15 November 2011
Zhongguancun
My journey tonight took me quite close to where I went last night, it seems North Beijing is the happening place to be in the evenings, its much less ancient.
Unfortunately this is a good 20km North of the centre of town, so it takes a long time to get there and I have to change subways twice.
Zhongguancun is where all the electronics markets are, these like Shanghai are a dissapointment, I didnt even take a photo of the inside of the stores, refer to Shanghai for details. They are all tiny branded stores within stores selling the same stuff for substantially more than it costs in Australia.
The streets around it were quite interesting, as you can see below everything gets delivered in boxes on the side of the road in the middle of the night.
When you arrive here, its extremely confusing to get your bearings, the subway lets out in all directions into an enormous underground mall with signage which I am convinced leads you around in circles. Its not like a mall like we have in Australia where theres a big hallway with shops either side, when you build the whole thing underground you dont have to do that. Instead its more like a cricket ground sized grid of identical looking stores.
Once on the surface, I realised that most of what there is here is underground, including restaurants and cinemas. Strangely going to the cinema costs $20! More than Australia again. And its $20 to see your choice of robot fighting movie or the adventures of tin tin. Those are the only 2 English language movies. The Chinese movies dont have English subtitles, because they need to have Chinese subtitles because everyone speaks their own personal version of Chinese.
Once I made it to the surface, this handy diorama did nothing to explain how to find my way underground.
I didnt take a photo of the inside of an electronics super market, but heres the outside of one.
And heres all the computer stuff being delivered into the street.
There was an outdoor pedestrian shopping area, but as you can see its mostly abandoned. No restaurants to be found above ground for some reason....except for....(scroll down)
Before we get to my above ground dinner, Xiabo Xiabo is the most popular place in China, its Shabu Shabu as we would call it. I dont really understand the excitement to be found in boiling your own lettuce leaves.
I wandered far from the station and was starving (remember my lunch was a failure), so I had to settle for BIG PIZZA. The Chinese copy of the extremely popular Pizza Hut.
Pizza is only a small part of the menu, they have many rice dishes, snails, frogs, a huge dessert menu, steak etc. I chose a vegetarian pizza. I asked for the authentic style base (it was on the menu) but got pan fried anyway.
Whilst this looks just like a pizza hut pizza (which I hate anyway and havent eaten for many years), it is totally lacking in flavour of any kind. Like the cheese was air flavoured, so was the sauce.
So basically I ate about 1000 calories of air.