We made it to Tianjin, and left Bryan in the waiting arms of his family before Max, Brennan and I boarded the second fastest train in China, which travels from Tianjin to Beijing (a distance of about 80 miles) in a half hour. We got on the train, chatted a bit and then we were at our station already. It was a bit anticlimactic, really.
Finding out hostel was a bit of a problem, since we had to figure out how to get from the shiny new train station to the subway. We found a very sweet boy manning an information desk who apologized profusely at his terrible English (it wasn't, really) and directed us to the right train. Thank you, Chinese public transportation, you never let us down! The bus dropped us off at the metro and I was startled to discover that since my last overwhelmed experience with the Beijing subway I had learned some traveling skills. Picking out the station names and reading station maps was as simple as reading the map for the BART or the El-trains in Chicago. I guess before I was too shocked that I was actually in China really and truly to properly function, before. After almost two weeks, Beijing was still huge but no longer incomprehensible and threatening.
Wufangjin hostel is near a big shopping street that is in turn very close to Tienanmen square. Wufanjin street is gew-gaw paradise, fans and chopsticks and beetles encased in plastic and tea sets and electronics and keychains and snowglobes, etc. The main street is lined with little alleys (Beijing hutong, I missed you!) that are devoted to more plastic souvenirs than you can sneeze at, and all of the animals of the world offered to you fried on a stick.
The polyglot hawkers at some of the food booths would call out to us in English, waving their hands over mysterious food items. The starfish, seahorses and tentacled octopi on a stick were recognizable, but there was all manner of other seafood items that were mysterious. "Snake!" one hawker cried, brandishing a stick covered in wiggly, chopped pieces of snake. "Dog!" he offered another meat on a stick with his other hand. Max was very excited, since eating dog was one of his remaining goals and he only had two days left to realize it. So we bought dog on a stick, which the man proceeded to deep fry for us. Brennan refused to eat something that he had helped name, in the past so no dog (or duck) for him, but Max and I shared bites of fried dog. "Alsatian!" Max crowed, but it really just tasted like crunchy breaded fried meat. The creepiest thing on a stick was definitely the still-moving scorpions, twitching their little tails at me.
In more appetizing food on a stick news, I had one of these. Fruit on a stick that had been dipped into some sort of hot sugar that dried and looked like golden glass. I got one of the mixed fruit sticks, the plum and pineapple were especially delicious. The only part that was disappointing was that little red blob on the end of the stick, which is a cousin to the crabapple called a "haw" because that sucker was gritty and bitter.
Back at the hostel I totally won my very first ever game of pool against Brennan (even though really both of us lost since I got the 8-ball in during the middle of the game but Brennan let me have a re-do.) Considering how much I suck at pool this very much bragging rights for me.
The hostel didn't have any more room in their bunk rooms so they bumped us up to the next best thing, a three person private room. At night Max is a sleep-talker, and my favorite moment was in the dark middle of the night when I woke up long enough to hear him talking and cry out, "Scones!" with concerned urgency. It was probably one of those dreams where what you say outloud isn't what you mean in the dream. Then again, he is British so scones might be an urgent matter after all.
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