Tianjin

After a little bit of planning and mapping, I organized a day trip me and a few friends to Tianjin, a city an hour away from Beijing. Imagine my surprise when, on Saturday morning, 12 sleepy college students were on time at 7:30 am to travel to the city with me. We knew we were in for a lot of walking. We walked to the nearest metro station, Wudaokou, which was about a half an hour away. Then we took the metro down to the southern part of Beijing, and took a taxi from that metro stop to the Beijing South Train Station. From there we took a bullet train that reached up to 336 km/h, and reached Tianjin in about a half an hour. The city, at first sight, was missing one attribute of Beijing - air pollution.

All 13 of us started walking, and the real journey began. I played tour guide, because apparently everyone heard there was a day trip, not where, not how, not how long, and I was the only one who knew anything about Tianjin. First we walked toward the Northern part of the city, and we found Old Culture street, which is a street in Tianjin that is reconstructed as a 19th century Chinese hutong. In the little shops on either side of the street, the Chinese venders sold everything from fake Fendi bags to Chinese swords to chopsticks. There were pearl and jade shops right next to fan shops. It was a souvenir shopper's paradise. After an hour and a half of poking around the shops (the boys bought swords, and the girls bought purses), we all met up for lunch at a restaurant at the other side of the street. But we ate light, and prepared ourselves for what I promised would be a real treat.

Tianjin is famous for its fried cakes, so my trusty guide book told me, and after lunch we headed out West to find a famous shop whose name means Earhole in Chinese. When we finally found it, the smell of refried doughnuts was so intense I was drooling. The bakers take sweet bread, fill it with chocolate, cream, or some kind of fruit paste, and then fry the whole thing in sesame oil. We had to fight through the crowds of people (there are no lines in China) to get a few of the cakes for ourselves. Everyone enjoyed them, and I'm pretty sure that if I ate anymore my arteries would have clogged.

After the fried cake fiasco we continued to walk west to get to Tianjin's tiny metro. We needed to get south to walk through Tianjin's upscale shopping district. After about a 20 minute ride we arrived in what looked like New York city. There were a lot of Europeans, and the shops were all American and European clothing stores. Everything was really expensive (for me) and there were beautiful ball gowns and $100,000 cars on sale at every corner. Two real life manequins wearing wedding gowns posed for my camera. One threw up a peace sign but I didn't quite catch it soon enough. Molly, my roommate, and I saw a Haagen Daaz store and were hit with a ferocious craving for ice cream, but because we were running low on time we didn't get a chance to buy some.

All thirteen of us walked about six miles that day, took a high speed train back to Beijing, and then Molly, Tala, Ariel and I headed to the Lotus Center (Chinese Walmart) for some food and a hair straightener - none of which was for me. Molly and I secretly came to hunt for Haagen Daaz ice cream that we were still craving. It's been so hard not being able to drink milk or eat any dairy products here. I really miss cheese and, you guessed it, Ice Cream. When we were starting to think all hope was lost, we saw it. Gleaming by the cash register, by holy and fluorescent light, was a freezer that held large and small pints of Haagen Daaz ice cream!!! Molly and I made a run for it, her juggling the comforter that she randomly decided to purchase, and when we got there all our hopes were dashed. The ice cream was $6 for a one scoop container, and $13 for a half a pint. Our tiny college student wallets just couldn't handle it. We went home, tired and dejected, and vowed to find affordable, good ice cream another day