Eating in Beijing

For the Australian Embassy, Molldrew created a guide to eating around certain areas in Beijing. Here is a summary:

a)    Locations and map of some dining areas around Dongzhimen / Sanlitun

1. Ordering in – UN restaurant You get two dishes plus rice for 12 kuai (if two vegetarian dishes), 14 kuai (if 1 vegie, 1 meat), 16 kuai (2 meat)

Step 1: Go to http://www.unms.cn/cat.asp?catid=95 and pick out two dishes (the ones not in bold - meat dishes on left, vegie on right) - I generally use Google Translate to work out what the dishes are since my Chinese is poor!

Step 2: Before 11 (but earlier the better, they occasionally run out of certain dishes), ring the number above on the page, or as I do text them on 13621221178. 

2. Chinese Restaurant opposite the embassy – Noted by red doors and lanterns, this restaurant serves good dishes (Favourites include beef and broccoli, Sweet and Sour Pork, Hongshao Eggplant, Yuxiang Eggplant, Garlic Broccoli.)
3. Indian Restaurant – Second floor above Paddy O’Sheas. Expensive dinners, but has a RMB48 per person lunch buffet including several meat and vegetarian dishes.
4. Ginza Mall - Inside Ginza Mall there is McDonalds, Yoshinoya (Japanese meat and rice dishes) and other Chinese/Japanese restaurants.
5. Raffles – A shopping mall with food places in the basement. Food places include a Vietnamese Pho place, Japanese curry place, KFC and Subway.
6. Jenny Lou’s – Inside Jenny Lou’s near the delicatessen counters you can buy Subway style sandwiches for a slightly cheaper price than Subway.
7. Subway – Standard fare as available in Western countries.
8. The Village – The Village has many restaurants, most around RMB40 and up for a meal. Recommended restaurants include: Blue Frog (Half price burgers on Mondays, and two for one drinks), Ganges (good Indian).
9. Fried dumplings / noodles restaurant – Behind the supermarket
10. Duck restaurant – The gan bian si ji dou and eggplant/onions/tomatoes dish (22 kuai?) are great.
11. Hotpot restaurant – Individual hotpots for each person.
12. Sichuan restaurant – Does a good Yuxiang Eggplant.
13. Xinjiang restaurant – The leafy interior is reminiscent of the beautiful streets of Turpan, Xinjiang.
14. Milk tea place – best we’ve seen in Dongzhimen. Try the Coconut and the Peach!
15. Fish hot pot 
16. Korean restaurant
17. Arabic restaurant
18. Greek restaurant
19. In and Out – Yunnanese restaurant, the pineapple rice is delicious.
20. Flat White – NZ owned café, serves good coffee and lunches.
21. Lau Pa Sak – Good Malaysian food
22. Backyard Café - Good for healthy sandwiches, smoothies. 

b)     Locations and map of some dining places in Inner Beijing  

1. Chicken wings place – Does really good Chicken Wings in normal, spicy, wine and garlic flavours, Kao Bao Zi and Guo Tie are awesome as well.

2. Dumplings place – This roadside dumplings place offers good cheap dumplings.

3. Xinjiang restaurant

4. Vegetarian restaurant – All you can eat vegetarian restaurant, RMB70ish a head. Large selection of faux meats. Great ice cream!

5. Dali Courtyard – Yunnanese food, RMB 100 - 200 a head. Set menu including fish, seafood.

c)    Locations and map of some dining places in Northern Beijing (Near Huixinxijie Nankou)

1. Duck place
2. Noodles restaurant
3. Hamburger Pub – Pub that does decent RMB20 hamburgers.

4. Korean place – cheap good Korean place (RMB10-12 a dish).

Wenzhou train tragedy: A teething problem for new high speed rail?

On 23^rd July 2011, two D-category trains (top speed 250 km/h) crashed into each other in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. 40 people were killed in this tragedy.

While thorough investigation is required, this tragedy should not be seen as a teething problem for the recent additions to the China’s high speed train network. D-category trains:

• have been in operation in China since 2007. The track where the accident occurred had been in use since 2008.

• are common and well tested throughout China. In 2011, D-trains leaving or arriving in Beijing will travel a combined 34.3 million kilometres (21.4 million miles).

• have suffered no other reported accidents since their introduction.

While the new G-category trains (top speed 300 km/h) trains have suffered some teething problems the implemented safety systems have worked successfully.

In reporting on the incident, the Chinese Government should focus on the differences between the G-category trains and the D-category trains. The train incident should be reported as an isolated tragedy that has occurred after three years of successfully implementing D-category trains.

The Lost City of Ordos

 Our travels around China has taken us to some interesting places. While there have been more beautiful places, none has been more interesting and different than the lost city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia.

    Ordos is not a Doctor Who world over-run by Daleks, but the home of China's biggest property development mistake. About ten years ago, the coal-rich Ordos Government became concerned that the thriving town of Dongsheng (population 300,000) was running out of water. Rather than improving the piping, they decided to build a new city called Ordos (Kangbashi) 20 kilometres down the road next to reserviors. The Ordos Government had images of turning Ordos into a Chinese Dubai, a state-of-the-art city for over a million people. While building plans were impressive, they failed to consider that Ordos's outback location and freezing tundra temperatures may discourage potential residents.

    Recently the Chinese media ran stories claiming Ordos was a ghost town. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010-06/10/content_9958768.htm). Having heard about this place, we definitely had to go see it for ourselves to determine (i) whether the stories of the empty streets were true and (ii) whether we thought the Ordos situation was unique or could be repeated across China.

    On arriving in Ordos on a Friday working day in the middle of summer, two things immediately caught our attention. The first was how cold it was. For the middle of summer we were practically freezing. Hardly Dubai temperatures! The second was the scarcity of people. While there were people around the bus stops, otherwise the city was very quiet. We have both recently been reading books and articles on North Korea, and the empty roads reminded us of what we had read about North Korean cities.

   

    We spent a considerable amount of time over two days walking the streets of Ordos. There were about 15 convenience stores, many home renovation stores, a few small hotels and one supermarket open. The supermarket had a few customers and a reasonable array of products.

    The state-of-the art buildings being built in Ordos are amazing. We renamed the most interesting ones The Cake (Ordos Theatre), The Leaning Tower of Books (The "Great" Library of Ordos) and the Blob (Ordos Art Museum). Only the Leaning Tower of Books has been opened, with some books, a massive collection of magazines and Mongolian writings on display. The Leaning Tower of Books was definitely being underused, with more staff than customers.

 

The Cake

The Leaning Tower of Books , The Blob and an excited Molly!

    Overall Ordos is an interesting city, created by a coal-rich local Government that wanted to make a statement. It may suceed, if enough money is thrown at the problem. Andrew has a bet with Molly that the National Government will attempt to save face by making Ordos the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia within the next 20 years.

    Is Ordos indicative of what is happening in the rest of China? From our travelling to over 20 Chinese provinces we have seen considerable over-building. However, the concept of building a Chinese city from scratch is rare. While local governments have acquired a large amount of infrastructure funding from their local financing vechiles, only the richest local governments would have sufficient funds for the enormous costs of building a new city. We think that while badly built housing projects may cause problems around China, no other construction development problem is as systemic and large as the lost city of Ordos.

    Getting there: We recommend staying in Dongsheng and bussing to Ordos since you will quickly run out of things to do in the evenings in Ordos. You take the K21 (RMB8) from the Dongsheng train station to Ordos (Kangbashi) (Last bus back around 7pm-8pm). We stayed at the Hongye Hotel in Dongsheng (Hotel address: 6 Hangjin North Road (Hangjin Bei Lu),E'erduosi.

Hotel address in Chinese: 杭锦北路6号,鄂尔多斯 ) which you can find on C-TRIP and was reasonable with a great Chinese breakfast. From the hotel walk south to the traffic lights and then west and in front of the hospital you can catch the K-21 to Ordos.

In Dongsheng, buy a map since it will probably also contain a map of Ordos.

In Dongsheng, east of the Hongye Hotel is far more lively than West. There is a lovely square about 1km east of the Hongye Hotel (which Molly and I lindy-bombed!) and there are a collection of hot pot resturants in the vicinity.

Beijing Subway - Fangshan Line: the World Park and a cool pagoda

The Beijing metro system opened five new lines for the beginning of this year, which meant five new areas to explore!  The one that caught our interest the most was the Fangshan Line.  Not only is it fairly far out, it is also currently unconnected to the rest of the subway network, meaning the area must be reasonably populated and active!  We looked over the area on Google Maps and decided that one of the Liangxiang University stations would probably be the most interesting.

We started out at the top of the line, with our long-awaited visit to the World Park.  We’d heard that it was a big park full of scale models of world monuments, so how could we not go!  It ended up being a lot of fun, and even better than expected.  They had the classics: the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Big Ben, and so on. 

There were also some unexpected sites, such as a full-size model of the Trojan Horse. 

In the Asia area they had a full-size model of the Great Wall, which we found odd since one could get to the real Great Wall by going an hour north of the city rather than an hour south.

After we’d seen all there was to see at the World Park we went across the street from the entrance to try out a Lanzhou noodles place we’d spotted.  It was amazing!  Lanzhou noodles is always a good bet, but this place was really something special.  If only it wasn’t so far away from where we live!

Then, onto the Fangshan Line itself.  First we rode it all the way out to the end, and it was impressively populated all along!  Then we went back to Liang Xiang University West Station, the one that had looked the best, and it didn’t disappoint!  After walking a ways north from the station we spotted a pagoda in the distance—an excellent thing to explore.  The roads were a little tricky, but it was actually much closer than it had initially appeared!  In front there was an odd little park (Haotian Park), with lots of little, disused playground areas and a big bull grazing amongst them.  Unfortunately the pagoda was closed so we couldn’t get inside, but it was still very cool.

The area around it had a big bell with a ringer, which was very fun.

There were also fairly extensive trails in the woods around there.  It’s amazing what you can find just out off the subway lines!