Part 6 of 6: Beijing Notes: June 3 – 9, 2011
Usually it is fairly easy to catch a cab in central Beijing. The cabs are always clean, efficient and affordable as long as you can explain to the cabbie where it is you’re trying to get.
However, one day it starts to rain, which creates long lines at the taxi stands and brings the city traffic to a grinding halt. On this day you have only one option to move around the city – go underground and catch a ride on Beijing’s fourteen subway lines.
To say that Beijing is a large city is to say nothing at all. The old “Northern Capital” used to be protected by two rings of outer walls. Then the walls were torn down and replaced by the high speed highways. Now the enormous metropolis is surrounded by six (!) ring roads, which are consistently clogged up with traffic.
However, for less than 30 cents you can ride the air conditioned trains for two hundred miles underneath the city. The only problem is that almost 7 million people are using the subway system on the daily basis and it looks like all of them are riding next to you!
You know, I’ve been to a few crowded places before, including the New York’s subways, Tokyo’s Shibuya streets and the professional soccer matches in Rome, but I have never seen so many people pressed together in the underground corridors connecting one train line to another. It was a truly amazing and awesome sight – thousands of people moving silently and orderly in one direction, while the same river of dark hair heads would move in the opposite way.
The trains would arrive to the station completely full, the doors would open and, as if by magic, more passengers would insert themselves into the impossibly packed cars. Those of us who didn’t make it into the train would patiently wait single-filed between the white lines drawn on the platform floor for that purpose. There would be no cutting lines, no shoving, no arguing, no screaming or complaining. Wow!
The real prize would await for us as we re-surface in another part of the city – an expat friend, a Beijing resident, is taking us to a place called Muslim Seafood Restaurant. As I looked around the large dining room I did not see anything that would resemble any Muslim undertones. What I did notice was a group of burly Chechen men along with their Slavic wives in tow and an extensive collection of oversize aquariums lining up the restaurant walls.
Here is the process of ordering your food at this place: you walk between the aquariums while being accompanied by a pretty waitress and simply point at whatever lucky creature you feel like eating at this particular moment. Of course, your selection must be followed by a lengthy discussion concerning the best way to cook the floating monster of choice. It helps tremendously to have someone in your group who can maintain this conversation in Chinese and who knows a thing or two about eating at this type of establishment! I am not going to take the next page in order to list what was served to us that evening. Suffice to say that we have never had a better seafood dinner anywhere else in the world!
There is one thing I can assure you of – Beijing is a chock-full of excitement and it includes mind-blowing shopping, amazing history, super-modern architecture, picturesque neighborhoods, beautiful parks, and so on and so forth. However, this particular experience of riding the Beijing subway during the peak hours and dining at the Muslim Seafood Restaurant will stay with us as one of the most wonderful events of the entire trip!
Keep on traveling,
Lenka info@lenkatraveler.com