Day 6: fever, cycle rikshas, hutong visit, market, home lunch, Beihai Park again, boat on lake, visit dagoba.

Very very hot, over 30 degrees, maybe 35. I was walking from shade to shade and felt quite knocked out by the heat.

Ingrid woke early with a strong fever. I thought: that’s that, we will have to stay at the hotel and be bored all day. Nevertheless we got some paracetamol into her and dragged her down to breakfast. She’s been eating hardly anything, and especially tiny breakfasts. Today she had a whole fried egg and two croissants. After that, she was all perky and ready to go. So we decided to give it a chance after all. The rest of the day was roller coaster ride. At times she was jumping and running, other times obviously really sick and miserable, telling us she wanted to go home. Nevertheless the day went well.

The morning’s activity was a cycle riksha tour through a hutong. I found it hard to see much at this pace, especially since everyone not sitting in the first riksha will mostly see the other rikshas. It’s a good thing we saw them properly yesterday.

Then the group visited a local lady who lived in the hutongs, and got to ask her questions about her life. At this point Ingrid was feeling unwell and impatient, so I didn’t hear much of the Q&A. Instead we walked around in the street, where we happened to find a local primary school, so we watched what seemed to be an outdoors gym class, with the children all taking turns to show their rope skipping skills in the schoolyard.

It was interesting to see the hutong residence from the inside: it was more spacious than I expected, with all sorts of nooks and crannies. Almost all rooms seemed to be in separate buildings in and around the courtyard, with the courtyard serving as a sort of a hall. You had to actually go outside to get from the living room to the kitchen. Nice in the summer, probably less convenient in winter – and a nightmare to keep warm.

After this home visit we briefly visited a local vegetable market. It was crowded, noisy, and abundant. I am no fan of noise or crowds, and yet I wish I had something like this at home. Five kinds of tomatoes, three kinds of garlic, many varieties of eggs, also cereals and nuts – and fresh fish still splashing in their buckets.

Lunch was served in another hutong home. It wasn’t a real home lunch (they were obviously used to serving groups of 10 people) – perhaps it could be compared to an English bed & breakfast place – but nevertheless different from the restaurants we’ve been visiting thus far, with far more interesting flavours. (Tomato slices with sugar, anyone?)

The afternoon was free time again. Since it was so terribly hot, and since we hadn’t gotten our boat ride the day before, we went back to Beihai Park. We rented a little electric boat and cruised around on the lake for a while. It was a great relief to be in boat on lake: there was a nice breeze and the air above the water was noticeably cooler. Ingrid had a go at steering the boat (it had one speed only, and that was most sedate). It went zigging and zagging but definitely in the right general direction.

As soon as we got off the boat the heat hit me again. I had a cold drink and a cold yoghurt to fortify me, and then we went up the hill on Jade Island in the middle of the lake, to have a look at the White Dagoba. The dagoba is striking but weird from a distance, but it turned out not to be very interesting up close. It is a very large, relatively featureless white lump, and definitely looks more like it was designed in the 1970s than in the 1670s.

Then it was back to the hotel for a last dinner with our group.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

  • NY Times: The Naked Truth on Credit-Default Swaps – Credit-default swaps are, in reality, insurance. But the people who dreamed up credit-default swaps did not like the word insurance. It smacked of regulation and of reserves that insurance companies must set aside in case there were claims. So they called the new thing a swap. That decision, perhaps more than anything else, enabled AIG to go broke
  • TEDTalks : Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get rational – Behaviour that seems irrational – sharing needles etc – may be perfectly rational given the choices available to people.
  • TED: Julia Sweeney has "The Talk" – Despite her best efforts, comedian Julia Sweeney is forced to tell a little white lie when her 8-year-old begins learning about frog reproduction — and starts to ask some very smart questions.
  • The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours – Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr. For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time.