Bopping around Beijing

At seven in the morning we stumbled across some people (mainly silver sneakers) line dancing in the middle of a pedestrian mall with a stereo watching themselves in the storefront glasses. I wanted to join but no time to learn a new dance (or several – they had new moves for every song). It’s a little faster paced than the slo-mo synchronization we’ve been seeing – but it still called to me. Alas, we had many plans and had to keep moving.

We hopped on the Beijing Metro to the Summer Palace, and the ride was miserable! It was going-to-work time, but still – we were packed in there like sardines.

As we entered the park, we saw some more slow motion line dancing – what is this? And where do I sign up?

We were bopping around the largest royal park in China when we heard music and singing so we followed the sound.

We came upon a group of elderly (musical silver sneakers?) people singing around a pagoda, some with song books and some dancing their hearts out, to some live musical accompaniment. One dancing woman, singing at the top of her lungs, invited me to dance so I got down to some Chinese (folk?) music while holding this lady’s hand at ten in the morning. Livin’ life, yall!

Obviously impressed with my dancing (as was everybody around us), an elderly toothless gentleman who was dancing next to us came up and starting chatting with us for a bit – but the music was so loud we couldn’t really hear him (we were standing about ten feet from the clarinet section). We did manage to catch the part where he said mom looked too young to my mother! (truth.)

Need a blizzard? There’s a Dairy Queen right outside of the palace walls. Authentic, I’m sure!

We hopped back on the subway – still miserable! Is it ever not rush hour in a city of twenty million? – toward the drum & bell tower to check those out.

Then we headed to find the Wenyu Cheese Shop. It is some special kind of cheese that they used to only serve the emperors family. My mom saw it on TripAdvisor, but when we asked Victor the day before, he wasn’t familiar with it. He did point out the address on the map, in some alley. Luckily, we found it with very little second-guessing my directions and retracing our footsteps. We saw some people eating something in a blue and white cup, which my mom’s “instincts” told her was what we were looking for. “Follow the blue and white cup! There are more people with blue and white cups up headed, we must be getting close!”

She was right – must have a nose for royal treats. It turns out empirical cheese tastes like a mix between cream & egg custard. Pretty good, but not exactly the kind of cheese I was picturing. The cool part was the shop was in this neat little alley with all these small boutiques and food stands. I  imagine it’s comparable to an American hipster neighborhood, but with less mustaches.

We also had some pomelo-ade. It tasted like limeade but better – maybe because it was 100 degrees outside and we had been walking forever?

Our plan for the evening was to check out the Chinese acrobatic show. Welllllll, we got lost on the subway (my fault) and were a little late to the show but we only missed one or two acts and what we did see was awesome!

One act was 9 or 10 girls all balancing on one bicycle while one girl pedaled it in circles around the stage. It was nuts! One girl twirled and juggled parasols with her feet. A bunch of young men did a hat juggling thing, which was impressive. We were sitting in the second row, so we could see their faces and how much fun they were having with each other, which made it even more fun for us. There were two guys balancing on each other, walking up and down steps on their hands. The finale was seven motorcycles zooming around in a metal sphere cage. The small child in the seat next to me and I were on the edge of our seats!