Hipster Hutong

Today was my last Sunday in Beijing. I woke up, skyped with one of my best friends from home, grabbed a tuna panini for lunch from the cafe in the dorm area (which is the same lunch I had on the first Sunday), and had a generally boring and quiet day about my room. I started organizing my things for packing, watched Howl's Moving Castle, and studied my Chinese flashcards. I'm feeling pretty in control of everything in this last week and the whole upcoming international travel thing.

At 6:30PM, I met up with Professor Carmichael to go to a converted hutong for dinner and exploring. We had a lovely route planned from a slightly farther subway stop that would theoretically take us past some interesting things as we made our way to the hutong and beyond for a vegetarian dinner, but things never go according to plan in China.

We got out of the subway and started walking in the generally correct direction. It was a cool area with lots of small quirky shops and restaurants of all sorts. We eventually came to an adorable little park with a small pond, some sculptures, and lots of willow trees and flowers, and that was the highlight of the exploring. When we got out of the park, we were a little lost and ended up hailing a cab to get us to the hutong. It was the first female cab driver I had seen.

Anyway, we got caught in a traffic jam and started walking, but then we were one street too far north, so we wandered up and down there until we were tired and hungry and lost, so we got in another taxi to get there, and then we finally got to the hutong around 9PM.

It was the most hipster place I have seen in all of China, and the idea of a hipster hutong is just an oxymoron. The shops there were all unique and quirky, which I was not expecting at all because I thought they'd be like the "ancient streets" we visited in the south that were shop after shop of the same useless souvenirs. We walked into a few shops with journals to find a gift for our residential college master, and we found the right thing to bring back, which is nice a funny.

We had a very late dinner at a restaurant in the hutong. We ordered jasmine tea, cucmbers, Chinese broccoli, mushrooms and broccoli, and tofu wrapped vegetables. I really liked the dishes, and the tofu was my favorite. I really liked the rolls both plain and dipped in the dipping sauce. It was probably my favorite dipping sauce.

We discussed a lot of favorite things from the trip: foods, meals, sights seen, places visited, parks, shopping, etc. It's really cool to be able to look back over the past two months and see where I started and where I'm ending. Overall, I came in knowing nothing, and I'm leaving having seen all the sights on my list, understanding the culture a lot better, and being able to speak some Chinese. I have mostly memorized the subway map, have visited many hospitals, and am perfectly comfortable at Bei Da. It's really been transformative.

I got home just in time to write my blog, do a final flip through my flashcards for tomorrow's tingxie, take a quick shower, and go to sleep before my final week of classes.

Today is awesome because I got to see the hipster hutong and get lost in a really neat park.