to the capital
There I was at the centre of all things on a cold winter evening.
My thoughts were a jumble of "wow, Tiananmen Square is huge!", "I need to find food", and "I need to find somewhere to stay for the night".
The taxi driver had dropped me on the east side of the square in roughly the middle. I could see clearly across the square from Tiananmen to the north, the Great Hall of the People on the far side, the Monument to the People's Heroes in the centre, Mao's mausoleum just south of that, down to Qianmen in the south. The air was clear and, well, crisp doesn't do it justice. Frigid. The square was deserted apart from me and a few People's Armed Police and soldiers doing their guarding duty off in the distance.
How I got there went something like this:
I'd reached the end of my first semester in Taiyuan and I was thinking, "well, what do I do?" Somehow the answer was to throw a few essentials in a backpack and go down to the long-distance bus station on Yingze Dajie, just down from the railway station. Once there I saw a ticket office and dutifully stood in line. When I got to the head of the queue, I said "Beijing", and the ticket seller said something barely intelligible through the glass and over the hubbub, but gestured clearly to some other office. I walked out, looked in the direction she'd pointed, and saw another office just one door down with a sign saying "北京" - Beijing. Gotcha. And of course, I'd missed that because there was a bloody great big bus blocking my view as I'd walked in to the station. So into that office, and a couple of minutes later I had a ticket in hand for a bus that was about to leave.
Six hours later the bus was pulling in to Lize Qiao Long-Distance Bus Station at about sunset. I thought, "cool, I'm in Beijing, now where do I go? I know, I'll start at the centre of the universe!" So I got in a taxi and told the driver to take me to Tiananmen Square.
Now, this is where the story gets weird. I mean, it really does not make any sense.
I'd said Tian1an1men2 Guang3chang3 as clearly as I could. He said, "Huh?" Rinse and repeat several times, with me enunciating the words as clearly as I could, doing absolutely everything in my power to get the correct tones, as I rummaged through my bag, pulled out a battered, old Lonely Planet and found the words written out: 天安门广场. When I managed to show him the words, he said, "Oh! Tiarrarrmerr!".
And that's where it stops making sense.
Nobody says Tiarrarrmerr. Nobody. I've told that story to many people from Beijing, and they're all confused. Beijing dialect isn't just adding a bunch of 'r's to the end of every word. That 儿化音 - an r-sound at the end of a syllable - has meaning. It can function as a diminutive suffix, for example. It does not get applied to Tiananmen, either the gate itself or the square.
But after that brief stopover in an alternate dimension, the taxi driver drove me to Tiananmen Square. The sun had not long gone down, the temperature was dropping, I was hungry, and I needed to find a place to stay.
"If I remember rightly," I thought, "there should be a big KFC around here". I walked in the wrong direction, going north up the intersection with Chang'an Jie. KFC is on Qianmen Xi Dajie, opposite the southwestern corner of the square.
"No KFC visible," I thought, standing at the northeast corner of the square starting to feel the cold. "Isn't Wangfujing not far east of here? And don't they have a big McDonalds?" That time, I was right.
And why on earth was I in Beijing hunting down American fast food? It's quite simple - I needed food in a hurry. That's all. Nothing more than "put calories in stomach to stave off hypothermia". Say what you want about American fast food, it is reliable.
Once I'd filled me belly I returned to the question of accommodation. On the way to McDonald's I had been assessing the merits of Beijing's pedestrian underpasses as a form of shelter. They'd do well enough at keeping me out of the wind, but they were not warm. But then I remembered, judging by the map, if I went back down to Chang'an Jie then headed east again, then a short distance south, I'd find myself at Beijing Railway Station. That seemed like a pretty good place to find a hotel.
So off I went. And as I approached the station, a hawker called out offering me accommodation.
"How much?" I asked. "666 yuan a night" he said. "Too expensive," I said, as I thought, "Geez, what do you get for that? A date with Lucifer himself?"
We haggled a little, then he took me off to a hotel somewhere in what was then Chongwen District (the districts have since been re-organised, so this is now part of Dongcheng, or East City, District). The hotel was more than acceptable, despite costing a fraction of what that hawker had originally quoted.
I honestly can't remember what I did for the next couple of days, only that it involved figuring out buses around Beijing and some exploring. I do remember marvelling at the forest of high rise apartment blocks around my hotel and thinking that this would be what Hong Kong would look like if it had been built on a plain and the buildings more spaced out. I'm pretty sure I would've found my way to the Friendship Store at Jianguomenwai, where I would've stocked up on things like coffee and cheese and some reading material. The weather was bright and sunny, but cold.
But then I was headed back to Lize Qiao Long-Distance Bus Station. I walked into the ticket hall and saw a booth with the word 太原 on the window and thought, "that must be where you get tickets for Taiyuan." I went to that window, but nobody came. I looked around a bit more and saw other booths with Taiyuan on the windows, one or two of which had a person behind the counter and people queuing. So I joined a queue and within a few minutes I was on a bus, then six hours later I was getting off that bus at the bus station on Yingze Dajie in Taiyuan.
I felt quite refreshed after that little adventure.