Month: October 2021

Hello Everyone,

Thank you so much for returning to Astronomer in Beijing to read more about my time here in Beijing. I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe and healthy! As fall begins to set in here, I’ve been getting a lot of messages about COVID booster shots, flu shots, and making sure that everyone is staying healthy. I just got my flu shot this week (it’s really useful to know someone who runs an English language hospital – thank you so much for all of your help, Roberta!!!) and am hoping to get my COVID booster/the Chinese vaccine some time in November (Since I’m a foreigner, I don’t yet qualify for the Chinese booster, but since I haven’t received any of the Chinese vaccine, I am eligible). This is the first post of the now monthly format (there still will be some surprise special posts, but for the most part, the blog will be monthly). Again, if you’re reading this and you haven’t subscribed yet, I hope you’ll consider doing so. The link is on the right hand side of this page.

Before I dive into what I did in October, I promised last week I’d share some more photos of my apartment now that it’s starting to come together. As I mentioned before, I brought a fair amount of keepsakes from the US and from my various travels, so you might recognize a few things. I really like my apartment so far. I’m still trying to figure out the ideal setting for the floor heating, but I did get a water filter installed (Yay drinkable water!), and have been able to buy a number of things on baopals and taobao to help make my apartment feel like my home. I do want to thank Roberta & Ted again for all of their hospitality, and also for letting me borrow bedding and cutlery so that I didn’t need to spend my first day in the apartment figuring out where to buy plates and forks. I also did take a trip to the IKEA superstore here in Beijing and wow was I blown away. I’ve never been to an IKEA in the US, so maybe they’re all enormous, but I’ve never seen so much stuff (and thankfully all of it has English descriptions and they took my credit card!!).

Happy Halloween!!

Before I tell you all about my month, I want to wish everyone a Happy Halloween! I don’t know what the status of trick or treating is this year (or Halloween parties for that matter), but I’m sure that CVS and your local supermarket are full of Halloween candy. Well, obviously, Halloween is a super American Holiday and isn’t really celebrated here in China. However, as I’ve shown previously, the influence of America is ever present and the Jack O’Lanterns are out and about here in Beijing. Now, with the exception of the display at the Beijing United Family Hospital, all of these are at foreign import stores, so the target audience is definitely the Americans. Although I didn’t buy a pumpkin or any decorations, I did get some of the chocolates to celebrate. However, I did see a number of advertisements for Halloween celebrations here in Beijing and some kids in costume (including a very cute looking Harry Potter), so there will be some celebrations (even if I’m not doing anything).

Additionally, we had a small Halloween celebration at Kehillat Beijing as part of our “Challah”ween Shabbat (we have a themed dinner every week, see the section below for details). As part of the early celebration, one of the community members carved this amazing constellation Jack O’Lantern! I thought it was amazing and wanted to share it with you!

Exploring Gulou!

One of the reasons that I wanted to move into my apartment at the beginning of October is that the first week in October is the National Day Holiday, which commemorates the founding of modern China. As such, I had an entire week where I could work from home (and thus get things set up in my apartment). An added benefit of working from home during this week was that I also got to explore my new home base! As many of you know, I really enjoy running and I knew I needed to find a running route to really feel like I live in a Gulou. In looking at Apple Maps, I immediately was drawn to the Shichahai area of Gulou (see the map to the right), which is about 10 minutes from my apartment. When I was in Boston, my favorite place to run was the Chestnut Hill Reservoir right by Boston College and Shichahai is known for its three large lakes and multiple temples that surround those lakes. Although I haven’t visited the temples yet, I have had the opportunity to run around the lakes at least twice a week (the one nearest me and the one that is featured most in these photos is HouHai). As you can see, the landscape is amazing! Much like the Chestnut Hill reservoir feels a bit separated from Commonwealth Ave just a few feet away, Houhai lets me feel like I’m not in the middle of a bustling city when I’m running. As you can see, the lakes are dominated by large lotus flowers and weeping willows that make for a beautiful photo. I will note that unlike the Chestnut Hill reservoir, I have seen a number of people swimming in the lake (even though all the signs say not to). I don’t think I’ll be swimming in it any time soon, but it is a really pretty park.

Unlike the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, which is used almost exclusively as a running/walking path, the Shichahai area also has a number of very cute shops, cafes (see the Teddy bears sitting at the table), bars, and restaurants (especially as you approach Qianhai, the second of the lakes that I run around. Aesthetically, the vibe kind of reminds me of downtown Lake George (for those of you from Saratoga), where there are a lot of things for tourists. Since my first experience here was during a holiday, it definitely felt like the entire city was out an about. However, the slightly more commercial nature doesn’t take away from the fact that there are still lots of pretty flower gardens and statues surrounding this part of the lake (and yes, I believe that is an ad for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics).

Beyond exploring Shichahai, I also got to see some other really cool things around Gulou, including the Bell Tower at night (see below) and lots of really cool ornamentation and statues in the hutong areas near where I live.

China Vegan Festival!

As you’ve seen in my blog, I’ve really enjoyed exploring the vegan/vegetarian food scene here in Beijing. However, so far, the overwhelming majority of vegan food that I’ve had has been traditional Buddhist Chinese food (interestingly, Buddhist food also excludes onion and garlic, as well as meat). However, plant based products are on the rise here in China. Whether it’s the plethora of non-dairy milks or the introduction of plant-based meats (similar to the Impossible and Beyond Burger), veganism is on the rise. However, I was still pleasantly surprised and incredibly excited when I found out that the China Vegan Festival was happening in Beijing. This really hit all the nostalgia/comfort points for me as I really enjoyed going to various different Vegan Markets, Pop-ups, and Veg Fests when I was in Boston. For those of you who’ve never been to a Vegan Food Fest in the US, they’re pretty similar to any other type of food festival, except they generally have a number of vegan and plant based products to buy as well. Here, the China Vegan Festival had a number of different vendors selling everything from vegan baozi (I bought a number of different frozen baozi that I’ll be enjoying this winter), to veggie burgers and almond yogurt.

As with any good food festival, I was able to try a number of different samples, as well as purchase a rather extravagant lunch from a number of different vendors (You can see the full haul in the last image). Here you can see the full array of both western and eastern style foods. I got a mini almond yogurt smoothie (it was so good that I bought a couple of the yogurts that I’ve since enjoyed), a veggie burger (which definitely hit all of the nostalgia feels), and vegan plant based bites (the french fry looking things). As the Boston Veg Fests were always highlighted by the wide array of vegan deserts that I would get, I was pleasantly surprised that I could get a delicious vegan cheesecake (see the top right image) – western style deserts, and desert in general aren’t a big thing here. I also got to try different vegan baozi and sample noodles, vegan nuggets, vegan dumplings, and other vegan meats. All of it was really yummy and since it’s never clear which baozi and dumplings are vegan or vegetarian, it was great to know that all of these were. I also got to get another jianbing. If you remember my first blog, jianbing was the first real Chinese food that I got to have outside of quarantine, and it was great to get another vegan jianbing. You can see the jianbing being assembled in some of the bottom images. Everything was incredibly delicious and I really hope that I’ll get to go to another Vegan Festival while I’m here!!

Life at Tsinghua – Finally Hired!

After spending much of September filling out various forms (including one that required me to make up a Chinese name for internal Tsinghua purposes – I chose Jin Ma Zhen, which roughly translates to Gold – Ma (short for Ma ke si or the transliterated version of Marx) – Truth (since Emet means truth in Hebrew)), I am happy to say that after being in Beijing for 6 weeks and China for 10 weeks, I was officially hired by Tsinghua University on October 14!! (I guess I need to update my e-mail signature.) To clarify, some of the delay was that I needed to get a residence permit and a worker’s permit to be officially hired. Both of these required me to submit my passport to the Chinese government so that my new visa could be added to it. Although it was a bit disconcerting to not have my passport for two weeks (because of the holiday, all of the paperwork got delayed), I’m really glad that everything worked out. In the subsequent days, I was able to get everything else worked out too! This means that I finally have a Chinese bank account and have been reimbursed for my $4000 flight to Shanghai (and got a third of my back pay!!). More importantly, I can now use WeChat Pay, Alipay, and TaoBao, so it feels like I’m really living in China. One interesting thing to note is that unlike the US, where I could have pretty much any bank account as long as there was a Boston office and BU would set up direct deposit with it, I was told explicitly that I needed to set up a bank account with the China Construction Bank (it’s one of the four major banks here in China). Thankfully the office on campus had one staff member who speaks English and was able to help me get everything set up. I also finally have a Tsinghua e-mail address. Although I primarily use my BU e-mail and my gmail for communication, it really helps me feel like I’m actually a member of the Astronomy Department now that I’ve been added to the department listservs. One other very different aspect of Chinese universities (or at least Tsinghua) is that I have to pay for the university’s internet. It’s only 12rmb a month (approximately $2) and I was able to prepay for basically my entire stay in China, but it still feels a bit weird. I know some BU folks are subscribed to this blog, so maybe it’s possible that some fraction of grad student overhead goes to paying for the internet, but it was pretty surprising to me that in order to get an e-mail (and thus internet access), I had to pay a monthly fee.

Because of needing to go to various on campus offices to set everything up, I did get to take some lovely photos of the campus! You’ll find the building where the Astronomy Department is in the second photo. Again, I’m still always amazed by the duality of the campus. At times it looks like a traditional Chinese garden, but at other times it looks like a typical New England university. I will say, and I know I mentioned this to my Chinese colleagues, that it is a bit strange that there is nobody sitting on the grass or playing frisbee. Maybe it’s just my memories of College Hill at Brown and people sprawled out on the Main Green, but I can’t help but think about that when I see them. I’ve been told that people do actually sit on them on occasion (and maybe it’s a summer thing, I don’t know), but it’s not as pervasive as in the US.

I also want to highlight one of my favorite things on campus, which is this magnificent Han Tang Yue Se (moonlight pond). As I hope my pictures show, it’s a remarkably serene location and has an incredibly picturesque quality. While I haven’t gotten to spend a ton of time here, I’m hoping to spend some days working outside here in the spring and summer. Also, when I was walking with one of the graduate students in my group, I learned that the reason that Tsinghua’s traditional campus looks like a traditional Chinese estate/palace is that it was one. Tsinghua University houses the Qing Dynasty Prince’s Residence and this pond is part of that residence!

Actual Astronomy

Although I’ve avoided writing about it in my previous blog posts, I am here in Beijing to do Astrophysics research. Thankfully after spending the better part of a month filling out the mountain of paperwork, I’ve finally been able to work on some of the research that I came here to do. Although I don’t want to bog down everyone with the details, I do want to give a brief summary of the three projects that I’m currently working on. In general, my research focuses on galaxy clusters; bent, double-lobed radio sources; and protoclusters. Here’s a brief summary of what these things are for all of you non-Astronomers. Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe and are large groups of galaxies (50 – 1000+), Jesse studies these as well. A bent, double-lobed radio source is essentially the emission from an active supermassive black hole, which we call an active galactic nuclei (active means that material is being accreted onto the black hole). When the galaxies that host these super massive black holes are moving relative to the surrounding cluster medium, the radio sources can be bent into the canonical “C” shape that we use to identify them (An easy way to think of it is that when you’re on a roller coaster and going down a steep hill, your face and hair peel away from you due to the pressure from the air). Protoclusters are exactly what they sound like, the evolutionary step in a galaxy cluster’s life that happens before it is gravitionally-bound and starts to look like a present day cluster. These systems are even larger (in spatial extent) than clusters and have pretty different looking galaxy populations than clusters.

The three projects that I’m focusing on now all deal with galaxy clusters in some form or another and two are building off my dissertation. I’ve dubbed Project 1 as Project Radio. Here, I’m using LOFAR, the Low-Frequency Array (A large radio telescope) to further examine the radio sources in the clusters that I identified as part of my dissertation (called the Clusters Occupied by Bent Radio AGN – COBRA – Survey). The focus has been to look at the energetics of the radio sources to see if there are any differences or similarities among our population. I’ve dubbed Project 2 as Project Morphology. Here, I’m using Hubble data obtained by my supervisor to study the morphology of galaxies in a protoclusters approximately 11 billion light years from us (meaning 11 billion years in the past). Essentially we’re aiming to see if the type of galaxy (spiral, elliptical, merger, …) depends on the density of galaxies surrounding it. I’ve dubbed Project 3 as Project Evolution. For those of your who attended my dissertation defense, this is actually the evolution of the third chapter of my dissertation, in which I’m working to model the evolution of elliptical galaxies in galaxy clusters to better determine how the low-mass clusters that I study with COBRA evolve over time and potentially determine how/when the galaxies in these clusters stop forming stars (Brian, if you’re reading this, I owe you an e-mail about this project).

Although these are the three main projects I’m working on, I also have a number of long term projects in the works with both my brother and some other friends. One of the collaborations that I’m most excited about is called Extrac (ExtRAC – “Ext”ended “R”adio “A”GN in “C”lusters). It was facilitated by my good friend and fellow Astronomer Brian Lemaux, who realized that I was doing similar work to Emily Moravec (who I’d met at a Galaxy Cluster Conference in Sesto, Italy and who studies clusters in the MaDCoWS survey) and Lu Shen (who did her PhD with Brian and works on the ORELSE survey). Although we meet twice a month to discuss science, I’d never gotten to meet Lu. Lu is a postdoc at the University of Science and Technology here in China and her family is from Beijing, so I’ve been hoping to get to meet her in person after almost two years of collaborating. Well as you might guess by the picture above, Lu and her boyfriend Weida were able to come and visit Tsinghua’s campus a couple of weeks ago (For those of you wondering, the gold sign behind us says Department of Astronomy in Mandarin)! It was really great to meet her in person and discuss the various science projects I’m working on (including one that is still in the planning stages, but which I hope to collaborate with Lu on extensively! I also got to show Lu and Weida around Tsinghua and Zheng (my supervisor) treated us all to lunch at one of the restaurants on campus (this is also when one of the graduate students was telling us about the campus). Although it was a brief visit, it was so great to actually see a familiar face here in China! I’m hoping to give a talk later in the academic year at USTC and plan to have Lu back again so that she can give a formal talk to the department as well!

Exploring Beijing

As I become more accustomed to life here in Beijing, I’ve gotten to do a little more exploration as I traveled to get my residence visa, go to the China Vegan Festival, and get my flu shot. I also got to get a better sense of the area surrounding Gulou when I walked over to register with the police station. Unlike in the US, where anyone can travel within the country with basically no restrictions, here in China, you are supposed to register with the local police anytime you go anywhere (i.e. if I go visit Jesse in Shanghai, I need to register with the police there. If you stay at a hotel, the hotel staff do this for you). When I moved in, I only had my temporary visa, so with my new visa, I had to go back to the station to re-register. This was definitely one of the most positive experiences I’ve had dealing with administrative things here in China. Unlike at the other police stations I’d been to, the female officer who took care of the paperwork spoke English (I probably got lucky here, but it was very nice for me). When she saw that I’m from New York, she mentioned that her son had just applied to Columbia University. Since that is my Dad’s Alma Mater, I made sure to praise Columbia and say how great New York is. She was also very impressed when I said that I work at Tsinghua (much like there is an admiration of the Ivy League in the US, people here in Beijing are always very proud of Tsinghua). Since she spoke English, I was also able to clarify that I don’t need to re-register when I return to Beijing from a trip unless I leave Mainland China.

In my adventures around Beijing, one of the things that I’m continuously struck by is the art in the subway stations. You can see flowers, ink brush style art, sculptures, and fun cartoon characters. In the album below, all of the silver/grey/metal scultptures are at the Qinghuadongluxikou subway station (the station nearest to Tsinghua) and depict typical university life. Also, the bottom cartoon characters are all found on the ceiling at the Olympic Green Subway station and I think are the mascots from the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Beyond the subway stations, I’ve seen lots of other cool looking things, including walls of crane machine games, seas of bicycles, some very interesting looking statues and fountains, and some lovely flower displays. Although fall has certainly set in in Beijing, people still like to have nicely manicured flower displays. One of the coolest buildings that you’ll see in the many photos below is the China CCTV headquarters. As Ted told me, it’s commonly dubbed “The Pants Building” and I think it should be pretty obvious which one it is! The China Vegan Festival was right by that building and it makes for a lot of really cool photos.

As the sunset has been getting earlier and earlier, I want to note that the city looks really cool at night! Here are just a few pictures!

I also love that almost anywhere I walk there are what appear to be traditional Chinese lion statues and architecture. Some of them are huge (the first one was probably 20 ft tall), but others are much smaller and they are always pretty menacing.

I also saw some of my favorite things (giraffes, astronauts, and pandas)!

Animals of Beijing

As I was exploring Gulou, I was able to see a lot of cute dogs and cats. In particular this is the one neighborhood cat who’s been very friendly every time I’ve seen her. She comes right up to my door as if she owns the place and definitely didn’t want me to leave to go for my run. I’ve also run across a number of neighborhood dogs as well as two different areas with pets up for adoption (including at the Vegan Festival). Although I don’t plan to adopt a cat while I’m here, they are very cute!

Jewish Life

Although there weren’t any major Jewish Holidays in October, I did attend Shabbat services at Roberta & Ted’s home every week. I really am quite fond of the community, but I also love that it’s at their home as it feels much homier and I think makes it feel more like a community than if we were in a random rental space. One of the added bonuses is that since Ted is in charge of the Shabbat meal, he likes to have fun with it. As such, each Shabbat has a theme. This months themes were Chinese National Day Shabbat, Hot Pot Shabbat, Indian Shabbat, Oktoberfest Shabbat, and “Challah”ween Shabbat. Every week Roberta makes delicious homemade challah (she’s been experimenting with different flavors and we even had sauerkraut challah for Oktoberfest Shabbat) and Ted creates a menu surrounding the theme. The food and conversation are always great and it’s great to meet familiar faces as well as a number of new people. You can definitely tell that China has very slowly started to re-open as there has been a small, but steady wave of people who are either returning after a long time away or are new to the community. This past week we welcomed five Jewish Schwarzman Scholars (it’s a prestigious International Relations/Global Affairs Masters Program at Tsinghua) to Shabbat, which was incredibly exciting for me as it was really nice to meet some other Westerners on Tsinghua’s campus!

Here are a few pictures from Hot Pot Shabbat and “Challah”ween Shabbat. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Hot Pot, it’s kind of like a build your own soup, where generally people will share a communal soup pot and you add veggies (and traditionally meats, but here everything is vegetarian) to a broth to be cooked. Although the food is always themed, we definitely went all out on the aesthetics for “Challah”ween!

More Vegan Food!!!

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the China Vegan Festival, it didn’t prevent me from enjoying some other delicious food. As I mentioned, when Lu and Weida visited Tsinghua, Zheng took most of the group (about 10 people) to lunch at one of the restaurants on campus. Now, unlike me, Zheng is not a vegetarian, so I was left a bit in a lurch when he ordered for the entire table. When the food started arriving, I asked Lu which were vegetarian and when the answer was not much, thankfully Zheng was able to order some additional veggie dishes (okra, tofu skins, greens, & bok choy and mushrooms). I will say, it was fun explaining to Zheng what I do and don’t eat. No shrimp, chicken, chicken soup, … I’ve now since realized that it’s probably easier to tell someone that I’d eat what a Buddhist would eat.

I also ventured to another Vegetarian restaurant here in Beijing and had a delicious meal. Since I wasn’t able to celebrate my Mother’s birthday with her in person, she asked that I get a delicious meal in her honor and this meal didn’t disappoint! I got a yummy mushroom dish, tofu skins, veggie beef, and sword beans. I think the tofu skins were my favorite, but the mushrooms were a close second (I guess this is becoming a pattern with my favorite dishes)! I really don’t understand why tofu skins aren’t readily available in the US as their delicious! This restaurant also had a large vegan grocery store below it full of a wide array of frozen vegan meats. I was able to get some vegan meatballs that I’m excited to try later this month.

I also got to see (and even eat for some of them) a number of Western-style baked goods. The cinnamon bun and PB chocolate chip cookie (both delicious) are from “The Bake Shop” a very cute small cafe that one of my friends from Kehillat introduced me to! It’s about a 10 minute walk from my apartment and I’ve been told that it has the best bread in Beijing, so I’ll be back to buy a loaf the next time I need one. I also made my own vegan PB cookies (right panel) so that I have something sweet to snack on in my apartment!

I also found a place that sells local made and locally sourced vegan chocolate!!! And I got to try a traditional Chinese sweet or hard sugar covered strawberries. I think this is the Chinese equivalent of fair food/chocolate covered strawberries. Other than the sugar being a bit hard to bite through (kind of like a lollipop), it was quite a treat!

East Meets West

Like l mentioned last month, going to the foreign import grocery store is part of my weekly routine. I basically treat them as a secondary grocery store for getting packaged foods that I miss from the US or need in various recipes. As you can see, you can definitely get a lot of US (but also German, French, and British brands) if you know where to look.

As I’ve mentioned before, Disney (and other US cartoons) seem to be very popular here, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I’ve also seen a lot of Mickey!

I’ve also seen some more traditional US companies and movies (although I’m not sure if I’ll get to see Dune in theatres, I’m excited that it did make it here to China – it gives me some hope that The Batman will open here next spring) and even a few more surprising things! I found a Sgt. Peppers sign at a record shop (ok, not so surprising) and a kid in a Kobe Bryant jersey (basketball remains really popular here), but a James Joyce named coffee shop seems pretty unusual for China. I think the most surprising this I’ve seen in regards to the west is definitely the Avril Lavigne branded iced tea! It’s not the early 2000s, so I was pretty shocked to see that one.

Anime & Comics

As I’ve discussed before, I’m always on the lookout for all things manga, anime, and comics when I’m exploring Beijing. Here are just some of the anime and manga things I saw this month. Although statues feature heavily, you’ll also notice that I found a lot of anime in the wild (meaning in/on cars and motorcycles and even at the foreign import store – and this time, I bought all four Dragon Ball Z sodas!). You can also see how manga-style art is used to advertise restaurants here in Beijing.

Like with the manga and anime stuff, I found lots of comic book related sculptures (yes those are Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man drawing mannequins from IKEA) as well as some in the wild (and even a guy in a Spiderman suit). Regardless of if it is Marvel or DC, it’s great to see some of my favorite characters here in China!

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of the blog, thank you so much for reading!! I really hope that you liked the visual exploration of Beijing and getting to see all of the sights of Gulou, Tsinghua, and the China Vegan Festival! We’re now up to real time, so while I don’t know what the next month will bring, I’m sure there are lots of fun and exciting adventures on the horizons, so I hope you’ll stick around and enjoy them! I’m planning on posting around the beginning of every month (either right before or right after the 1st, it’ll depend on when the weekend is). If you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in getting notified when I post new blogs, please click the subscribe button on the right. Thanks again for reading my blog!

In Peace,

Emmet

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the fourth installment of Astronomer in Beijing! For all of you who reached out to me about the blog, thank you so much for the comments. I really appreciate the feedback in any form you prefer. I’m glad so many of you liked seeing the pictures of the Great Wall of China. It really was a magnificent trip and writing this blog was a fun way to reflect on it. Before I dive into my thrilling apartment search and other fun stuff that I did at the end of September, I wanted to remind you all that if you’re interested in getting notified about future installments of my blog, please click the subscribe button on the right. Also, I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe and healthy! I know that my life appears to have returned to normal, but the impact of the pandemic is still being felt in China. This week (in real time), there were 6 new cases of COVID in Beijing (thankfully about 20 miles from where I live) and because of that, the government has put some restrictions in place on large gatherings. Additionally, masks are still (and have been) required on all public transportation and inside most non-eating venues (and obviously people are required to do all of the quarantines to come to China to begin with).

Finding an Apartment

Although I had a lovely time staying with Roberta & Ted, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome and was also a bit anxious to finally get to unpack my suitcases. As such, much of my time when I wasn’t doing the fun things that I’ve previously shared was spent trying to find an apartment. The last time I actually had to look for a place was before I started graduate school and although I really liked my apartment in Boston (Go Brighton!), I knew that I didn’t want to just settle on a place, but could afford to be picky. Because of this, I took my time finding a place. In terms of the actual rental process, it is pretty different here in China. Unlike in the US, where the person searching for an apartment has to actively look through Craig’s List or on a realtor’s website and contact an agent to find out if a place is still available, here, you need to contact an agent and tell them what you’re looking for. The agents will then send you possible apartments that may (or may not) meet your needs. Over the span of the three weeks that I was looking for an apartment, I was in contact with three agents and probably saw thousands of pictures of a hundred or so apartments. All of this is done on WeChat, so I’d get lots of sporadic messages at all hours of the day about if I was interested in a given apartment. As I said, I was trying to be a bit picky, so in my mind, the things that I wanted were a one or two bedroom furnished apartment with a living room, a kitchen, and an oven.

Although many of the apartments and houses I’ve seen during my time in China look pretty similar to the west on the interior, there are a few key differences that I’ve seen that made it trickier for me to find an apartment. For starters, when I was looking for a place in the US, it would be unheard of to make sure there is an oven. However, most traditional Chinese homes do not have an oven. I’ve had a few discussions with different people about this and I think it boils down to differences in food cost and what is the overall priority of different things here in China. Specifically, I’ve had friends who are Chinese say that it isn’t because they don’t like to cook, but rather, they cannot fathom why someone would spend the time cooking when they can just get a good (and relatively inexpensive) meal from the university cafeteria or restaurant. Given that a meal on Tsinghua’s campus can cost as little as 20rmb (~ $3), I can understand this point. However, for me, I really like cooking and although I enjoy Chinese food (as this blog has shown), it’s also nice to make some Western food that I can’t get as easily here. One of the other features that I desperately wanted to avoid having in my apartment was a loft. Since I’m 6ft2in, I’m a fair bit taller than the average Chinese person and many of the lofted apartments that I saw pictures of have very low slanted ceilings, which would be unusable to me. Although I saw a lot of pictures of cute apartments with them, I wanted to be able to take full advantage of my entire apartment. Another major difference between the US and Chinese processes is that in the US, a realtor won’t show you an apartment that is under construction. That’s not the case in China. I was sent at least five different apartments that looked more like a demolition zone with mountains of concrete that I’d be told would be ready in a few days. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t love the idea of renting an unfinished apartment and thus asked the agents to not send me those.

Although it was nice to see so many different apartments via weChat in so many different parts of the city, I must admit that the Chinese rental process was exhausting. Because I was always at the whims of the agent and interacting with multiple agents, it felt like the process would never end and was a constant barrage of seeing less than desirable housing. After my trip to the Great Wall, I was hoping to be able to find a place within the next week or so. I spent much of Wednesday and Thursday rejecting apartments until I was told by the agent that I ultimately used that there were no more apartments that met my specifications in Gulou or the surrounding areas. Although this felt unlikely to me, I definitely was a bit dejected and started to try to figure out if there were other areas I might want to live. However, later that afternoon, he sent me an ad for the apartment that I ultimately ended up renting! When I saw that there was a kitchen (with an oven!), bedroom, and living room, and that it was in Gulou and in my price range, I knew I needed to visit as soon as possible. (Ironically, two agents sent me the ad for my apartment almost simultaneously, and was a bit tricky to figure out who to use). Above are just a few pictures of my apartment before I moved in and unpacked all of my stuff. Although you can’t see it in any of the photos, I did get my oven, as well as a separate living room and bedroom (and yes, that is a washing machine in the kitchen – that’s pretty standard here). I also have a really cool rooftop deck (see the first picture above). Although autumn has definitely begun in Beijing and I haven’t had the chance to enjoy it a ton, I’m planning to make the most of it in the spring and summer! Because the entire process was so stressful and I didn’t want to lose out on the apartment, I ended up signing my lease on the same day as I visited the apartment. Although I still didn’t have a bank account at this point, I was able to have Jesse pay my first 3 months rent and my realtor fee (Thank you so much Jesse! And yes, I’ll be paying you back soon).

Although I didn’t end up moving into my apartment until a week later (the landlord needed to do a little bit of painting and cleaning), I was able to get the internet set up for my apartment so that once I moved in, I would be able to actually live in it. You can see a few pictures of my apartment from when I finally moved in here (I’ll share some more next week, too)! For those of you with eagle eyes, you’ll notice a lot of mementos from Saratoga, Boston, and everywhere in between! Although schlepping all of those suitcases through the Shanghai airport was a pain, I’m really glad that I did as it has helped transform my apartment into a home. Thankfully, I didn’t have to deal with moving all five suitcases by myself from Roberta & Ted’s to Gulou. Ted was able to drive me over and help me to put them into my apartment, which made the transition infinitely simpler. Again, I really need to stress just how welcoming, helpful, and generous Roberta & Ted were to welcome me into their home and help me get situated here in Beijing. The Kehillat Beijing community has already become an integral part of my Beijing identity and I really can’t imagine living here without it.

Miyazaki X Beijing

Beyond my apartment search, I also got to visit my first Chinese Art Museum. As you’ve probably discovered from reading this blog, I’m a huge anime fan! When I discovered that the Today Art Gallery in Beijing was hosting an exhibit on the work of Hayao Miyazaki I knew I needed to check it out. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Miyazaki’s name, you’ll probably recognize at least a few of the characters below. Miyazaki is arguably the most famous and important animator in Japan and responsible for the elevation of anime beyond television into movie features. Some of his more famous movies (at least in the US) are Spirited Away, Nausicaa, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro (I think all of the Miyazaki Catalog – and all of Studio Ghibli for that matter – is available on HBOMax, so if you’re inspired from these pictures, check them out). The exhibit took over three floors of the museum and captured Miyazaki’s entire opus.

The exhibit started out with a retrospective of all of Miyazaki’s movies through hundreds of movie posters. It was really cool to see which movies I recognized and also realize that there were so many that I still need to see. After the movie posters, the exhibit opened up into a detailed description of Miyazaki’s working career. Although I had to use Baidu translate to translate the descriptions into English, it was really cool to see the giant cutouts of the different characters and take some selfies.

The next section of the exhibit was one of my favorites! Here, the had recreations of story boards, original character designs, and animation cels to show how anime comes to life. It’s really cool to see how the rough sketches become the polished masterpieces that wow us on the screen. One of my favorite thing in comics (and comic book social media) is when you can see the full creative process, so this was really cool! Beyond the pictures shown here, the also had an entire floor showing the original art from a variety of Miyazaki’s work! Hands down, this was my favorite part of the exhibit. I’m so used to see the crisp, clean lines that define Miyazaki’s animation, so it was fascinating to see the original pencil sketches and watercolor work. I really enjoyed seeing the early designs for characters from Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, and Spirited Away. While I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of original comic art (and I even own a few pieces) at Boston Comic Con, it’s pretty rare to get to see unpublished and early sketch work from manga (at least when I was in the US). It was really cool to see the evolution in the way the sketches were done. Much of the early work was pencil and watercolor sketches, while the later work was definitely more pen and ink.

I really wish I could share all of the amazing art with you, but unfortunately the museum asked people not to take pictures in this part of the museum. Thankfully I’ll have all of these other photos and my memories of an amazing exhibit. If this exhibit or another similar one ever travel to a city near you, I highly recommend it!!! However, it is worth noting that the no photos signs didn’t prevent many of the Chinese patrons from taking pictures. However, I didn’t want any of the docents to single me out. I will say that one of the major differences that I found between US/European museums and this museum in particular is that in the US you don’t touch the artwork (or the glass that is covering it). Here, many of the patrons were touching everything to the point that it looked like the exhibit should be more interactive than it actually was.

The last part of the exhibit was a life size recreation of some of the scenes from My Neighbor Totoro. Given the first two parts of the exhibit, this was definitely a huge change of pace, but still a lot of fun. I was a bit surprised by how many kids were at the museum until I saw this section! This was definitely made for them! The large scenes reminded me of something out of Disney World! It was also reminiscent of a Beatrix Potter exhibit that I remember seeing when I was 6 and we visited the Lake District (Mom, feel free to correct me here). It was really cute to see all of the kids getting photos with Totoro and even I didn’t want to miss out on the fun!

Wandering Around Beijing

Between visiting my apartment, going to Tsinghua for work, and the Today Art Museum, I also got to see a lot of really cool stuff here in Beijing. As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the things I really enjoy about Beijing is that all of the subway stations have a unique artistic flair. Here you can see imagery from three wildly different subway stations. The two right hand side images are from the Olympic Park subway station that I walk through everyday on my commute to Tsinghua. Because it is the nearest subway to the 2008 Beijing stadium (which will also be hosting some sports for the upcoming 2022 games this winter), all of the imagery is tied to sport. The bottom panel shows some of the sights from the Gulodaijie subway station near my apartment including a brilliant golden inlay of the Drum Tower.

The city art isn’t just limited to the subway stations. After signing my lease, I wandered around and saw some really cool statues and traditional Chinese architecture. I also saw some pretty cool skyscrapers and what appears to be an observatory of some kind – I believe it might be associated with a science museum, but I need to double check. I also really love see seeing the various street ads, especially those highlighting the Chinese Olympic team or cute cartoon animals.

While exploring the area near my rental agent’s office, I wandered into a pretty cool mall filled with smiling faces! The yellow logo wasn’t the only fun thing I saw, I also saw some cool in store advertisements (like the giant cartoon kid and red dog wearing sunglasses). Again, astronauts made another appearance in marketing, further highlighting the cultural cache astronauts and space have right now.

On my trip to the Today Art Museum to see the Miyazaki World exhibit, I started to get the sense that I was approaching the museum because the amount of abstract/modern art started to increase the closer I got to the museum. One of my favorites was the giant red caged T-Rex! I don’t know if this was an homage to Jurassic Park, but that’s the vibe I got. There was also a really interesting statue recreating The Last Supper with Pigs. Based on the connotation of “capitalist pigs”, I’m sure this was a political statement, but I thought the piece was quite clever. Furthermore, there were a number of cool sights including a cat cafe and a rather creepy/intense series of metallic statues that seemed to be screaming out to people.

Also, when I was setting up my internet, I saw the first real signs that the Olympics will be here in a few months! Although I don’t yet know if I’ll be able to attend any events, I’ll definitely be commenting on the state and attitude of the city this winter, especially during the Games in future posts.

Wandering Around Tsinghua

As I showed in my second blog post, Tsinghua’s campus is really pretty! It has a very curated park feel and the more I get to wander around, the more I see picturesque sites. One of the things I really like about the campus, which I hope all of my pictures capture, is the juxtaposition of new and old architecture and design. Obviously the first three pictures I posted show off the hyper modern, but other areas of the campus highlight an entirely different atmosphere and transport me to a much calmer and quieter headspace. I also did manage to find the Tsinghua Bookstore/Gift shop, so I’ll hopefully be able to get some Tsinghua swag pretty soon!

Food

No Astronomer in Beijing blog post would be complete without a few food pictures to whet the appetite. After successfully signing my lease, I decided to treat myself to a wonderful lunch at a vegan restaurant near the rental agent’s office. I got a delicious mushroom dish (I’m really a fan of these long thin mushrooms!). Because it was a cold and rainy day, I tried my first noodle soup, which was lovely. It was jam packed full of tofu, mushrooms, greens, and noodles. It wasn’t ramen, but it was definitely reminiscent of ramen. I also got a lotus root meatball dish with potatoes that was delicious, too! Now, you’ll probably notice a fourth dish. Unlike restaurants in the US that give you bread as a free appetizer, this restaurant gave me hawthorns, a little apple-like fruit that is super popular here in China! I also saw some really pretty cakes when I visited the mall later that day! I didn’t try any, but I thought you’d all like to see what a Chinese bakery display looks like.

Animals of Beijing

As this was my last week staying with Roberta & Ted, I made sure to spend some extra time with their dogs, Mimi and Honey. I even got to take them for a walk when Roberta & Ted went away for a weekend. I can’t remember when the last time I took a dog for a walk was and while it took the dogs a little bit of time to decide that they actually wanted to leave the house, once we got started, they knew exactly where they wanted to go and what to do.

I also saw a number of other animals while I was exploring Beijing and the Gulou area specifically. I want to highlight the outdoor fish tank that’s near Roberta & Ted’s house. I’ll let you know if they stay out there all winter. I also caught a photo of a bird by the vegan restaurant I went too. One of the things that most excited me about living in Gulou is that there are a lot of neighborhood dogs and cats! I’m especially a big fan of the cat, who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a few times sitting right outside of my apartment’s front door.

East Meets West

As I explore Beijing, I’m always on the lookout for recognizable western influences. When I was at the mall, I wandered in to a Chinese bookstore half hoping they might have English language books, but also to see what a Chinese bookstore was like. I didn’t find any English language books, but I did see Harry Potter! I also found a movie theatre that had at least one non-Chinese movie playing (Free Guy – the Chinese movie industry is a big deal and it definitely dominates what is playing). I also saw two of my favorite Disney characters in Chip n’ Dale. When I was at Tsinghua, I saw an ad for an airing of the British National Theatre production of Frankenstein from a few years back staring Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller. And right by my apartment is a super Chinese looking McDonalds!

One of my favorite aspects of China that I’ve been wanting to highlight for a while are international foreign import grocery stores. Although Chinese grocery stores occasionally have Western products (mostly candy, Oreos, and soda), when I want to get Western products like cereal, canned beans, ketchup, tomato sauce, peanut butter, or tortilla, these markets are the place to go. Unlike typical US supermarkets, the stock is a little bit more fluid. You can’t always be sure that the market will have the exact brand they had last time, but it’s been a godsend for when I’m in the mood for a little taste of home.

Anime and Comics

Beyond the Miyazaki World exhibit, I also noticed a lot of other cool anime things. While I did see One Piece and Demon Slayer figurines and manga at the bookstore (whether it was in Chinese or Japanese, I’m not sure), I also saw some “anime in the wild” like the One Piece stickers on the computers at the realtor’s office and the ads for My Neighbor Totoro and another anime film on Tsinghua’s campus. I think my favorite find was the DragonBall Z soda that I found at the import store. While I didn’t buy a soda this time (hopefully I’ll see them again), it’s really cool to be perusing an aisle and notice some of my favorite characters.

Beyond the anime characters, I also saw some cool DC comics and Marvel figures (yes, that’s a display of the same DC figurines I bought last week). Although anime is definitely more popular than superheroes here, I’m glad both have a presence.

And with that, I’ve put a close on my first month living in Beijing! I hope you enjoyed getting to read all about my adventures here in Beijing in September. Next week, I’ll be switching to the first of my monthly format, so you’ll get to hear what I’ve been up to in October, all about getting adjusted to life in Beijing living on my own, and how my research is going now that I’m finally settled in. I hope you’re enjoying the blog, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please click the button on the righthand side of this post! Let me know what you think! It’d be great to hear from you!

In Peace,

Emmet

Hi Everyone, Thank you again for reading my blog! I’m so glad that so many of you are enjoying hearing about and seeing pictures of my time in Beijing! As I teased in the last post, I hope you’re excited to see pictures of the Great Wall (like the one I took that I use as the background image for the blog). Before I dive in, I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy! And again, if you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in getting an e-mail when I update my blog, click the button on the right.

Yom Kippur

As I mentioned last week, my arrival in Beijing was perfectly timed to align with the Jewish High Holy Days. As such, I was able to celebrate Yom Kippur with Kehillat Beijing and go to services in person. Like Rosh Hashanah, Roberta & Ted hosted services in their home (as well as lovely pre-fast and break-fast meals!). Because Yom Kippur was in the middle of the week, the crowd was definitely a bit smaller. However, it was still very nice to meet many new people. Traditionally, Kehillat Beijing has brought a Rabbi over from the US or Israel to lead services. However, because of the COVID restrictions/quarantining, they haven’t been able to do that. Like Rosh Hashanah, Roberta led the services with a lot of community interaction. For those of you in the Temple Sinai community, you might remember that I’ve done my fair share of High Holiday chanting. Because Roberta was looking for volunteers, a couple of days before Yom Kippur I looked through the Torah portions to see what I remembered. Surprisingly, I still remembered most of the 5th Aliyah, so with the help of tapes recorded by my home congregation’s rabbis (Rabbi Linda and Rabbi Jonathon – thank you so much for sending those tapes to Jesse!), I was able to re-learn the portion and chant it! It was really cool to participate in such a meaningful way in a community I just joined. It really helped to make my first Yom Kippur abroad feel special.

Visiting the Great Wall of China

Because of the timing of all of the Jewish and Chinese holidays, both Sukkot and the mid-Autumn festival coincide with a few days after Yom Kippur (both are governed by Lunar calendars). In China, the mid-Autumn festival is a celebration of the autumn full moon and a symbol of family reunion. Although this is a lovely sentiment, it was a bit bittersweet for me since I obviously wasn’t reunited with my family to celebrate. However, I did get to try a few different moon cakes, the traditional pastry for the holiday. For those of you who are unfamiliar, they’re pretty different from any western-style pastries I’ve had. There is a thin layer of dough and they are packed with various fillings. Unlike baozi that I’ve shown previously, moon cakes are pretty dense. The ones that I particularly enjoyed had a mix of nuts (it kind of tasted like haroset from Passover) and red bean paste. Traditionally they also contain a whole egg yolk, but I didn’t try any of those.

Because the mid-Autumn festival holiday is a government holiday (and people get time off from work), Roberta, Ted, and their son Ben were planning to go to their vacation home in Huairou and invited me to join. Since my only experiences in China up to this point had been in Shanghai and Beijing, I was excited to go and experience non big-city life! Although Huairou is technically in Beijing, we were about an hour from where Roberta & Ted live in Beijing (by car) and an hour and a half from my current apartment. There is a reason that people sometime refer to these cities as Megacities! These cities have governmental districts that are enormous, even if they can be divided up into a main city with smaller regional cities surrounding it. Huairou is famous for chestnuts and walnuts and as you’ll see any many of the pictures below, I got to see lots of chestnut trees (those spiky little balls are the chestnuts)! They’re pretty much everywhere and the only downside is that the husks that the chestnuts grow in are really prickly and can get stuck in your skin if you pick them up (or in a dog’s paw if they step on them).

While it was a real treat to spend three days away from the grind of city life in Beijing, the most exciting part of this trip is that Huairou is the area closest to Beijing where you can see and climb the Great Wall of China!!! I actually got to hike and walk the Great Wall twice in a span of less than 48 hours! The two trips were really different and it was cool to see a more touristy side of the Great Wall and a more secluded portion. On Monday afternoon, Roberta and I took the dogs on a hike through the chestnut orchards (see above photos) that culminated in my getting to go to the Great Wall. As the chestnut orchards feel a bit more like a mountainous forest than the apple orchards in the North East, it was really exciting to see the Great Wall start to become visible as we got closer and closer.

For this hike, we ended up at the commercial area where I was able to take a ski life up to the Great Wall. For those of you who don’t like heights, this probably isn’t the ideal method to get to the Wall. The ski lift definitely felt just a bit precarious as it carried me over the mountainous terrain to the top of the Great Wall. However, it does provide for some amazing photographs of Huairou and the Wall itself. For those of you who are wondering, that is indeed a giant slide track down the side of the mountain from the top of the Great Wall. As you can see in one of the top photos, one of the options for getting down from the top of the Wall is to drive a go-kart down the mountain. Although this looks fun, I wasn’t sure how fast the karts drove and since I didn’t have a backpack with me, was a bit concerned with the prospect of losing my phone as I flew down the track (apparently they actually move quite slowly), so I opted to take the ski lift down. For now, I’ll just have to save that as a thing to do next time I visit.

The Great Wall is magnificent! It’s really cool to walk on an actual part of history. As I hope my pictures show, with the exception of a few handrails, everything is maintained/restored to how it was built in the 1300s as a way to defend the borders of the Ming Dynasty from the Mongols (although the Wall is an enduring symbol of China and human ingenuity, it was not entirely effective at securing the Ming Dynasty borders). The entire time I was on the wall, I was pretty much in awe that I was actually there. Because I got to the Wall around 4:30pm, I was able to Facetime Jesse and show him some of the pictures that you’re seeing here live. Because the public portion (and thus the ski lift down) closes at 5pm, I wasn’t able to do to much of a hike, but that didn’t stop me from trekking all the way to the 3rd tower that you can see in the top left picture (because I lost track of time, I had to sprint back). Given its construction over 700 years ago it’s amazing how level and stable all of the steps are (just look at all of those steps). However, because of the recent rain and overall damp weather, some of the steps were quite slick, so those handrails came in handy. Although it was an amazing hike, I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like to hike the Great Wall wearing traditional Chinese sandals/slippers as opposed to my Mizuno running shoes. By the end of the my trek, my feet were definitely a bit sore and I assume my shoes have much better support than traditional footwear. One of the things that surprised me about the wall is just how much of it is stairs as opposed to flat walkways. Maybe this is just my naivete, but I wasn’t expecting almost my entire walk to be a climb up and down steps. Although in hindsight, given how much the natural terrain governs the geography of the wall, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Also, you might be wondering why my pictures seem to be lacking the throngs of tourists that you might see if you search for pictures of the Great Wall online. I assume this is because it was late in the day and the weather had been cold and rainy in the morning (I saw a few groups leaving the area as I approached the ski life), but regardless, the lack of tourists made the trip even more special for me as at times it felt like I was alone with the wall and could be transported back to the past where I might be walking the wall as a scout looking for invaders!

As I mentioned, I got to hike to and walk the Great Wall not once, but twice. I hiked to the Great Wall for a second time on Wednesday morning. Because Roberta & Ted hosted a lovely Sukkot party (see the following section for a description of that and some pictures of our Sukkah), there were a lot of people staying at their home in Huairou (despite Huairou technically being in Beijing, after 10pm or so, it can be difficult to get a taxi to drive you back to the city proper). Bright and early Wednesday morning (at 6am), I headed out on a hike to the Great Wall with another Kehillat member, Hal (the other guy in the photos below). We had approximate directions from Roberta, so we spent much of the first hour of our hike (in which we knew we were approaching the Great Wall since it was getting larger on the horizon) wondering if we were going the right way. As you can see, after we walked out of Huairou proper, the city gave way to a far more rustic and rural/mountainous landscape. Once we left the main road, the we were able to follow a cobblestone path toward the wall. This definitely felt like Robert Frost’s road less traveled. As you can see in the pictures below, this was not the commercial way to the Great Wall that I took previously. Instead, it felt like we were discovering the Great Wall for the first time! Especially, when, because of the dense forrest, it seemed to just appear out of nowhere.

After about an hour of our hike, Hal and I finally made it to the wall (see the pictures below). As you can see, I was again incredibly fortunate to be basically alone on the Wall (we think this was because the previous day had been a holiday and most people were going back to work on Wednesday). Again, I was struck by the shear size of the Wall. As my pictures show, the wall stretches on for what seems like an eternity, tracing the tops of the mountains. Because of the area where we walked was right near a mountain summit, we were able to scale the wall up the mountain. Boy were those stairs steep!!! If you look closely at some of the photos of me and Hal, you can see that these steps were sometimes more like a ladder than stairs. As I mentioned earlier, I can’t imagine how Chinese soldiers were supposed to move quickly across the Wall. While I was sure of my footing climbing up the Wall, when we were going down the stairs, especially in the steep parts, I ended up using the Wall to brace myself so that I wouldn’t fall. After all the hiking and climbing, my calfs and feet definitely felt it the next morning. However, the views were definitely worth it. I mean, just look at that landscape and how the Great Wall snakes across the mountains. It’s difficult to image how the Chinese built it! Because Hal and I hiked the Wall so early in the morning our time, I was able to FaceTime both my brother (who was on the bus on his way to work) and my parents in Saratoga! It was really cool to show them the landscape and have them with me at the Great Wall. Because of how this section was set up, we got to go through one of the “fort” areas that connects different sections, where we had to climb an actual ladder to get to the next portion of the Wall. After being in China for over five weeks at this point, it was incredibly fulfilling to do something that felt authentically Chinese and authentically China!

Overall, the hike took us about 3.5 hours from start to finish. I’m so glad that Hal mentioned the idea of hiking to the Great Wall the previous night as it is one of the extreme highlights of my time in Beijing so far and I definitely wouldn’t have done it by myself!

As many of you know, I really enjoy drawing. Although most of my drawing efforts focus on pencil and ink drawings of manga/anime/comic book characters, the magnificence of the Great Wall deserved to be commemorated. Using my iPad, I created this piece to immortalize my experience with climbing the seemingly endless steps of the Great Wall. I plan to do some more China inspired art while I’m here and you can be sure that I’ll be sharing it on this blog.

Sukkot

As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons for the trip to Huairou was to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Sukkot is a harvest holiday that traditionally coincided with the harvesting of the fields. As part of Sukkot, Jews traditionally build a Sukkah, a temporary structure made of at least three free standing walls with a roof that allows one to see the stars. I have many fond memories of Sukkot in Saratoga and going to Sukkah Parties at Lollie Abramson’s home, as well as more recently getting to eat a meal in the Sukkah at Marshall Einhorn’s home in Brookline. When I left for China in August, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be able to eat a meal in the Sukkah, let alone build one, in China. As you can see from the pictures below, Roberta and I spent most of Tuesday morning constructing the Sukkah from scratch. We took advantage of a few garden walls and trees in their yard, but for the most part, everything was done by hand and hard work. We started with lots of long pieces of wood that we bought the previous day. Using nails and zip ties, we constructed a pretty impressive Sukkah (at least if you ask me). This is the first time that I remember building a Sukkah from scratch and it’s really cool to see something come together like this in the span of only five or so hours.

As you can see in the above pictures, we didn’t just build the Sukkah for ourselves, but for the Jewish community of Beijing. Roberta & Ted invited the entire Kehillat Beijing community out to their home for a Sukkah party. It was very much in the spirit of my mother’s Rosh Hashanah Sweet’s Party (although there were not nearly as many sweets)! It was really nice to celebrate with so many people and to show off our Sukkah! I think more so than celebrating the High Holy Days or Shabbat in Beijing, building the Sukkah really reminded me that you can be Jewish and celebrate literally anywhere in the world.

Wandering Around Huairou (and Beijing, too!)

Unlike what I showed in last week’s post, I didn’t have as much time to explore Beijing since I was in Huairou for three days. Instead, I want to share some of the interesting sights around Huairou that don’t quite align with going to the Great Wall or celebrating Sukkot. As you can see from a few different pictures (in previous entries), many of the neighborhoods (in both Beijing and Huairou) have ornate gates to mark the entrances to hutongs. Also, it seems like anywhere I turn there are interesting Chinese statues and stone monuments. I believe the stone monuments (like the ones with red lettering) are tied to government buildings (at least the other ones I’ve seen are all near police stations), but I’ll need to double check that. One of the highlights of Huairou was this amazing fruit and vegetable stand that we stopped at. They had an array of fresh and freshly dried fruits. I had some amazing peaches, cherries, apples, and sundried cherry tomatoes. It was also really cool to see pumpkins, too, as I think of those as an American fall crop and didn’t realize they grow them here.

I also did see a few interesting signs and statues in Beijing. As I’ve said before, I love the giraffe signs! I also really love seeing panda statues. The one of the two pandas is right by a subway station that I go to (Wangjing South for those of you who know Beijing) and it’s a giant statue in the middle of a busy road. I’ve also found that the subways stations have some cool art on the inside, like the two lego-esque displays (see the right hand side of the gallery of images below).

Food

It wouldn’t be an Astronomer in Beijing blog post without some food to whet your appetite. After my hike to the Great Wall with Roberta, we all went to a local inn in Huairou for a delicious meal (it’s really nice that Roberta and Ted are vegetarian, since that means we all eat the same food). This was definitely a bit more of a rustic style meal, but it was very tasty. We got a mushroom dish, roasted peanuts – which are really hard to eat with chopsticks, cauliflower, tofu, scallion pancakes, and cabbage.

Although not food from a restaurant, I also wanted to show off a picture of sticky sesame cauliflower that I made for the potluck portion of the Sukkah party. It was a lot of fun to get to cook for everyone and I got a ton of compliments! Because of the rave reviews, I’m planning to make something for an upcoming Shabbat dinner, too!

Animals of Beijing

While I did see a few wild/stray/neighborhood dogs in Huairou, I didn’t get a chance to snap any photos, so instead, here are some cute photos of Roberta & Ted’s dogs, Honey & Mimi. They are definitely photogenic. I also was able to get a selfie with them! Mimi spent the entire drive to Huairou on my lap, so I think the dogs definitely like me. When we were at the inn that we had dinner at, I also saw a very pretty family of cats! They definitely were hoping we’d have some leftovers for them and were very friendly.

East Meets West

Unfortunately, not even the Great Wall can escape the draw of American commercialism. Right by the entry to the Wall where I took the ski lift up, there was a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. That was definitely a bit surreal! On a very different note, on Sunday night, before we drove to Huairou, Ben, Roberta & Ted’s son performed at a “What the Folk” night at a Gulou area bar. This was my first time seeing live, indoor music since I saw the Broadway touring production of The Band’s Visit with my parents at Proctors in Schenechtady. It was a great show (Ben was great) and it was really cool to hear live music again. I’ve featured it in this section, because the bar had a super hipster vibe and I felt like I’d been transported to a Cambridge seeing a small indie show and not Beijing.

Anime and Comics

Although I didn’t see as many comics or anime stores this week, I did see a few different things that I thought were pretty cool! I saw a woman in a Popeye shirt, a guy reading manga on his phone on the subway, and a Neon Genesis Evangelion sticker on someone’s bike! I also saw some (and bought) some really cool DC comics mini figures!

Anyway, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of the blog, thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed seeing all of the pictures, especially of the Great Wall! I hope to hear from many of you! Please don’t hesitate to comment! And if you haven’t yet, subscribe with the button on the right!

Next week’s post will focus on my apartment search in Beijing as well as some other fun adventures that I’ve had here in Beijing, so I hope you’ll check it out!

In Peace,

Emmet

Hi Everyone, Thank you again for reading my blog! It was really great to hear from so many of you about my first installment and I hope that if you’re reading this, you’re excited to learn about Beijing. Before I dive in, I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy! And again, if you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in getting an e-mail when I update my blog, click the button on the right.

Taking the High Speed Rail to Beijing

After spending two wonderful weeks in Shanghai with Jesse, it was finally time to head to Beijing. For those of you who are wondering why I didn’t head directly to Beijing once I got out of quarantine, it was for two reasons. 1) I wanted to see Jesse and 2) I wanted to avoid having to do another quarantine once I arrived in Beijing.

In terms of actually traveling to Beijing, I had two options, I could take a plane or the high speed rail. As the header of this section suggests, I took the high speed rail. A lot of Jesse’s friends mentioned that planes are prone to delays due to storms and I didn’t want to get stuck in airport. Thankfully buying a train ticket online is super simple and there are high speed trains between Shanghai and Beijing that leave every couple of hours, so I had lots of options. I ended up buying a first class ticket because the online reviews implied that it would be quieter and cleaner (and boy, were they correct)! In terms of the actual train station, the Shanghai train station felt like being in an airport (minus most of the security). The station is probably larger than the Albany airport and has hundreds of trains going in and out of it during the day. You can definitely tell that China has invested a lot more infrastructure dollars in trains than the US. In terms of getting on the train, everything went relatively smoothly. The only snafu I hit was that I had two travel sized bottles of hand sanitizer that I was told I could not bring on the train because they are “alcohol”. Now given my lack of Mandarin, I couldn’t effectively argue that these are more of a soap than a beverage (and given the general state of COVID concern, this seemed a bit ironic), but thankfully I just handed those to Jesse and was able to get on to the train.

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Once I got onto the train, I found that my first class seat was very spacious and incredibly comfortable. I was able to set myself up so that I could read comics and watch tv on my iPad and be very comfortable. It was also really cool to take some pictures of the Chinese countryside as I zoomed across the region. For those of you who haven’t been on a high speed rail, the train was traveling at ~ 300km/hr (and they were updating our speed in real time). Also, one of the added perks of traveling in first class was that they gave us snacks as if this was a flight! I got cookies, crackers, wasabi peas, and some kind of dried meat (that I didn’t eat). As you can see below, the Chinese countryside is pretty remarkable. It was mostly farmland, but it was also interesting to see some of the mountains in the background. Now for those of you who might be wondering what happened to my suitcases, you’ll notice that I only have one in all of the pictures. No, I didn’t bring four suitcases worth of clothes for Jesse :). Because I knew that dealing with the suitcases was going to be a hassle, Jesse’s friend Shimi helped us to use SF (a Chinese delivery company similar to FedEx) to ship four of my suitcases. In terms of a price comparison, this ended up costing us ~ 400rmb (or close to $60) for all four suitcases and took about three days. For those of you in the states who want to compare prices, these suitcases weighed ~ 100kg and cost me an extra $700 per flight to get to Shanghai, so it was a pleasant surprise for the cost to be so low (I think a 40lb pox is usually about $60 for the same speed of shipping in the US).

I will say that the one thing that I didn’t love about the train was that when I exited the train, it seemed like literally every person had lit up a cigarette. It felt a little bit like a Doonesbury cartoon with Mr. Butts. It’s weird because although some things are similar aesthetically to the US, the cultural acceptability of smoking in public is definitely one of the things that is not similar.

Arrival in Beijing – Jewish Life in Beijing – Welcome to Kehillat Beijing!

One of the other reasons that I didn’t rush to head to Beijing was that for much of my time in Shanghai, I was incredibly uncertain as to where I’d be staying. Before heading to China, I had assumed that Tsinghua would be able to put me up in a hotel in Beijing and that I’d be able to stay there indefinitely as I found suitable accommodations, much like Jesse did when he first came to Shanghai. However, that was not the case. Toward the end of my quarantine, as I was corresponding with the secretary at Tsinghua who had been helping me get here, she informed me that because I had been in Shanghai (and although she didn’t say this, because I am a foreigner), that she couldn’t find any hotels that would take me. Although I still find this hard to believe, her recommendation of renting an apartment without visiting it and directly moving to it after I left Jesse felt both unrealistic and also just like a terrible idea. This is the part of my journey where I got INCREDIBLY lucky. As many of you know, I’m Jewish and my brother is very involved in the Kehilat Shanghai community. What many of you probably don’t know is that the Kehilat Shanghai community has incredibly close ties to the Kehillat Beijing community (and to the best of my understanding, the Kehilat Shanghai community founders included former Kehillat Beijing members who moved to Shanghai and were looking for a similar experience). As luck would have it, Jesse had met the organizers and founders of Kehillat Beijing (Roberta & Ted) some time after I had accepted my postdoc position and mentioned that I would be moving to Beijing. Roberta told Jesse that they were excited to have me join the community and to let her know when I arrived. When Jesse messaged her on WeChat to let her know that I’d be in arriving to Beijing right before the High Holy Days, she offered that if I needed a place to stay, they would be happy to host me. As such, I was able to stay in Roberta & Ted’s lovely home in Beijing and be both fully welcomed to the Beijing Jewish community, but also not be forced to spend more time in a hotel. Stepping out of the narrative for a bit, I’m incredibly grateful to Roberta & Ted for their incredibly generous hospitality! They really did a wonderful job of making me feel welcomed and wanted in Beijing! Additionally, one of the unexpected benefits of staying with Roberta & Ted is that they are vegetarian! This meant that I didn’t need to worry about whether or not something that I wasn’t familiar with in the fridge was a mystery meat product!

I arrived on Saturday, September 4 and for those of you familiar with the Jewish High Holy Days, this meant that I arrived just in time for Rosh Hashanah (it started on Monday evening). Although many of you probably were not able to enjoy in person services, it was really wonderful to get to sit and pray with people in person and hear a room full of people singing familiar melodies even though I’m thousands of miles away from my home community of Temple Sinai. Roberta and Ted hosted the entire Kehillat Beijing community (~ 60 people) at their home for both Erev Rosh Hashanah and a lovely dinner following it. It was a great opportunity to meet a ton of people! Everyone was super friendly and welcoming! I also got to connect with one of my mother’s former Skidmore College Honor’s Forum Students, David (see picture below). It was a bit surreal to be half a world away and meet someone else who spent time in Saratoga (ironically, after this, Roberta mentioned that one of her good friends from Beijing recently moved to the Saratoga area – it really is a smaller world than you think)! It’s probably also the most non-Chinese people I’ve seen in a single location indoors (excluding airports) since I was at the Jazz-Celtics game just before the pandemic started.

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We also had day services on Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah at Roberta and Ted’s home. Unlike the evening service, these were much smaller, quieter, and generally more relaxed. I really enjoyed getting to go around the circle and do English readings and having everyone participate. It reminded me of the spirit of the second day of Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Sinai. After the day service, we had Tashlikh, which is the traditional ceremony wherein one tosses their sins away (into a body of water that is moving). Because there is a park with a pond around the corner from Roberta and Ted’s home (where I went on many runs later in my stay), we were able to walk there as a group (see pictures above). It was really nice to spend some time outside and partake in another part of the ritual that reminds me of home (especially the Tashlikh at Congress Park). Afterwards, we all went to a Chinese restaurant down the block from the park and I got to try some more yummy food! As Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of the Jewish New Year, it definitely was meaningful to me to think about the start of this new adventure here in Beijing. As the new year is beginning, a new chapter of my life, both as a postdoc and an expat, is just beginning and I’m glad my time in Beijing started on such a sweet note!

Beyond being welcomed to the Jewish community, since Roberta & Ted host Shabbat dinners for Kehillat Beijing every Friday, it was incredibly convenient to attend Shabbat every Friday (I was planning on doing this anyway, there was just no commute). Because of the high holidays, the dinners and services were more intimate and smaller, but its really nice to meet more Jews here in Beijing, get challah on Fridays (Roberta makes it every week), and sit down with friends to a delicious meal! I really appreciate how welcoming everyone is and how excited people are that there are new members and that I’m an Astronomer.

Medical Checks

With Rosh Hashanah complete, I was now able to set my sights on actually starting my postdoc at Tsinghua. Now coming into this entire process, I knew that one of the hurdles that I’d have to jump to be hired was the mandatory physical required for any foreign workers coming to China (Jesse had to do this in Shanghai, so I knew what to expect). In order for me to get my physical on Wednesday, I needed a negative COVID test (after another negative test that I thought I might need for the train, this was negative COVID test number 9). Thankfully Roberta runs a hospital (and it is more accessible to English speakers – Beijing United Family Health), so she was very helpful in my booking an appointment. With that out of the way, I set out on my first trip on the Beijing metro. Now if you’ve ever seen pictures of the subway systems in China (or Japan), you can probably guess what I experienced. It’s amazing just how many people use the subway during the day. After avoiding crowds in the US, it took a bit getting used to to not feel overwhelmed by all of the congestion. Now one thing to note is that although the subway is packed, there is a bit more of collective awareness of the surrounding passengers than on the T back in Boston. In Boston, when the trains are packed, it’s impossible to maneuver yourself to the exit. In Beijing, there’s a bit more respect placed on letting the people on the train get off first and then loading up the trains. It’s still quite chaotic, but a bit more ordered chaos. Another difference is the shear size of the subway stations. When I’ve had to change lines, sometimes I’ll walk almost a quarter mile all underground in the same station to get from one set of tracks to another. It’s almost like a little underground city.

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For those of you who’ve ever traveled in a foreign city, it’s pretty easy to get lost when you don’t know where you’re going. Thankfully the subways all have signs in English! However, this didn’t prevent me from being routed to the wrong location by Apple Maps. After a phone call to my supervisor, Zheng, he was able to send me a WeChat pin to the correct location and I was able to make it just before the hospital closed. In terms of the actual medical check, it is super uncomfortable to go to a doctor’s office and have generally no idea what is going on. Most of the doctor’s spoke little to no English and the translation of the various tests wasn’t the most obvious. I’m not sure exactly what they were checking for (I had to have an ultrasound among other things), but my understanding is that they basically wanted to make sure that I wasn’t coming to China with any serious underlying health conditions. To my extreme pleasure, I had to do this all again the following Monday because Tsinghua University requires its own health exam! Thankfully for this one, an Astronomy department secretary met me at the Tsinghua hospital and was able to translate what the various procedures were going to be, but it was still a bit disconcerting to not really know what was happening.

Visiting Gulou/The Drum Tower

After trekking out to the hospital, I decided to take some time to explore a bit of the city. A few different people that I met had recommended the Gulou area, near the Drum Tower as a place to live given its large array of music venues, cool cafes and shops, and being a bit more accessible to foreigners. The Drum Tower, along with the Bell Tower, were built during the reign of Kublai Khan and used as a time keeping mechanism for the people living in Beijing. As (spoiler alert), this is where I ended up living, it was really nice to take some time to see the area. Although I didn’t visit the Drum Tower (and still haven’t, it’s on the top of my to do list since it’s about a 10 minute walk from my apartment), I did get to see it from the outside.

The area immediately surrounding the Drum Tower has a bit of a Lake George/downtown Saratoga in the summer vibe, where the streets are bustling with lots of shops selling trinkets, food, toys, and pretty much anything you can think of. However, if you walk just a few blocks in any direction, you’re transported into the much quieter neighborhoods of the hutongs. Hutongs are one/two story large scale apartment style complexes that are the traditional apartments of Beijing. Many of them (including the one that I’m currently living in) are fully renovated on the inside, but the exterior retains a more traditional look. As you can see there’s a distinct neighbor hood vibe to many of the hutongs and there are lots of little shops in the area. I think I was attracted to the area not just because people recommended it but because it also would give me a more authentically Beijing experience, as opposed to living in a high-rise out by Tsinghua University. Gulou is also pretty near the Lama Temple, one of the holy sites for Tibetan Buddhism here in Beijing (again, along with the Drum Tower, this is on the top of my list of things to visit). Here’s just a sampling of the Drum Tower, the hutongs, and the Lama Temple.

Tsinghua University

On Thursday, September 9th, after being in China for over five weeks, I was finally able to visit Tsinghua University, my academic home for the next three years. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tsinghua, it is one of the two premiere universities in Beijing (the other being Peking University) and is often referred to as the MIT of China. As one of my professors at BU used to refer to MIT as the trade school across the river, I want to note that aesthetically, Tsinghua looks nothing like a trade school. As you can see the campus is enormous (it takes about 20 minutes to walk from the entrance to the Astronomy Department building)! Because of COVID and my not having a Tsinghua University ID (I still don’t by the way, there’s lots of necessary paperwork to do that takes a lot of time), I’m required to enter the campus through the Southeast Gate. Unlike most universities I’ve been to in the US where pretty much anyone can wander onto campus, Tsinghua requires you to scan your ID to enter the campus. Because I don’t have a campus ID, I have to use my passport, which works fine except there is generally some confusion as the campus security guards aren’t the most familiar with US passports and where the passport number that is my de facto ID number is.

Aesthetically, Tsinghua reminds me of a hybrid of Brown University – with its large green spaces (although nobody is sitting on the greens or playing frisbee), the University of Michigan Ann Arbor – because of the sheer city-esque size of the campus, and Skidmore College – because one second I’ll be walking in what looks like a traditional campus building and the next second it’ll feel like I’m in a manicured park. The campus is really quite stunning. As you can see in the first picture, Tsinghua celebrated its 100th birthday this summer, so I just missed the celebrations. Beyond the amount of green space and gardens, the number of seemingly random pieces of modern art really caught my eye. The Tsinghua University Art Museum is on my walk to the Astronomy Department, so I’m excited to visit that once I get my ID. Additionally, it’s really interesting to see the architectural dichotomy of the campus. In the area where the Astronomy Department is (I realized I don’t have any great pictures of the building, I’ll try to remedy that this week), most of the buildings look similar to typical academic buildings. However, on my walk to the University Hospital for my second medical check, I walked past more of the residential areas on campus, where the traditional Chinese aesthetic (both in garden styles and in having older temple-esque buildings) becomes dominant.

Beyond visiting the campus and taking pictures, much of my time in my first few days at Tsinghua were spent meeting Zheng’s group and talking to Zheng about my research and how I was adjusting to China. Everyone in Zheng’s group has been incredibly friendly. We went as a group to one of the University canteens for lunch and it was nice to talk to all of the grad students and other postdocs and find out that there are some anime fans in the group. In interacting with the group, I’ve noticed a few things that are pretty different from US institutions. For one, at BU, there was a large degree of departmental community and cohesion. Here, everything is divvied up into little fiefdoms, so I really have only interacted with the students working with Zheng. I have gotten a chance to meet some of the other postdocs who are working in the department, but that’s mostly because we share an office (see my desk below). Also, some eagle-eyed Brown Physics alumni should recognize two names/pictures on the below Physics poster!

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The other difference that I’ve noticed is that all of the faculty seem to eat at the same canteens (or at least Zheng does) as grad students and undergrads. Now I spent seven years at BU and beyond grabbing a snack at the student union I never ate in the dining halls. As someone who likes to cook, it’s a bit different to me that basically nobody cooks their own food. I was told that in general the food is so inexpensive that most people choose to eat there. As someone who eats almost entirely vegan, the cafeteria isn’t the ideal setting for me. Maybe it’s just that the few times that I’ve been have been a mad house, but the one section that I was told was vegetarian basically has single vegetable dishes (i.e. plates of sauted onions or carrots). You can see below that the food definitely doesn’t look as yummy as some of the restaurant meals I’ve posted before. Although it was incredibly generous of Zheng’s students to treat me and welcome me, I’m not sure how often I’m planning on going to the campus canteen. Also, one of the other differences (at least from when I was an undergrad and ate at the Ratty at Brown regularly) is that I usually talk to the people I’m eating with. Most of the lunch was spent eating in silence, which is a bit different.

Much of the rest of my first few days on campus was spent answering questions for the secretary who was helping me with the vast mountain of paperwork that I needed to do to be officially hired. Unlike in the US (at least I think this is the case), basically none of the paperwork had been given to me to fill out ahead of time. Despite my filling out various forms when I was in the US and sending them to Tsinghua, it seemed like nobody had kept those forms or remembered my answers. This was definitely a bit frustrating for me. Particularly, I was a bit dismayed by the lack of understanding that I’d like to be able to open a bank account sooner rather than later because much of the Chinese economy uses WeChat Pay and Ali Pay and both of those only work with Chinese bank accounts (you can add a US credit card to WeChat Pay, but the business has to be willing to accept that type of payment and most do not). The secretary that I was working with tried to tell me that I’m just not used to China and that’s why I’m frustrated. While I do agree that there is still a lot for me to get used to, I would just like to be able to pay for things like everyone else. Because I am a foreigner, I cannot open a bank account without proof of employment (i.e. a work contract). Unfortunately, Tsinghua requires a completed worker’s and resident’s permit to officially hire me, which means I’m still waiting to do this. Additionally, because I started working remotely in November 2020 and a Chinese University paying a US bank account is not allowed, Tsinghua still owes me quite a lot of back pay that I need a bank account to be able to get.

On the not so fun side, I did get to experience racial profiling first hand. As I was walking to a vegetarian restaurant just outside of Tsinghua’s campus, a security guard started yelling at me and pointing at a bike that was left on the street. Since I don’t speak Mandarin it sounded to me like he was scolded me about something and I just kind of stood there and tried to figure out what he wanted (was I going down a street I shouldn’t, did I do something wrong?). I tried to use my phone to translate what he was saying, but he didn’t seem to quite understand what I was trying to do. Thankfully as I was typing in my phone that I don’t understand what you’re saying and saying this aloud as I typed, a couple of students walked by who knew English and helped me out. Apparently, a bike had been left in the wrong spot and for whatever reason (I’m not Chinese, that’s the reason), the security guard decided I must have left the bike there. I told the students that it was not my bike and I was walking and they relayed this to the guard who let me continue on my way. Although I’ll never understand what it’s like to be stopped by the police in the US for my skin color, I can say that it was incredibly unnerving here and generally left me feeling a bit rattled.

Although very little academic work was done in the first few days on campus, it was still really nice to be back on a college campus as an employee and be surrounded by students. Ironically, the department seminar on the Thursday I arrived was on galaxy clusters, my specialty, so I was able to very actively engage with the speaker and ask lots of probing questions. Although the Tsinghua Astronomy Department is primarily populated by Chinese nationals, the other non-Chinese postdoc, Paulo, has been incredibly friendly and showed me around campus and has just been a great person to chat with about the various hoops to jump through in terms of getting hired. A lot of the pictures (including the ones of the outside of the observatory – apparently, I can get access to it if I want) were taken when Paulo showed me around. I’m definitely excited to get started working at Tsinghua.

Wandering Around Beijing

Beyond exploring Tsinghua and Gulou, I also saw a lot of other cool and interesting things in Beijing. Because they don’t quite fit into the narrative portion of the blog, I’m planning on having this section (along with the other sections below) as parts of every blog post so that you all can get a better sense of Beijing.

The first group of pictures are all from the Wangjing Park, which is where we did Tashlikh and is right by Roberta & Ted’s house where i was staying. I really loved the marshy pond at the center of the park and lion statues at the front of the park.

I also saw a lot of cool buildings near malls and other places that I visited. As you can see, at night a lot of the buildings are illuminated and make the skylines look really cool! One of the things that I’m still in awe of are the number of bicycles that are around Beijing. A lot of people use the rental bikes to go from place to place and as a result, you get large lots of bikes where people have them parked. Although a lot of people have recommended that I start biking places, I’m still a bit hesitant to do so. It isn’t just that I don’t know Beijing, but rather I still don’t know the traffic laws. While cars generally follow the traffic lights (the right hand on red is a bit more loose here than in the states), basically anything with three or fewer wheels (there are lots of motorized bikes that look like mini cars because of an exterior shell) follow their own rules. You’ll see scooters/bikes on the street, on the sidewalk, zooming down one way streets in the opposite direction, and going at seemingly any instance when there isn’t traffic.

I’ve found that basically anywhere I go there’s interesting signs and statues, whether it be Subway stations, outdoor mall, indoor malls, or just walking around on my way to other places. There are so many cute statues of cats, astronauts, cartoon kids, and interesting creatures. You just have to know where to look (or wander into the right place)!

Food

As I was exploring Gulou and Tsinghua, I also got to try a few different vegan restaurants. All of the food was really yummy and the menus were pretty expansive. I definitely missed having Jesse with me to share food. Happy Cow for the win! At the first restaurant that I went to, which is right by the Lama Temple, I was only able to order cold dishes (likely because it was pretty late for lunch). I got tofu skins filled with mushrooms, a mushroom “abalone” dish, and kaofu. The cold food was rather refreshing on a hot day! The kaofu was really similar to what I’d gotten in Shanghai and really yummy, but I also really liked the tofu skins! Since this place is pretty close to where I now live, I’ll definitely be back!

I went to this next vegan restaurant in the middle of a long day of both exploring Beijing and going to Zheng’s group meetings (which are at 9am on Saturday morning). It turned out to be one of the hottest days that I’ve been in Beijing, so I downed about a liter of water during the meal, but the meal was amazing! This is a Yunnan restaurant, which is a region is Southwestern China that specialize spicy food and mushroom dishes. Here, I got a crispy tofu (the tofu was soft as silk on the inside), an eggplant dish, and a fried mushroom dish! Each dish was amazing! This is probably my favorite meal in Beijing so far!

Lastly, I went to a vegetarian restaurant that’s right by Tsinghua’s campus. I thought this place reminded me a lot of the restaurants I went to with Jesse in Shanghai. I got a cauliflower dish, a mushroom dish, a seitan stir fry, and watermelon juice. Everything was really great, especially the mushroom dish! As a big fan of mushrooms, it’s really great to see so many different types of mushrooms and mushroom-centric dishes. One of the coolest non-food things is that they used a robot (see below) to deliver the food!

Although not a full meal, at Zheng’s group meeting, two of his graduate students were celebrating their birthdays. Apparently, it’s a tradition (at least in Zheng’s group) to bring cake for your birthday. We all sang and the cake was super cute! This is my first experience with Chinese desserts and I thought the cake was very tasty. The texture was pretty fluffy, but the flavor was pretty mild, so I’m not actually sure if it was chocolate or not. Also, American cake is definitely a lot sweeter, so I did miss the sugar content.

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Animals of Beijing

Unlike Shanghai, where I saw a ton of cats, in Beijing, I’ve seen a few different types of animals. Most surprisingly, the in the park by Roberta & Ted’s house are a pack of miniature horses. To allow the horses to graze and to keep the grass trim, the horses are used as a lawn mowing service. Thus, throughout my times in the park, I got a ton of pictures of them! I don’t know if I’ve seen miniature horses before, but it was definitely a bit surreal to turn the corner and see them there (although I did need to watch my step when I was running in the park).

Outside of the park, I also got to spend a lot of time with Roberta & Ted’s two dogs Mimi and Honey. They are both really friendly dogs and spent a lot of time with me on the couch. They are very comfortable with crowds and paraded around the services, making it very clear who’s house we were really in. Here are a few cute pictures of them!

I also did get a few pictures of some cats and dogs that were wandering around Beijing, including two beautiful white cats on Tsinghua’s campus. I don’t know if there are fewer stray cats here than in Shanghai because it does get cold, but it’s always nice to see a cat.

East Meets West

Like in Shanghai, I’ve seen the influence of the West creep into Beijing. Specifically, Disney is still everywhere! Lots of Mickey Mouse and the gang. Harry Potter figurines also made another appearance. Given that the movies are a decade old at this point and there haven’t been any new books, I’m surprised to see so much HP! I also spotted a Gal Gadot ad on the subway and the most Chinese looking KFC I’ve ever seen. At one of the malls I went to, I spotted a LEGO store and saw some cool Chinese lego sets. I think the most unexpected thing was a figurine of the Utah Jazz Jazz Bear mascot. As a Utah Jazz fan, if it hadn’t cost almost $100, I’d have bought that in an instant.

Anime and Comics

No post could be complete without a view of all of the awesome anime figurines, posters, and apparel that I’ve seen in Beijing. Again, the primary focus on the anime/manga side is Dragon Ball Z, but I’ve also seen One Piece, Naruto, Slam Dunk and a little bit more Astro Boy. On the comics side, I saw some cool Marvel and DC figurines and some more Peanuts stuff. I really love wandering around Beijing and seeing the pop culture characters that I grew up peaking out of shop windows!

I hoped you enjoyed seeing and reading about my first week and a half in Beijing! It’s the beginning of my journey to be an Astronomer in Beijing and I hope you’ll be back for more. As a teaser, next week’s post will feature my trip to the Great Wall, so you don’t want to miss that one! Again, please feel free to comment, I’d love to hear from you! Don’t forget to subscribe (it’s the button on the side).

In Peace,

Emmet