Monday, August 30, 2010

Tianjin

So at some point I decided to do a long-discussed day trip to Tianjin, a city of 12 million people located just south of Beijing and whose name means Sky ford, or Heavenly Ford (a river runs through it). A high speed rail line connecting Beijing and Tianjin opened in time for the Olympics and reaches about 300 km/hr, or nearly 200 mph. Despite being two huge metropolises by our standards, the cities are very close. In fact, the train ride to Tianjin (~35 minutes) is faster than the subway ride from my place to the Beijing railway station (~40 minutes).
Even with the proximity and ease of travel between the two cities, I quickly discovered than Tianjin was very distinct from Beijing. Though most people still spoke with the r sound, Tianjin Mandarin definitely sounded a little different from Beijing's. The city was a business city, with considerably less major tourist attractions and thus considerably less tourists. In fact, Westerners, businessmen, students and tourists alike, were extremely scarce. This was a breath of fresh air (and indeed the air was marginally better) because there was more real Chinese culture and less Chinese people trying to speak bad English to me. So I woke up relatively early (9:30), wrote down in my little notepad the names of the cool tourist sites in Tianjin, and hopped on the metro.
After the high speed trip, I get a big map of the city at the train station and find myself rather confused because this is quite a sizable city. The main tourist attraction is the Ancient Culture Street (古文化街which looks to be a half decent walk from the station. So I decide to cab it and soon find myself underneath the station where a tunnel is filled to the brink with blue cabs. The scene is hectic with a typical Chinese line of waiting riders continually breaking rank and boarding taxis far down the line. It takes about 10 minutes to navigate through this mess but the taxis clearly have it worse, as I soon find out. I enter a cab and tell the 司机 to hit up the Ancient Culture Street and get a silent nod of recognition. It's not until the driver leaves the tunnel that he turns to me and complains how "I waited in line for an hour and you want to drive somewhere 5 minutes away!" Haha oops. Well if I was in a worse mood I might have been like "sucks to be you" or "maybe you shouldn't wait in the train station like the rest of the city's drivers." But instead I was in a good mood of exploration and explained that I was a tourist just visiting for the day, and asked how he felt about driving down the river and giving me a little tour of the city. The driver is very happy to hear this and starts conversing with me and pointing out various landmarks. Tianjin's got a bunch of cool bridges, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm all about bridges. We also drive through a street known for its colonial style European buildings which are now used by modern Chinese banks. I had read about the street on Wiki and heard about how it was a good representation of Tianjin's former exposure to Europeans and was looking forward to it. I didn't need to get out of the car though to realize that it was pretty lame. I've been to Europe, I've seen European buildings, and these were really uninspired for European buildings. It was like any boring office street in Frankfurt or London, and in this case, just because they were in China didn't make them any more special.
I asked him if there was any good food near the Ancient Culture Street and he said that why didn't I go to the snack street (食品街), another landmark in my little notepad. I said why not
and found myself outside an interesting hall - the bottom looked new and manufactured like a shopping center, while the top was an imperial style gate. I paid the driver about 25 kuai, which was probably double what he would have gotten if he hadn't given me the whole tour, but still not a lot of money. The inside looked like this picture on the left, a very Chinese jumble of cheap goods stalls, food stands and vertical advertisements. I got a very unremarkable but totally memorable duck sandwich which was just a piece of roasted duck stuck into a bun and struck me as a very normal meal for a local. The area was interesting enough to keep me occupied for about a half hour before I ventured off to see the Culture Street.
The walk there showed me that Tianjin, though certainly a business city with its skyscrapers, had a more suburban feel to it. The neighborhood that I ventured to felt oddly uncrowded, a very typical experience perhaps everywhere in the world except China. The streets were still as trafficked as ever, but the sidewalks were very sparsely populated.
The Ancient Culture Street was a cool collection of antique stores, street performers, statues, craftsmen and people. This area was not sparsely populated at all and while Beijing and Shanghai have their similar places, I still felt like I was walking in a unique location. Maybe it was like Newbury Street in Back Bay - sure it's just a street of clothing and bookstores, but it's neat. It was a fun walk but without notable purchases cause half of my time in China had been spent buying useless street souvenirs. Eventually I made my way to the monastery in Tianjin which I believe once held a skull relic of Xuanzang, the famous monk from the Monkey King tales (those stories may have been the most Chinese part of my upbringing). However the monastery was closed and I resorted to taking pictures of the gate and wandering around it's tourist shops, one of which sold me a beautiful jade dragon necklace.
I left the closed monastery for a riverwalk and came within sight of Tianjin's perhaps coolest landmark, a bridge with a ferris wheel right on it. Yes that Ferris wheel is on a bridge, with cars and such driving right underneath it. It's called the Eye of Tianjin (creative right?) and is the only ferris wheel of its kind in the world. Walking towards the eye, suddenly I heard a giant bang. I almost hit the deck and no joke, my first thoughts were as to what foreign powers were involved in the attack. No one around me reacted though, which rather confused me. Soon on the walk though, I discovered tons of used fireworks (also pictured right) right on the street and put two and two together. Nonetheless I couldn't figure out what the fireworks were for. Many of them remained scattered on the road where cars still whizzed by. Only a few workers were doing cleanup and there was no crowd or anything gathered when I walked by, nor signs of any festival or anything. No one who I asked gave me an answer. I walked on, under the ferris wheel bridge, still confused. On the other side I hailed a cab and searched for a final tourist site, the St. Joseph's church. This church is well publicized on Wikipedia, it's actually one of the main images of the city, but it seems that its prestige on the online encyclopedia is significantly larger than its prestige among Tianjin residents. The taxi driver I hailed actually had to look up its address. We then got into a very great conversation. Everybody I talked to in Tianjin asked me "你喜欢天津吗?Do you like Tianjin?" I had only positive things to say. This driver told me about the characteristic of the city, most of which I did not understand, except for Zhou Enlai's name when we passed by his memorial. He proceeded to list a bunch of famous people from Tianjin, of whom I recognized maybe 2. Then he said "let me guess how old you are. 22?" And I was like holy shit and started laughing, and I was like in 2 weeks yes. He was like, "guess how old I am?" He looked pretty old but I went for an underestimation of what I really thought, so I said "54." He starts cracking up and says, " so close, 55." I didn't even believe him, but he pulled out his ID and I pulled out mine and we shared one of the more bizarre laughs of my lifetime. He then recommended a good "Goubuli bao 狗不理包" place within walking distance from the church which I thought would be an awesome local place, but it turned out to be one of the main restaurants that charged about 70 kuai for 6 buns. Goubuli baozis are Tianjin's famous local buns. I only learned after having the six that they are all different flavors - it seems there is no standard goubuli bao. The church was cool too, I went into a nearby Starbucks to take better pictures of it. How often do you say that?
Inside the restaurant I caught the last part of Tianjin culture that I was hoping to see - xiangsheng, an old esteemed form of Chinese poetry/rap that involves very complicated wordplay and knowledge of the language. The intricate puns and messages that the guy was spitting out were way beyond me, but I still really appreciated his performance, although it seems everyone else was too used to these bards to clap.
The return journey on the train featured one last memorable encounter. A black girl boards the train very late and with two giant suitcases that she was struggling with. I pause then ask in English, "do you need help there?" to which she immediately responded "yes please." After helping her bring the bags inside, she told me that she was going home after spending the semester in Tianjin. I asked her where she was from, fully expecting her to be American (couldn't discern an accent) so when she said, "Zambia" I was really surprised.
The lovely day trip was really quite simple and rather painless. All of my planning was contained within looking up various sites and figuring out how I'd get there once I got there. In the process I think I learned a lot about China. Here was one city where life went on regardless of what a foreigner like me did or thought. This was a real part of China not as transparently broadcast to the world. Interestingly, many of the people I met had never been to Beijing. I was stunned, the city was literally 40 minutes away. You could drive there no problem or take a bus if you couldn't afford the train. Tianjin to Beijing is very similar to Baltimore to DC right down to the train prices and one end's presence as the nation's capital. So I don't know what it says that a lot of residents hadn't left the city even to see the wonders of freaking Beijing, but it certainly has something to do with the strength of the economy. It's strange though, since Beijing has a large composition of transplants from around the country. What an odd dichotomy.