I know that I said in my last message that I wouldn't have anything until I got to Jiangxi, but as I sit here in my temporary residence, wondering what of my vast music collection I should transfer to my iPhone for the marathon train ride I have in my near future, I can't help but reflect on the day that I have just had. Today I have seen some really good art, some really mediocre art, gotten completely lost in Beijing, found my way through Beijing, and got back in time to eat sushi and ride a six story tall escalator. Recently I've been questioning if I rely too much on liner narrative in the way that I write, but this is a day that was more or less made of liner narrative, so I'm going to have to swallow my doubts and plunge in at the beginning.
Our plan for the day was simple: see Ish and Alejandra off on their journey, go to the art district in Beijing and the Temple of Heaven, and then eat sushi with everyone as a way to say goodbye before we leave at 1 PM tomorrow. Things got off to a good start. I got us directions to and from where we needed to go, wolfed down a Big Mac and fries, and before noon we were on our way. The route to the art district was a simple subway stop, followed by a bus ride. We had the number, got on the bus, counted the stops, and were there in a matter of an hour. Cool beans. The art district in Beijing is called 798, and exists in the old buildings of the alleged birthplace of the Chinese nuclear program, or so Miles tells me. A useful note for later is the fact that Mary was with us as well, as she plays into the story later. This is the most heavy handed foreshadowing you'll see in a non-Dan Brown penned for for years and years. Anyway, 798 is pretty cool. It's a sprawling place full of a mixture of galleries, street sculpture, and decrepit looking industrial buildings/equipment. I'd really rather not do what my photos can do, so I'm not going to describe it more than that. However, there were a couple of things worth noting. For one, don't go on Monday, as most of the galleries are closed on Monday. Second, although this is an art district, it's still in China, and as such, a ton of work toes the party line in some way, or just becomes a bunch of blandish portraits and landscapes. There was some really cool stuff, and some really mediocre stuff, although my experience is that of the places that were open. Third, there was a lot of art from North Korea, which was really weird to see.
A lot of the galleries are in these old, poured concrete warehouses that really reminded me of St. John's, oddly enough. It was in one of these that our first incident happened. Until we stepped into this warehouse, all three of us were traveling in a pack. When we got in, some sort of miscommunication happened, and Mary left, and we stayed. Miles and I then exited a different way, and Mary was lost forever (at least for the sake of the story, she's fine. She waited for us, and when we didn't come, she caught the bus back home. Not a big deal). Miles and I continued to wander around, and once we hit the end of the “Art Zone”, we turned around, and using Google's directions took the bus that we thought would take us to the subway.
The thing is, this bus was supposed to take us to the subway in six stops, and instead, it took us to the bus garage in four stops. That's a small difference in the number of stops, but a huge difference in wither or not Miles and I were lost in Beijing or not. In the daze that only a discrepancy this large between expected and actual location can bring, we headed out from the bus garage, and decided the best thing to do was to walk, so we did. We walked a hell of a long way, looking for some way to get to the subway. When we had walked for miles and found ourselves standing in front of an international flower market in the middle of a field, we decided to take up a new strategy. We caught the only bus we could find, and hoped it would take us some place that would make more sense. No dice there, only another garage.
At this point, we were out of small bills, so we walked across the street to a supermarket to make change. Whist inside the supermarket, we decided that if we were lost, which we most certainly were, we might as well make a good time out of it, so we each bought tall boy cans of Yanjing Beer, and cans in hand, we moved east, as we knew the subway line was east from how far south we had gone, but we just didn't know how far.
As it turned out, it wasn't that far, but it would have been if we wouldn't have done one important thing: acted like locals. On our journey east, we hit a snag, and by snag, I do mean a railway line. After flipping a coin, we headed south along the line, walking on a side road past confused locals going home from work. I'm not really sure what we were thinking other than “just keep walking”, but this turned out to be a good idea, as we soon made an important discovery. When I said we acted like locals, it was for one moment, when we came upon a hole in the fence, watched a guy take his bike across the tracks, and then did the same with our bodies, moving us from the wrong side of the tracks, to the significantly more affluent right side of the tracks.
We soon found a bus stop, and this being the more affluent side of the tracks, it would make sense that it would be the side that would have significantly better access to rapid transit, right? Doesn't matter, we're getting on the bus, logic or no. And you know what? Three of the stops on this bus line had subway access, and before I could listen to three songs off of Summerteeth, we were at the subway station, and on our way home,a full two and a half hours after we wanted to be going. This would have bothered us, but all of our plans are flexible anyway.
We arrived back at the compound to empty dorms. Everyone had gone out to sushi without us. “No big deal,” we thought, “We'll just meet them there.” As it turns out, we went to completely different sushi restaurants, but that problem was nothing a few plates of salmon and eel couldn't fix. I went to the corner store to get a bottle of wine for the 17 hours on a train, and now I'm here, talking to everyone/nobody, listening to George Harrison sing All Things Must Pass. I think now is time for me to go to bed, as I'll probably have even more stories tomorrow.
-Cooper
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