After checking into the hotel late yesterday afternoon, I headed out to find some dumplings.  I walked along Jinbao Jie to Chaoyangmen Nanlu and pulled into a spot, Dongfang Jiaozi Wang. It was good.  Nothing fancy.  Just standard northern dumplings and a bottle of Harbin Beer. 

As I walked to and fro, my senses brought me back twenty-five years, to when I was first in Beijing.  Further to the west, Jinbao Jie is a luxury lane, complete with a Lamborghini dealership (not many customers as far as I could tell).  But over to the east a bit, closer to Chaoyangmen street, it's a bit funkier.  Some smaller stores and restaurants, a few Muslim places.  It was there that the acrid smell of coal burning assaulted my nostrils.  And that is a smell I associate with Beijing from years ago.  The coal smell, the sewage smell; they're not pleasant but they're familiar.  They bring back to me memories of riding all around the city on my bike when I was a student, back before the roads were widened and choked with cars, back before the high rises rose, the braziers in innumerable hutongs and homes belched forth their small clouds of blue smoke and everything always smelled of coal. 

I had a similar rush of recollection as I walked about today.  After a pleasant lunch with Jeremiah, his wife, and Brendan, I wandered over to the new National Theater.  The route took me through Tiananmen Square, where I once, in 1983, sang in a barbershop quartet under Mao's portrait.  What I noticed this time, however, were the throngs of Chinese tourists.  Groups that appeared to come from the provinces, people with skin darkened by the sun and rough-hewn faces and countryside dialects, come to the capital to see the great national sites.  The faces, the sounds, the jostle of humanity, all sparked images in my mind from various China encounters…. 

Not many foreign tourists it seems.  I guess it is still a bit early in the season. 

I went into the Wangfujing Bookstore and looked around.  A young woman helped me search online for Aidan's Way (Aidan zhi Lu, in Chinese) but it was sold out.  She smiled when I told her that I was the author.  And then one of her colleagues asked me for my autograph!  It was sweet.  There wasn't a copy of my book but they still thought I was autograph-worthy….

I was going to head up to the Confucius Temple but it was too late; it closes at 5PM.

Not sure what tonight will bring.   Tomorrow I will do a class with Jeremiah's students, who have read a couple chapters of the book manuscript.  It's a good way for me to keep my head in that project. 

Here are a couple of photos of the National Theater, which looks like an alien space ship that landed in a pond: