House Photos

Recipe: Moroccan Preserved Lemons

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

Choose ripe, smooth, thin-skinned lemons without flaws for the best results. Thick-skinned lemons are not suitable.

Only the peel is used in cooking plus the juice from the pulp (which is discarded although I have used it). The flavour is unique – the peel has lost its bitter taste.

16 small (thin-skinned) ripe lemons
coarse salt
lemon juice

1. Scrub lemons with a stiff brush then place them in a large glass, plastic, stainless steel or glazed earthenware container. Cover with cold water and allow lemons to soak for 3 – 5 days, changing the water each day.

2. Drain lemons. Using the point of a sharp knife, insert knife 6mm (1/4 inch) from the bud end of each lemon and make four incisions lengthwise to within 6mm (1/4 inch) of the other end. Then cut through incisions in each lemon so that lemons are cut completely through both sides, but still held together at both ends.

3. Insert 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt into centre of each lemon, squeezing them open. Arrange lemons in sterilized Kilner jars. Sprinkle lemons in each jar with 1 tablespoon coarse salt. Add strained juice of one lemon to each jar and pour in enough boiling water to cover lemons.

4. Leave lemons to steep in this mixture for at least 3 weeks before using them. You will find that the salty, oily pickling juice is honey thick and highly flavoured. Use it in salads instead of vinegar. You may also use it to add savour to tangines. The lemons will keep in this mixture indefinitely if stored in a dry place.

5. To use preserved lemons, remove lemons from jar and rinse well under cold running water. Cut away pulp from each quarter but first squeezing juice from pulp to use in recipe, and discard pulp.
You may use quarters of peel whole or sliver them into salads. Never touch preserved lemons in jar with an oily or greasy spoon as fat will spoil the pickling mixture. Don’t worry if a white film forms on preserved lemons in the jar; just rinse off before using lemons.

Moving, moving, moved

It’s been a week. A week to the hour. A week ago now the last item was moved into the new house in Vermont Sth, VIC 3133. We are unsure if it’s a good thing or not that ‘Neighbours’ is made around the corner and that Kylie has surely trampled our lawn. The street is nothing like ‘Ramsay Street’ and hopefully won’t attract the same number of tourists, unless they are our invited guests.

Anyway, we have a new house and home, with its own well-appointed garden made up of a series of garden areas. There are roses, palms, breaths-of-heaven, camellias, nadinas, pittispora, cypresses – and there’s a protea. Not a king protea, but what must therefore be a queen. Soon, there will be more. There is birdsong, and so far only one possum dared to squark and screech. We have no ‘Hello possums’ doormat; instead we have a watchful owl with glaring predatorial eyes. There will be more owls.

Since then we’ve achieve the usual round of ritualistic things:

• Last-minute conveyancer and bank negotiating and hoping the planets do line up on the day at the appointed hour (they did)
• Unwrapping, unpacking furniture items and bits and bobs
• Arranging, rearranging and again rearranging furniture
• Undoing 100 boxes (literally 100, exactly 100) of books, DVDs, CDs, kitchen items, chinaware, miscellaneous and the usual rubbish you thought you’d thrown out last move
• Cleaning, recleaning and sterilising cupboard interiors, shower cabinets and all surfaces to expunge the peril of the pervious owners and exorcise their spirits
• Bidding for new furniture – that which was absolutely essential including two Persian rugs – at auction and getting them delivered
• Getting new sheets (essential) and lots of freshness for the guest room
• Getting the central heating, unused for years it seems, fixed
• Getting the sauna, unused for years, onto its own electrical circuit so it can be used and infused with pine – without shorting and blowing out the electrics in the bungalow (a much nicer word than Granny flat)
• Getting the internet and phone on (a biggie over here – they cut us off as soon as they put us on because their Indian supervisor did not communicate with the Pakistani one – and so harder than you could imagine)
• Arranging books and DVDs and CDs as easily and logically as possible without over-cataloguing anal retentively
• Folding the aforementioned 100 boxes, and associated bubble wrap, and putting in the large workshed/ gardenshed/ poolshed we didn’t know we had but am so glad we do
• Finding out about banal local routines like when’s rubbish day and how water metering works
• Paying an unending round of initial bills and last readings-bills from the previous house
• Sussing out the local malls (there are many) and Bunnings Barns and getting those essential things you forget about (like tidies for cutlery drawers, laundry baskets and vacuum cleaner bags)
• Ensuring there’s enough wine in stock from the local Dan Murphy’s (luckily one tram stop away)
• Taking a cursory walk around the neighbourhood (East is better than west) and looking at local houses (respectable upper brick and tile architecture with cypress trees and box hedging, mostly)

Before that was the less rewarding hideousness of packing up the old house and cleaning it top to toe to leave it spick and span in the hope of a full bond retrieval (still n the future). The walls were starting to crack due to shifting grounds and there were doors that no longer closed. Nevertheless, Mr Property Manager has hiked the rent another $40.00 in counter-intuition to market forces. No wonder there are no bites despite four open homes so far (one on which Mr Idiot Property Manager organised on our moving day despite our warning him against it). Another ordeal was returning the keys. Mr Fucking Moronic Property Manager did not even tell us his office had moved from Richmond to Toorak (that tells you a lot about him, if you know the Melbourne places). So I turned up to open day and returned them then. I think I was the only person there. The Hawthorn Victorian cottage was a wonderful introit to Melbourne, but a year on it’s time to say goodbye and hello.

Besides, an adjacent section, the possum house (a derelict long-empty place, every neighbourhood has one, with many holes in the roof and cars growing in the back yard, you know the picture) is due to be bulldozed, probably to make way for a zillion town houses on a pocket handkerchief – you know the story. Which means noise. And temporary extra possum chaos. And further we get to move away from ‘Maggot Face’ the local uncontrolled bichon-friese-type yap-dog that yelped every time an autumn leaf blew into its yard or every time a passer-by breathed. Good riddance to maggot face. May the new residents maintain their sanity. Another month and there may have been blood.

Yes a year to the day, to the hour, to the minute. August 1 was when I arrived, at first, for the first time. It’s been a short year. I still feel like a newcomer, like a virgin in a brothel. Many roads are still untrodden and I still need orientation in the inner city, though my sense of direction has worked out all the main inner arterials so I can travel without a map. Beyond those limits there is vastness and endless suburbia. Those places are unnegotiated dark places where there be monsters. We are at the edge of civilisation, the last but one stop on a tram line. The tram means you are still in the city limits. It also means you are 20 kms out, which in Melbourne is still within the heart. And hence I’m closer by a full 13 kms to one of the university campuses (some would say campi, for a laugh) I frequent. This campus, you understand is the one famed for bizarreness I’ve described before and now for robot sumo (http://www.theage.com.au/national/robot-sumos-do-battle-for-title-20090731-e4bh.html). Anyway, back to the house. It’s great the neighbourhood is quiet, and so far; no yapping dogs. From my office I can see a pink horizon over treetops. And so the anniversary minute has gone.

But the rains have come. The second that naysayers dared to say ‘fire risk 2010’ down came the clouds and the waters fell. Already they are adjusting their dire predictions. And we might be able to apply to get a swimming pool put in without H20 guilt. Besides, Google Earth tells us all the neighbours have them. Our nigh-arthritic bodies and untoned gym-lycra-techno-loathing conditions demand a swimming pool. We have the spa, but need the space. Let the breaststroke militate against encroaching bad joints and tensions. Let’s hope the bank agrees (so far so good). Donations and bequests to the swimming pool fund are also gratefully accepted.

Moving house is one thing; I’ve also moved offices at work. Yesterday. If I see another box, I might scream. I’ve more unpacking to do on Monday. But this means a change of group for my discipline, and this can only be a good thing, given the history I inherited when I arrived. Hopefully I’ll be around scholars this time rather than boozers. Hopefully we’ll get managed and not bullied this time. It seems (and those of you connected to Auckland or Otago Museums will know what I mean) many workplaces have bullying managers-from-other-cultures employed in the name of multiculturalism – but given absolutely no cultural training in such issues as the inappropriateness of cronyism. They are afforded no communication skills briefing or people-skills education. It is only partly their fault that they’re promoted beyond their proverbial level of competence. They spend their lives saving face instead of apologizing and digging ever-deeper holes.

I very much like the new house: tidy brick and tile, no maintenance, spacious interior, lots of light, garden vistas from every window, few visible neighbours. My study has a large Chinese rug and an oriental flavour and a twin-column oak desk with a green leather top that I had to have at auction. I have three large bookcases and the place feels studious. There are three other bedrooms in the house and two bathrooms. The living area is spacious and has several sections – the art nouveau lounge with the new Persian rug; the music corner; the reading corner that might one day, once the pool is a done deal, be the harpsichord corner. The dining area adjoins the newish kitchen with lovely steel appliances and is also spacious. The large table and six dining chairs look small. It’s nice to have a central hall area, great for china cabinets, and good to have a spacious laundry with more cupboards than you need to store napisan and Fab in. The extra bungalow with its own kitchen and bathroom facilities is a bonus, and is a summer house and music room and den. It also has a large new wooden bookcase, but now demands a chaise lounge. It adjoins the sheltered patio and spa areas that will be wonderful for summer living and quaffing Spanish reds as the sun sets. Nobody has yet uttered the word ‘BBQ’ but they will.

Media Watch

Tapping into the media allows you to access the Zeitgeist of nations and internations and to elicit what’s really on the world’s mind, if it has one.

Obviously, though, this week was for icon Weltschmertz. Deceased icons and legends, dethroned kings and fallen angels, toppled Twin Towers of Hollywoodland and caused Google to melt down (http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/jackson-queries-cause-google-meltdown-20090627-d06w.html).

Then there was damage control. The world had to lose all jokes about Wacko Jacko’s noselessness or about anything anal. Good on media-baiting Sascha Baron-Cohen Brueno for excising a Jackson skit 12 hours before the film was premiering – there’s a fine line between unfortunate timing and dire taste and it sounds like there’s enough bad taste in this movie to satisfy that other Jackson, eh Peter, how’s the NZ Film Commission?

But tacky rather than bloody bad taste.

Good on him for tactful LaToya-editing but bad on Sascha’s Brueno entourage for having the scaffolding holding up man-sized marketing materials for the movie’s Friday premiere over Michael Jackson’s star, sending mourners to another star off Hollywood Boulevard, Michael Jackson, DJ, a false idol by accident.

New Zealand’s media meanwhile managed to lurch between tragic murders with David Bain’s repeat performance of Arthur Allen Thomas giving way to Kung-Fuing wifeslayer Nai Yin Xue, in turn yielding to the unspeakably sad and gruesome Sophie Elliott case, redolent of Ford’s bloody revenge tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and now the Porirua slaying of two women witnessed by two toddlers. What will the world think Kiwiland is? A land where there are so many crims that luxury jails like the Milton Hilton are full and surfeit crims have to live in makeshift container crates with makeshift dunnies?

Fascinating to see the struggling defense in the Nai Yin Xue case suggest lonely murder victim An-An Liu may have died in the sort of incomprehensible multi-partner auto-aspyxiation that may have taken the life of David Kung Fu Carradine in a Bangkok hotel closet – or perhaps there was fowl play. I mean foul play. Perhaps Michael Hutchence was involved too. The media almost cannibalised itself there for a moment.

In NZ’s murderama, there was, in between, the bizarre exorcism expurgation killing in a Maori community. And probably several more bodies in the Avon River in underbelly city Christchurch- who’s counting now?

And Melbourne has its own art imitating life with the Moranic Underbelly slaying organised by the Mafioso wife, and Sydneysiders were appalled by the notorious, possibly-gang-related KFC shootings where a wrong-place-wrong-time truckie was shot by (mis)chance, echoing last year’s Macdonalds’ drive-through – or was it drive-by? – slayings. California of course had the pizza parlour gun-down (http://www.theage.com.au/world/three-gunned-down-in-pizzeria-car-park-20090629-d1gd.html). What next, the great Burger King massacre? Sounds like the Zeitgeist is ready for Johnny Depp as both Dillinger and the Mad Hatter.

I’m sad that the worst of these Kiwi killings happened Aramoana-like in unhappily-wintered Dunedin. Blame it on the water supply? Lack of vitamins from the sun? The curses or ghosts of Larnarch and Cargill?

It’s almost as if these cases happen to power the media along and give people diversions away from the big picture of … Perhaps, what John Key was going flying Jetstar anyway when he got fog-logged in Queenstown. Perhaps truly conspiratorial swine flu stats, true data about what seems to some the recession instead of journalised case studies about how hard times hit the poor and the executive equally. Perhaps it is a smokescreen to hide what the Keyed up government is really doing, or not doing. Like, in Kiwiland’s case, overtly not paying all adults $300 Aussie stimulus package style, not giving promised tax-cuts for the monied (unlike Aussie I might shamefully add), and not increasing subsidised places for Polytech students, not getting sufficient anti-porcine nonovirus till 2009 (unlike well-stocked Aussies I might further add, and boy do they need it). And spending 8 million on anti-smacking referenda and 80 million on prime waterfront rugby party venues – see NZ Herald for other whinings.

If you’re not looking, they can get away with it, and suddenly it’s fait accompli.

And in Aussie’s case it’s all a smokescreen not from bushfire mismanagement (the benefits of hindsight) but from a minor scandal known as ‘Ute-gate’ involving politicians misappropriating motor vehicles and sending fake emails and ending with calls that ‘X must reign’ and then no action (ee http://www.theage.com.au/national/utegate-police-speak-with-turnbull-20090628-d0ub.html and if you follow it, let me know). Sounds like something Dr. Don Brash in NZ might have done several leaders of the opposition ago. Avert you eye, and life still goes on as usual.

But I suspect the Keyed-up, Uted-up ones themselves created the smokescreen. To hide the fact that _ nothing _ interesting _ is _ actually _ happening.

But Michael and Farrah (and briefly David) diverted us, and a psychologically necessary double (not triple) pin-up legend icon angel-making process is underway a la Diana (Spencer not Ross). Soon there will be musicals or operas based on their lives and statues erected alongside Diana’s.

Meanwhile, back down to earth from the emptied firmament of stars, in Melbourne a man falls from a roof and fights for life (http://www.theage.com.au/national/man-fights-for-life-after-roof-fall-20090626-czps.html) while in New Zealand a roof falls on people and ends their life. A bit like the squished-by-Dorothy’s-house Wicked Witch of the East in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Featuring tragic pill-popper Judy Garland who died at 47. Reminding me that Michael Jackson was in the blaxploitation remake The Wiz circa 1978 with Diana Ross who looks like young pre-Moondance Michael in the movie and whom Michael resembled later in the more cosmetic section of his life. But there are some things about everyone best forgotten.

It’s time to head off to see the culture in Melbourne, the time-warping Dali and the time-stopping Pompeii. And I hear there’s a travelling, pink Barbie doll museum in town. And that there’s Wicked Witch of the East Barbie, but no Farrah Barbie. I’d love to market memento mori Barbie.

From 38 to 8

Culture shock has for me a new definition. It is emerging from the wonderment of 38 degree days into days of 8 and nights of well below 8. I returned from my early summer sojourn to Beijing and Singapore back to Melbourne and felt my skin shiver. It was not just the prospect of returning to work, and there was a massive backlog. It was the chill that makes it easy to transmit Swine flu. But still the chill can’t measure up to the Kiwi chills of my Dunedin childhood and a flash on the news revealed snowfall after snowfall in Kiwiland’s deep south. Cars were marooned and schoolkids forced to stay home. And even in safe little NZ the swines are flu-ing and the fear-mongers are forecasting 200 deaths from it. They do not say how many people die every year from ordinary common-garden flus. My body has now adjusted to the temperature decrease, and my body is responding with thickening blood and the craving for the wrong kinds of body-expanding foods.

Singapore

Travelling back from China or anywhere too far flung means you have to break your journey somewhere exotic. Singapore was my choice, as I had a campus to visit there and had heard much about its colonisation and prosperity. And I wanted to hear one Singlish as she is spoke la.

Being in Singapore made me wish I’d spent two extra days in Beijing. While a place of bustle and excitement, fine dining and fine shopping, especially Gucci and Prada or any brand you may or may not have heard of, it is ultimately one massive plaza with outskirts you don’t see where the real people live. The monied minority spend their days in salons and dineries, looking beautiful but never smiling, walking fast but seemingly getting nowhere. There’s a facaded plasticity about Singapore and it is not just due to its sterile cleanliness – though I did spy litter in the night market. It’s a neon artifice of concrete and mirrorglass with a few blotches of history like colonial Raffles or Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It’s a massive plaza, and feels like the best place in the world for a shopping stopover. Even the Catholic Church has a son-et-lumiere display over crucified Jesus. Everything is beautified and enhanced in Singapore, and it has endless provision and products from wall to wall. Most of all it is a fashion centre, and you have to flaunt it. Those in tourist garb stand out like a sore thumb, unless it is Versace tourist garb. I could never quite feel myself in Orchard road amongst the precincts and business suits with last week’s new haircut ready to become this week’s.

The Orchid Gardens are splendid, though to my amazement there’s an orchid there named after the rather unorchidaceous Jenny Shipley, one time PM of NZ. There’s a garden of special orchids, named for famous international visitors. Nelson Mandela’s orchid was also rather unspecial. The gardens are a pleasant oasis, so accessible by bus, and strangely unoccupied save for the odd jogger. I suspect everyone’s at the mall, especially on a searing 38 degree and humid day. The coolhouses – the temperature of the hot houses over here – were welcome. The flowers loved it, and put on the most florid display. And every corner saw a gardener lurking, usually an Indian fellow, dodging the photos of tourists. And Singapore is so organised that there were people stationed at photo spots employed actually to take your photo. Splendid.

Also splendid are the open precincts around the river and waterways. It’s like Melbourne’s SouthBank or Auckland’s America’s Cup Village, except with a Pan Asian spin that is so Singapore. Everything’s fusion, even Chinatown, itself a precinct of souvenir shops and Indian tailors vying for your money. Most splendid of all is the infrastructure: public transport that is everything Melbournians miss and Aucklanders will never know they are missing. The subways are comprehensive and white, and you can get fit walking in the underground from platform to platform. The buses are convenient and user-friendly and their frequency is impressive.

I went into public buildings – and had my temperature taken and was given a sticker to wear all day. It meant I was swine-flu-free, for the day. Such stickers much clash with much brand fashion! In Singapore, I read, schoolkids need to go to school with their thermometers and be prepared for regular self-tests. Despite it all, there are swine flu cases in Singapore, so even the safest you can be is not safe enough. I just plowed on through the plazas and looked for the esplanade.

I ended up in the Arts Precinct by the river mouth, looking out towards Indonesia, where the power and gas that powers this artificial Utopian island comes from, and over to Malaysia where the Singaporeans pipe their plentiful water from and use it to fill up their pools. I enjoyed the Singapore Flier, which is like the London Eye only more so. It calls itself the world’s largest ferris wheel and it’s safe so even claustrophobic and vertigo-sufferers need not fear. They even gave me a discount on flashing my Kiwi passport, tourists being a boon to booming Singapore. The flight – the airport metaphor is underlined in all the commentaries – travels slowly and offers 360 degree views as far as the eye might ever want to see. The floor beneath your feet is secure, and the glass is safer than that of a Sky Tower. The spot where the new casino is to be built is the largest spot on the foreshore, massive site and soon to be a temple of Mammon. All around and especially away from Indonesia, the skyscape is superb and the rooftops of multi-storey condos stretch endlessly until you can almost see the slums in the distance.

Impressions of China and the Zoo

Beijing is a place I could easily visit again, as the sights demand multiple viewings and it is a city continually capable of surprise and change. There are numerous other places of interest, and our dollar goes far here. English is still hardly spoken, except among some people working with internationals, but the art of mime and body language and menu- and map-pointing serve most internationals well. It’s better to turn up with a smattering of basic phrases though, and the locals will notice. Fear of the foreigner can be seen from time to time, but mostly the foreign is seen as the monied and is therefore treated respectfully. Locals who mingle with foreigners are more likely to get criticised for mingling with western money. Accommodation there is cheap and well-pointed, and none of my fears of having no toilet were founded, and squat toilets only appeared in hotels for locals, but do appear in shopping centres, and do not forget your paper as it’s not usually supplied. For your hotel room and wherever you travel, bring mosquito repellant. These insects there are the size of pteradactyls.

Beijing Zoo was wonderful too, especially the Aquarium, and you can see well-trained dolphins looping loops and being anthropomorphic. It’s all a show, a slightly fake façade based on training and practice, like the opening of the Olympics. The colourful aquaria are wonderful, and designed for photograph-seekers, who will be rewarded. The pandas will probably be asleep or sick of being gazed at, and the African animals might not be looking too well, like the emaciated tiger and lions. There’s an Aussie section, but all you might see in the wilderness, mostly overgrown, is a kangaroo.

The Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven (Ming 1420), China’s holiest imperial temple, is a most stunning structure too in royal parklands with 1000 species of tree in the south central area of Beijing, now an oasis amidst busy streets. It stuns because it encapsulates mystical cosmological, numerological and universal laws, with ‘nine’ being architecturally paramount. I write this on our Winter solstice, and am reminded that the Emperor came to the Temple of Heaven on Winter Solstices to pray for a good harvest. Aside from the superb architecture and ancient white plazas and staircases, the striking thing is the locals. The pavilion areas of the park attracts local residents by the thousand each day, elders who come to practice Tai Qi, singing, martial arts, Peking opera, chess, dancing, calligraphy and to sell handmade crocheted Temples of Heaven and feathered hackysacks. They are uninhabited; this is their place.

The Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square and the Olympic Village

The other attractions requiring attention were: The Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square and the Olympic Village. I was there exactly 20 years after what the press called the Tiananmen Square massacre, and visited the site on both June 3, the day before the fated anniversary, and June 4, the day itself. Both days the security was in full force and no photography was allowed if you looked like a CNN reporter, as, of course, I did. The official bespectacled Chinese police operative was convinced I was either an American TV star or a dogless version of TinTin. On the first of the days we are actually followed several blocks before throwing off the pursuers in a subway where armless cripples begged for yuan. On the second day Josie and I passed the airport-style subway security and mingled with the free souls in celebration or mourning throughout the massive plaza with its associated symbolic workers’ buildings and adjacent “Gate of Heavenly Peace”. The western news reported inherent tensions and imprisoned survivors gave a few interviews before the media lost interest and turned to Teheran’s post-election riots, that had to be described as a potential Tiananmen Square massacre (e.g http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/090616/iran-the-next-steps). At the same time as these minor instances of censorship in new China were evident, the Chinese government shut down first Bing and then Google. The former was Microsoft’s brand-new flagship search engine, but it was unfiltered and for two days the Chinese accessed sites they’d never been allowed before, only to have the engine shut down and then reinstalled with filters. All businesses and home-owners were told to install in their computers further filtering devices to keep out subversive material. There’s still a lot to hide and a lot of repression, but it does not overly affect people’s daily lives.

The Great Wall was less great on the day we had booked an all-day quality taxi for 700 yuan (about $150AU), a price that included carriage to the Olympic Green. It was the one rainy, smoggy, foggy, white-rather-than-gray day we had, and the celebrated landscapes were only contours through the mists. We went only in the end to the Badaling Section one of the 4 places that the Great Wall of China near BJ readily open and accessible. We got to walk along several steep kilometres of the 8,851.8 kilometers of the 2000 year-historied Ming Heritage monument. We also used the gondola, no vertigo-inducer to anyone who’s been to Queenstown, to get up. I wanted to go to the less touristy more mountainous and scenic Juyongguan or Jian Kou Great Wall, the latter with its ‘Nine-Eye Tower’, Badaling however is representative if riddled with tourism, and you can climb the steep inclines between signal fire platforms and imagine that the Mongols would not have stood too much chance. Still, evidence of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan exists around Beijing when conquered parts of the city were Zhongdu or Yuandadu, though locals tend not to divert attention to it, though foreign tour guides have the pleasure domes on their itineraries.

Of course even in wet The Wall is monumental, batstone-and-brick, robust, 6 metres wide and slippery when wet. On our wet day there were as many pilgrims there as ever – it was the day of the Tiananmen Square anniversary and Chinese out-of-towners had flocked to the city – and there were opportunistic rain-coat sellers at every entrance way. Yesterday sunhats and parasols; today brollies and plastic one-use raincoats in purples, greens and yellows. In my yellow one I looked like an enormous condom, but it kept out the elements. Aside from a few condom pictures, there was no opportunity for photography here either.

However, the real monument of Twenty-First Chinese identity is unquestionably the Olympic Games Village, presided over by the Birds’ Nest Stadium and the Water Cube H203 swimming structure. These are the people’s palaces that captured the zeitgeist, and they are busy, noisy, frantic and not quite as impressive as they looked on TV. There are multi video screens, dancing panda-icons and endless stage shows. More film is exposed here than anywhere. This is the architecture of capitalistic China, the image for the west to take away. The Bird’s Nest, though they don’t admit it, is actually the work of Swiss architects Herzog & DeMeuron. And like many buildings, the facades are more iconic and impressive than the interiors. Its souvenir shops thrive like it’s 2008. Rows of new hotels skyscrape across the concreted horizons. Wonderfully, it is located at the north end of the central axis of Beijing City, as if on the same historical continuum of symmetry as the Forbidden City. After this, you desire a retreat to old Beijing, not as far back as Peking Man, but certainly back to the temples, palaces, hutongs and squares.

China is of course starting to do Modern well too, and the Airports and Subways, upgraded for 2008, are super; though the main plazas of Wangfujing Street or the Yansha Shopping Mall or any of those places where Gucci have moved in, feel like a globalised ‘anyplace’. The Wall Street strip too has standard gray building standing at erect attention interspersed by executive 7-star hotels. But look closely and you can find the rickshaws, opera houses, historic medicine shops, book shops, hatmakers, teashops and silk merchants, nightmarkets, junky Sunday markets, and you can only tip the iceberg. If you want to barter for Mao Zedong memorabilia and panda paraphernalia at the markets, have a local with you or be prepared to have your arm grabbed time and time again as foreign money is still more than local money.

Consumption in Beijing

The green of the gardens is so lush that you wonder where the water could possibly come from. In Beijing there is so much of everything, particularly food, that it’s incomprehensible where it might all be grown and made, and how many chickens sacrifice their lives every day for the appetites of this one city alone. The scale of consumption, even without factoring in the western influence, is massive. The number of ducks eaten in a single Beijing Duck restaurant – I went to one with 5 busy floors – is immense, and this happens seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, ad infinitum. The ducks must surely be battery or GE ducks. And then there are the pigeons, the oysters and clams, the crabs, the catfish, the squid, the frogs, the locusts and the scorpions. You can see the scorpions impaled, alive, in the markets, ready to become your next kebab. Locust kebabs looked interesting but I was scared of the crunch and the Vincent Price eyes. It’s easy to be tempted by the exotic and extraordinary when an occidental in an oriental mood for foods, and I did try a lot of extraordinary things, frog and snake and lily included, but you do not want even accidentally to be guilty of trying an endangered species or of gorging on GE produce, though I suspect it is unavoidable. It has to be.

The city has changed post cultural revolution, and the conspicuous consumption is part of it, along with the ‘enjoy your life’ philosophy which is practiced everywhere. There may be too many cars on the roads for a city whose infrastructure was not designed for it, but there are also fleets of orange taxis, mostly Jettas and Landras, which dart wildly in and out of streams of traffic and cost little even for locals. They count as public transport along with the super subway (you can travel anywhere for 2 RMB, less than 50c) and the buses, which have fares so tiny you hardly notice. There are few choices of car in China, and in Singapore, my next stop, you can virtually only get Rolls Royce, Lexus and BMW, the most fuel efficient and aesthetic. There are only certain colours and makes of car allowed, and carbon emissions are measured closely. There’s nothing pre-1995 on the roads there; in China, even jalopies are allowed, though few locals want or need them. They hardly need them, and everyone walks, a great antidote for the consumption that their grandparents were denied.

Incredibly, Macdonalds and KFC still thrive, adding to my wonderment about numbers of chickens slaughtered daily. They thrive despite the wonderful fresh and healthy local cuisine. It’s partly down to Americanised coolness and partly due to an incomprehensible ‘fashion’ among particular younger groups. There ought to be more pride in the local product, which is pretty unmatchable, and it’s easy to understand why Beijingers scoff at Chinese restaurants in Australia or NZ as being inauthentic or bastardised. There’s a pride in the local product, and MSG belongs in the past. Only a few restaurants bother to declare they don’t use it; it is so unaccepted now. However those Chinese takeaways in New Zealand … I even saw an Aussie pub/restaurant there. It was called the Outback. To my surprise too there is a significant Russian enclave, full of restaurants and shops, in the centre of Beijing too, and this partly explains the large number of USSR tourists there. The Russian influence is surprisingly strong in Beijing, and their heavier fare has a good audience. To get back to the American fast-foods, I was thrilled to learn that a Macdonalds had been outlawed from the Forbidden City, and that Starbucks was failing to make much of a stronghold in the city.