 5-hour hike, trying to make friends in the hope that we would buy their trinkets.  We observed their horror as we threw our empty plastic water bottles into the recycle bins provided along the way.  We learned from one woman that 13 empty plastic bottles could be traded for one bowl of rice.

One particular woman accompanied us for a very long time, pointing out her tiny village off in the distance in the barren landscape, and explaining with a few words of English and lots of gestures that the villagers plant and eat rice and corn. When we offered her an extra sandwich from our lunch, she inspected it closely and told us through a fellow traveller who could interpret that she had never eaten a sandwich before.  When she opened it up and found that it had a bit of meat in it, she looked astonished, smiled widely, and gestured that it was quite a treat indeed.  It is clear by their appearance that these women lead hard lives.  Life can be so unfair to vast numbers of people.  It is hard not to feel guilty for the relative luxury of being able to eat at will.

Beijing was very good to us.  We stayed for longer than planned, but it was so cold out that some days we had a hard time making it past the front door of our hostel.

I was in our hostel in Beijing doing math homework with the kids when September interrupted my explaining the finer points of collecting like terms and simplifying, by bursting into the room screaming, "It is so cold out!  I am going to break my neck on the icy sidewalks if I don't freeze to death first.  We have got to get out of here!"  With a little help from weather.com, we found that it was much warmer almost everywhere else in China we wanted to go.