Rants and Jottings: October in Beijing – Heaven and/or Hell, Where's the Sauce?

 A few thoughts as summer crash lands into fall …

• Is there a better time of the year to be in Beijing than October? I mean, besides the crushing tourist crowds at the beginning of the month, the imminent death of your internet connection to the outside world, and an onslaught of chaotic security measures designed to “maintain public order” during the upcoming Party Congress, and the fact that winter is, in fact, coming, bringing with it November’s choking smog and the cold, dry Siberian Express winds which make riding a bike between December and March feel like you’re fellating a sandblaster filled with liquid nitrogen?

• I saw a guy get wheeled out of XL on Friday night. Might have been a first. There’s no way you can look cool if you’re 86’d from a bar while wearing roller blades especially when your Parthian retort ("You have no idea what I'm capable of!") was lifted verbatim from an episode of the TV show Smallville.

• On my way there, I stopped by the new, expanded Heaven Supermarket. I’m not sure how to live in a world where somebody looked at the original Heaven supermarket at 1.30 in the morning and thought … we need to do this, but more of it, and bigger. Never has one space inspired so many bad decisions. In the mechanics of a Sanlitun night out, the 3am suggestion that we should “see what Heaven’s like right now” is the moment where you take the throttle and move it from “A good night with friends” to “F**k it, unleash the Ragnarök – only the iron-willed survive.” Between the original shop, the second location, and now the Mega Heaven Mart just up the street from the first Heaven, the only thing left to do is pay a few of the construction workers busy tearing up Dirty Bar Street to head over, dig down as far as they can, and complete the inevitable by opening a portal direct to Hell.

• Yummy Box crashed out of the Beijing Pizza Cup. I think my vote may have helped. As many, if not both, of my readers will attest, I am on a one-man Quixotic campaign to get pizza places in Beijing to add more sauce to their pizza. When I saw the pictures of Yummy Box’s Chicago-style pie, I was sure my quest was over. (Whether Chicago-style qualifies as pizza is a point of debate for some people. Not many people, and none who you would choose to hang out with, but I’m told such folks exist.) Sure enough, Yummy Box’s pizza was a towering marvel encased in a tall, golden crust, a pie/bread bowl of gooey goodness. It wasn’t bad, but there still wasn’t enough sauce. It was a layer of toppings, a ton of cheese, and a thin layer of ragu on top apparently for decorative purposes. Don’t get me wrong, it was good pizza – for Beijing – and the best Chicago-style pizza I’ve had in the city, but I was disappointed that my trek to Wangjing in search of the well-sauced pie came up empty.

• One of the best ways to spend an October afternoon is to have a beer under the trees at the original Great Leap Brewing courtyard. So many of us feel that way that the bar has become a regular stop for the tri-shaw tours which orbit the Houhai/Nanluogu Xiang area. This past Saturday, a trio of tri-shaws pulled up and the guides garbled in their best Hebei-inflected Beijing hua'r about how, “This is what laowai do. They drink. They come here to drink. Go ahead, take a picture! They don’t mind!” It reminded me of the long-since-closed Room 101. A great more-or-less 24-hour establishment carved out of a shopfront on Andingmennei Dajie, Room 101 had a huge picture window facing the street, and as the drunks and late-night revelers poured through the door in the hours around sunrise, they provided early-morning pedestrians with a human zoo featuring almost every form of inebriated behavior imaginable. More than once, patrons turned to find a sidewalk crowd of gawkers staring from outside the window. It was Lao Wai Street Theater at its best … or maybe worst. 

Seriously, though: October is one of Beijing’s best months. The summer humidity fades into a crisp autumnal coolness, the leaves of the gingko trees turn bright yellow, and thanks to our image-conscious overlords, the skies should be pretty and blue through most of the month. Get out and enjoy it.

Photos: Tom Arnstein, Tautvile Daugelaite, Wikimedia Commons, Study in China