The Last Day

Brennan and Max flew out a day before I did, so they had roughly 24 hours in Tokyo while I didn't join them there until the next day, just a few hours after we shared the #8 flight back to San Francisco. They were on their way around eleven o'clock, so after that I was on my own. I had plans to spend the day enjoying Beijing's dead things, mainly Chairman Mao and the Natural History Museum. While that was the plan, that's hardly what I ended up doing.

Mao stops seeing visitors at noon, so by the time I got my luggage stowed in the hostel's dark and scary luggage closet (complete with horrible low ceilings that I cracked my skull on rather resoundingly) and trtekked all the way out to Tienanmen Square it was too late. No worries, I thought, I'll just hike down to the museum and spend extra time there. On the guide book's inset map of this area of Beijing it didn't look like a terrible walk, but it was several blocks from a subway stop and even though I did my best to cling to the shaded areas it was miserably hot. The Natural History Museum is free, it turns out, but you must make reservations 5 days in advance. Though the walk down Qianmen Dajie was hot and starkly sunny I did keep laughing when I glanced down. The sandals I'd been wearing for the past two weeks had left my feet with well-defined stripes on them.

At a loss, I decided to spend some time in one last Chinese temple and see if I could decipher any of the Buddhist iconography that so escaped me at the Tianjin monastery. So, I ended up going to Yong He Gong Lama temple and proving to myself that when I see any Bodhisattva I always think it's Buddha. Unless the Bodhisattva has breasts and then I think it's Guayin, Goddess of Mercy (but she's usually got a lot of props and the whole eight arm thing, so she's a bit less confusing.) It's like going into those Catholic churches all over Central Europe, I'm missing so much of the stories of the saints and only getting the "ah, so they died in this horrible way." (Of course the rather glaring difference between that and the Buddhist tradition is the, "Ah, so they transcended this splendid way." I suppose the idea of shuffling off mortal concerns and suffering is the same.)

One hall that was fairly comprehensible was a bunch of friendly-but-demonic figures in tantric sex positions. They had extra arms and legs and some of them even had tails, which I imagine can do wonders for balance. Er, yes, balance.



The courtyards were full of hot sunlight and heavy with incense smoke which made the inside of my face feel positively saturated with rich oily smells.






The eight auspicious Buddhist symbols are apparently: a parasol, pair of golden fish, the great treasure vase, a lotus, the right turning conch, the endless knot, the banner of victory and the wheel of dharma.

Even the brightest of these pictures don't really do a good job of showing how brilliant the colors were inside the temple rooms. Huge silks hung from the ceilings, tattered at the ends but still ablaze with color, flats and colorful lamps and pennants and banners fluttered slowly in the artificial breeze from standing fans.

By the end of my temple tour I felt overheated, sticky and somewhat triumphant, since I had finally managed to find a set of Chinese Chess in one of the souvenir shops right outside the temple. Chinese Chess appears to be rather similar in play to Western Chess, pieces have roles like general, chariot and cannon. The main superficial difference is that the game board is intersected by "the river" and this impedes different pieces in different ways.

I finished purchasing souvenirs for people back home, mostly candy and weird edible things from the convenience store. My favorite may have been the little pretzel sticks with the marvelous Engrish flavor text. "Like swimming in the Aegean sea, remember the Greek cheese myth." That one was for cheesecake, but of course you knew that since the Greek cheese myth is so well known. I was thoroughly shagged out and in need of a shower so I went back to the hostel to recuperate. Recuperation didn't really happen, I just sat in the cool, dim room for a while. I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and my sniffles and congestion grew progressively worse. I did not want to be sick while traveling, especially given the temperature guns that had been aimed at me on my landing and I felt as though I were experiencing the beginning twinges of a fever. I repacked my bag, now heavy with gifts and goodies. The heft of my luggage made me feel rather properly Chinese, since I always saw people in train stations schlepping huge bundles of food and sweets and other gifts for the folks back home.

I figured out my timetables and realized with great disappointment that my plane left too early in the morning for me to get there by using the subway. So, I figured I would just spend a night in the airport and cozy down on a bench somewhere. The subway line out to the airport was cool and tranquil, but my feverish feeling never died down completely. Once in the airport I camped out behind a large monitor announcing flight arrivals and partially hidden and protected by the large Skoda vehicle on display.



I read Just-So Stories for a while and then slipped into a fitful series of naps. And that was how I spent my last day in China.