BEIJING – The morning started with a friendly couple in their late 20s  
coming up behind us on the sidewalk near the hotel and, in near-
perfect English, engaging us in a pleasant conversation about where we  
were from, how we were enjoying Beijing and proudly telling us that  
they were art students. It was all very sweet, and then came the hook:  
Would we like to take a few moments to come with them and see their  
art? No, Courtenay and I said almost simultaneously. We’d read the  
warnings in guidebooks and elsewhere about tourists being invited by  
people on the streets of Beijing to go for tea or something to  
“practice their English” or “see their art,” and then get caught in a  
scam that costs them hundreds of dollars. The whole thing made us  
laugh – it was reassuring to experience something that we had been  
braced for, something that we had expected.

In many, many other ways, Beijing has been a total surprise. It’s a  
city of jarring contrasts, five-star hotels backed up against decrepit  
tenement buildings, a black Maserati sports car honking to get past a  
man on a rusting bicycle, burly rural farmers carrying dirty bed rolls  
arguing over the right subway stop while surrounded by sophisticated,  
urbane young Chinese.

It’s also a place where we have been treated much better, much more  
kindly and welcoming, than we had expected. People make room on the  
subways, offer seats, smile and make eye contact. Restaurant staff are  
patient with our halting orders. Even the hard-negotiating hawkers at  
the five-story Silk Market, where everyone was shouting to us about  
their wares, were fun to spar with.

Of course, there are cab drivers who shake their heads and drive  
away, refusing to take us where we want to go. It felt personal the  
first few times, but some reading reveals that taxi driving is an  
especially tough, low-paid job here, and drivers are paid only by the  
distance they go, not the time it takes. So when a Western couple and  
their young son wants a ride downtown to their hotel, during the teeth  
of the rush hour, well, it makes some sense that a driver would  
pretend he doesn’t know where they want to go, shake his head, and  
drive away.

Today will not be remembered by any of us as an amazing day in  
Beijing. The Dazhalan area we visited first thing in the morning was a  
disappointment; touristy in an especially bad way, crowded and stinky  
and vaguely disturbing. It threw Will into a funk that made him want  
to go back to the hotel.

And then in our march to escape we got mildly turned around and  
found ourselves funneled in a massive crowd back through several  
tunnels and flights of stairs and onto Tiananmen Square. It took  
another 30 minutes to get off the square, back into the subway and on  
our way to the Silk Market and the U.S. Embassy.

The market was great fun, five or six stories of stalls offering  
every knockoff under the sun—ski coats, suits, bras, t-shirts of all  
stripes and (faux) brands. Courtenay bought a couple Chinese fans  
while Will and I bargained over a small jade Buddha, which started at  
380 yuan and wound up, thanks to a certain tough negotiator from  
Oregon, selling for 80, or a little less than nine bucks. Real jade!  
Or so she said.

From there, we walked around the U.S. Embassy, and got shouted out  
for trying to take a picture of Will in front of the embassy gate. No  
pictures! The embassy area is a nice, quiet part of Beijing; we wanted  
to see it in part to think about the lives of the embassy staff,  
including Courtenay’s childhood friend, Lori Thomas, who lived there  
with her husband, Clay, for a couple years.

After that, we set off on a search for a dumpling restaurant that  
Lori had recommended. It was a real snipe hunt, a longish cab ride,  
and then a hot shuffle that went on for nearly an hour, where  
Courtenay would stop a passer-by and ask directions, they’d point  
somewhere nearby, Will and I would get our hopes up, only to just walk  
and walk and walk. Eventually we found it—a nice place yes, with  
pretty good dumplings and a very hot dish of small chicken parts  
surrounded by fiery pepper pieces, but perhaps not worth the extended  
ordeal of getting there.

Afterwards, we were turned down or ignored by a couple more cabbies,  
and limped another mile or so to a train station, and eventually made  
our way back to the hotel.

This was the last night that we will have access to a club area at  
the hotel, where we have made friends with several staff members who  
try to coax Will into using his Mandarin, and where I have developed a  
deep relationship with the fruit tarts that they put out each evening.

The night ended with all of us limping down to Nike’s flagship store  
in Beijing, where I sought shoes that might leave fewer blisters than  
the one pair of shoes that I brought. That, too, was surreal—being  
across the world but going into a retail store of a company that is so  
thoroughly Oregon. One other thing was familiar: the price of Nike  
shoes.

Unlike my friends at the Silk Market, they don’t bargain.

The night ends with me waiting up long past midnight for Mitchell to  
arrive. He’s had a hellish travel experience—his flight from Vancouver  
apparently made it as far as Anchorage, and then had to turn back  
because of some failure with the plane’s water system, and I gather,  
its toilets. He had to wait for another plane, and is now scheduled to  
arrive about midnight – 10 hours later than he was supposed to arrive.  
He will have been traveling for well over 24 hours when he finally  
arrives. I’ll get him into bed, and give him all day tomorrow to  
recover. Our Stanford tour is set to start on Saturday evening, and we  
hope everyone is feeling well and rested, including me in my brand new  
Nike sneakers.

And now, from Will:

Hey this is Will again. What we did today was wake up, then go out  
to a alley to see shops and stuff. I did NOT like that, every one  
smoked and the shops were bad. We found a taxi and went to tiannamen  
square. By then I was feeling sick from the smoke. We took a subway to  
the silk market. A place filled with sassy ladies who sell you stuff.  
This person wanted to sell us a coat and just by walking away we got  
the price from 500 yuan to 200 yuan. It was cool then we went to a  
place were they have dumplings then we went home.