The Great Hall of the People

The Great Hall of the People

As visiting guests of the government, we were invited to attend a dinner celebrating the founding of the Republic of China in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People.  This was sometime around the 1^st of October.  We taught for only a couple of weeks and then had a week off for the celebration of this national holiday.  The Great Hall of the People is enormous and sits on the west side of Tiananmen Square.  It’s not a building that is open to the public and it was a big deal to get invited to a dinner there.  Some of the foreign teachers at the big universities in and around Beijing were invited as well as foreign dignitaries.  We rode to Beijing on a bus with the vice president of Nankai University, the head of the office for foreign teachers and the other teachers.  The dinner was plate after plate of great Chinese food.  We then listened to some speeches, one given by one of the vice chairmen of the central committee.  Of course we didn’t understand any of them, they were in Chinese, but we were provided a rather interesting translation.  Mom went to the bathroom with Doerte and wanted to steal the tissue dispenser that had Great Hall of the People stamped on it.  Doerte persuaded her that it was not a good idea, but they could take a picture.  It was fun evening and the building was very impressive.

L to R The head of the office for all the foreign teachers, Doerte, the German Teacher, Carol and John Galbraith, Mom and I, The Vice President of NanKai, and one of the Japanese Teachers and his wife.

Really big vases.

 

This painting was huge, maybe 30 feet long and 20 feet tall.

L to R Dave Hennesey, Carol and Craig Larson, Mom and I.  Dave, Carol and Craig were BYU Teachers also and taught at Tianjin University right next to Nankai University.

The tissue dispenser that tempted mom.

Outside the Great Hall of the People before the dinner.

Out side the Great Hall of the People after the dinner.

Eye of Tianjin Fall 2009

Mom and I and Doerte.

Eye of Tianjin

At some point in the fall of 2009 the university took all the foreign teachers on a field trip to see a museum about the 20 year plan for Tianjin and surrounding area. It was amazing that they went to such great lengths to build huge dioramas of the city in the future.  They took us to lunch and then to the Eye of Tianjin.  This is a huge Ferris wheel that really gives you a good view of the city.  We were in the gondola with 2 of the German teachers.  The younger one, Doerte, became our really good friend and in 2010 we even went on a trip with her to Chengdu the older one is taking our picture.  We then went to a Buddhist temple. It was a nice outing and informative about what the future holds for Tianjin.

Looking north from the Eye of Tianjin.

Looking West.

They would only put people in every other gondola.

This is the Buddhist Temple we visited after the ride in the gondola.

This is at the Temple.

The Ferris wheel is in the background.  At the temple.

At the Temple.

L to R Carol and John Galbraith and me. At the temple.

Our Apartment

Our Apartment

We lived on the top floor of an old building that had 1 bedroom apartments with small kitchens and then at the end of the building it had one 2 bedroom apartment but with no kitchen.

Bedroom

Bedroom

So the university must have improvised, because they took the second bedroom and made it into a kitchen /office.  One side was office and one side kitchen.  It had a small refrigerator, table and a china cabinet on one side of the room and 2 desks on the other side of the room.

Kitchen/office

Office

Our dishes and food storage.

It had a very large divided bathroom, one room with a vanity with 2 sinks, so we used one for our kitchen sink and the other for the bathroom sink.  We always had dishes drying on the counter in the bathroom.  Then there was another room with the toilet, bathtub and a small washing machine.

Bathroom and Kitchen sinks

Yes that machine in the middle is our washing machine. (small loads)

It had a nice sized living room with a couch and we had a TV that had cable and we had two English stations, the BBC and the national TV station that had news from the government. 

There were times when we had to wear a sweater or fleece to stay warm.

Living room.

We cooked on hot plates, a microwave and a little roasting oven.  You could bake maybe 4 cookies on a tray at a time.  That made making a batch of cookies a long process, but Chris did it many times.  We also had a crock pot, so we got along just fine.  We often had 6 people to dinner and would move the table into the living room and it was just right.   But we did eat out a lot.  We found it just as cheap to eat out as it was to cook. If we went to the student’s dining hall we could eat for under a dollar.  We didn’t eat there all that often; the food was not as good.

One of the 3 student dinning halls on campus.

A typical lunch at the student dinning hall.

We never went hungry.

But there were many other dining halls on campus that made it very convenient to eat out and were only a little more expensive.  So we usually would spend 2 or 3 dollars for lunch or dinner.  I would ride my bike over to a market about 10 minutes away and buy fried noodles and fried rice at a small stall in the market.  I really liked those noodles.  I would get them “La Da”, which means spicy.  We got invited out to eat  once in awhile and a few times we were invited to a student’s home for dinner. 

 

Eating dinner at one of my student's home, Arron's.

We did get invited out to eat once in awhile.

We did get invited out to eat once in awhile.  That is John and Carol Galbraith on the left.

We had a lot of mosquitoes and I would smash them on the walls and ceilings and so we had a lot of bloody dead mosquitoes on the walls and ceilings.  I got tired of waking up with more mosquito bites so we hung a mosquito net and slept under the net and that saved us.  We also bought a contraption that looked like a small tennis racket that had wires instead of strings and was battery operated.  If you swung it into a mosquito it would fry the mosquito.  That was a lot of fun.  We were quite comfortable there and enjoyed it and realized you can live with a lot less stuff.

 

First Trip to Beijing

First Trip to Beijing

Since we didn’t need to start teaching until the 21^st of Sept., we decided to take a day trip to Beijing.  The Larsons, Craig and Carol, who lived about 10 minutes from us on bikes and taught at Tianjin University, decided to go with us.  We took a taxi to the train station and then figured out how to buy tickets for the high speed train to Beijing.  In the apartment, we had been left all these little business cards that had the names of the places to visit written in Chinese on one side and English on the other side.  So to take a taxi, you would just show the driver the card of where you wanted to go and then the taxi had a meter and you knew how much to pay him.  If you wanted to go someplace that you did not have a card for, you would find someone who spoke English and Chinese and have them write out where you wanted to go in Chinese and then you had a card for the new place.  There was an office for foreign teachers in the building just across the plaza from our apartment building and they always had someone who could help us.  We always carried a card for the University so we could get home.  We did learn the bus line that would take us to a few of our favorite haunts, but I will tell you about them in another post.  The train to Beijing took about 30 minutes and always left on time.  It took longer to get from our apartment to the train station than it took to get to Beijing.  It is about 175 kilometers to Beijing, but traveling at 320 Kilometers per hour really gets you there fast.  You get a little sick if you try and focus your eyes on things that are close to the train, but if you look at things in the distance it doesn’t bother you. 

Mom too has her happy face on.

We visited the Temple of Heaven and the Pearl Market that are just across the street from each other.  The subway system in Beijing is great and you can catch it from the high speed train station and go anywhere you want to go.

Temple of Heaven

L to R Craig Larson, Carol Larson and Me.  I think I am trying to hold my stomach in.

Brides would come and have there wedding pictures taken in the park surrounding the building of the Temple of Heaven.

They love covered walkways.

They love covered walkways.

There was an energy among the people.  They would come to the parks and interact in interesting ways.  This man is writing calligraphy with water.  We didn't know if he was writing famous sayings or telling a story.

"In ancient China, the Emperor of China was regarded as the Son of Heaven, who administered earthly matters on behalf of, and representing, heavenly authority. To be seen to be showing respect to the source of his authority, in the form of sacrifices to heaven, was extremely important. The temple was built for these ceremonies, mostly comprising prayers for good harvests.
Twice a year the Emperor and all his retinue would move from the Forbidden city through Beijing to encamp within the complex, wearing special robes and abstaining from eating meat. No ordinary Chinese was allowed to view this procession or the following ceremony. In the temple complex the Emperor would personally pray to Heaven for good harvests. The highpoint of the ceremony at the winter solstice was performed by the Emperor on the Earthly Mount. The ceremony had to be perfectly completed; it was widely held that the smallest of mistakes would constitute a bad omen for the whole nation in the coming year.

The Temple of Heaven

See, mom has already been shopping.

And the painting on the ceilings are beautiful.

Earth was represented by a square and Heaven by a circle; several features of the temple complex symbolize the connection of Heaven and Earth, of circle and square. The whole temple complex is surrounded by two cordons of walls; the outer wall has a taller, semi-circular northern end, representing Heaven, and a shorter, rectangular southern end, representing the Earth. Both the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests and the Circular Mound Altar are round, each standing on a square yard, again representing Heaven and Earth.
The number nine represents the Emperor and is evident in the design of the Circular Mound Altar: a single round marmor plate is surrounded by a ring of nine plates, then a ring of 18 plates, and so on for a total of nine surrounding rings, the outermost having 9×9 plates.
The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests has four inner, twelve middle and twelve outer pillars, representing the four seasons, twelve months and twelve traditional Chinese hours respectively. Combined together, the twelve middle and twelve outer pillars represent the traditional solar term.
All the buildings within the Temple have special dark blue roof tiles, representing the Heaven." That was from Wikipedia. This is John now.  I think it is interesting that even today we use the circle and the square to represent Heaven and Earth.  These symbols are found in many of our latter day temples.

The carvings on the stone are incredible.