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I spent the last few days at the Shougang Steel plant, one of the 10 biggest steel plants in China. I was asked to go there for a few days to investigate some problems that they've been having with the software my company provides. So I jumped on a plane on Wednesday afternoon along with one of the local employees and made my way to Beijing.
Up until a few years ago, the steel plant was located on the outskirts of Beijing. But the government decided to close it down due to pollution concerns and had it moved to a new location around 3 hours east of the city - right on the coast of China. As a result, we were up bright and early at around 6am on Thursday in order to get there at a reasonable time. We stayed at a hotel that was next to the Avic Aerospace company - they had a J-10A fighter plane on display out the front of the building, complete with (non-functional) missiles. Very cool:
The drive itself was nothing special until we got to the coast where I was able to see a number of offshore oil rigs. It was pretty strange to be driving on a four lane highway only 100 metres or so away from the sea. We passed through a bunch of toll booths on the way (most of the major roads in China seem to be tolled) and at one we actually caused a big traffic jam. When you enter a highway you get a ticket, and you then hand over that ticket and pay your fee at the other end. We got up to the toll booth and were unable to find our ticket...which meant a bit of chaos while we frantically searched all over the car for it. Eventually we were told to reverse out of the line and allow the other cars to go through - there was an absolute storm of beeping going on when we pulled over to the side of the road to do some more searching. We ended up having to take apart part of the dashboard to find that the ticket had fallen through the compartment and gotten lodged in a hard-to-reach place. Not the best design!
Anyway, we finally arrived at the plant at around 10am - it was pretty nice, as far as steel plants go. I've been to three now (all in the top 10 biggest in China) and they're all pretty grimy and dirty. So it was quite different to see one that seemed pretty clean and had quite a nice layout with grassy plains, a pond and even a small stream flowing between the control building at the food plaza. I guess it's all pretty new which is why everything looked reasonably good, although the atmosphere was extremely grey and murky due to the masses of smoke being produced by all the smelting activities.
I spent the whole day on Thursday going through problems with the lead operator, and we then made our way to the closest town with a hotel - a good 40 minute drive away. The town was pretty small, and seemed to contain all of the dirt and grime that I was expecting to see in the plant itself. It was absolutely full of trucks carrying loads of dirt, concrete, steel, you name it. We stopped to fill up with petrol at one of the many petrol stations nearby (strange that there were so many in a small town and yet I rarely see any around Shanghai or Beijing) where I came across another local oddity - in China, you are not allowed to fill up your own car with petrol. We had to wait for one of the two attendants to get around to us after they had filled up all of the other waiting vehicles. I was going to say 'cars', but there were a couple of pretty strange looking vehicles getting refueled - an example of one is below:
Not sure I'd want to drive a vehicle where the fuel tank is directly in front of the steering wheel! The attendants carry cash around with them, so you don't have to go inside the station at all. However, with 4 pumps but only 2 attendants, it was a slow process. We were there for about 10 minutes and only a minute or so was spent actually putting the petrol into the car.
Friday brought more of the same - back to the plant, more investigation of problems...we fixed a few big ones but there's still a bunch to look into. Since the plant is so large, it needs a lot of staff to keep it going. A lot of these staff come from Beijing, but rather than commuting every day they arrive on site Monday morning, stay at accomodation on site until Friday, and then go back to Beijing for the weekend. Just after the lunch break a whole fleet of buses appeared - ready and waiting to take the eager employees back home to their families for the weekend.
Before I knew it it was 7pm and time to go. The other guys deemed it too late to drive back to Beijing at that point, so we made our way back to the small town and had a meal and a few beers. During this meal I did something I've never done before - I put ice cubes in my beer. In China when you ask for beer you need to specify whether you want it cold or at room temperature. When the weather is cold, Chinese people don't like drinking cold drinks. Therefore, I got a few surprised looks when I asked for a cold beer with dinner. They didn't actually have any beer in their fridges as they assumed noone would want to drink it, so their solution was to provide the room temperature bottles and a bucket of ice cubes with some tongs for me to use. It was a dilemma - warm beer or watered-down cold beer? I went with the ice cubes, and it was drinkable, although not exactly tasty.
We left for Beijing early Saturday morning, and after a bit of a wait at the airport and then some further delays in Shanghai waiting for luggage, I finally got back to my apartment by 6pm. Sometimes it's good to be back in Shanghai.
So we got up on the Saturday and dragged ourselves out of bed at around 8am. Three hours of sleep is definitely not recommended when you've got to make an early flight. We threw our clothes into a couple of bags, flagged down a taxi and got out to the Hongqiao airport in reasonable time. The 2 hour flight went past pretty quickly, and before we knew it, we were in Beijing.
Well, at the airport anyway. The airport in Beijing is a goodly distance out of the city itself, so we had a 30 minute taxi ride or so to marvel at...well, not much. It's one of the few places in China that I've been to where there weren't buildings lining the road for the entire trip. Seriously, I've been to places about 2 hours drive away from Shanghai, and the entire drive just felt like we were going through the suburbs at 100km per hour.
I had been responsible for choosing the hotel when I booked the flights online, so I had the address of our hotel in Chinese, so the taxi driver knew exactly where we were going...but we didn't. We took quite a few turns and went down a number of side-streets before we finally turned into a little alleyway which had a name that I recognised - it was the street that our hotel was on. We were a little taken aback at first, as this street was filled with kids running around, street vendors selling their wares - we weren't sure what I had gotten us into. However, after being dropped off at the hotel (and getting past some initial confusion about our names), we got our 3-bed room, and were quite happy with the facilities. We dropped of our bags, picked up a map from the helpful girls at the front desk, and went off in search of something we would recognise.
It didn't take long. The ShaTan Hotel that we stayed at was only a kilometre or so away from the Forbidden City. We walked around the moat that surrounded it, stopping to take pictures here and there, and had a quick discussion about whether we should go in or not. We decided to move on, as we still had two days left to come back and see that area. We wandered further down the road and found ourselves at Tiananmen Square.
Tiananmen Square is massive. I didn't realise how big the place was until I laid eyes on it - it really is extremely large. It was originally built back in the 1600s, but only came to be it's current size back in the 1950s. We took a few pictures in front of the gate with the big poster of Chairman Mao, and then wandered around the square itself. In the middle of TS is the Monument to People's Heroes, which is a big pillar dedicated to all the people who died fighting in the revolutionary struggles of China during the 19th and 20th centuries. Unfortunately we were unable to get anywhere near it, as the steps leading up to the monument itself were guarded by a couple of soldiers. We walked past the monument and the multitudes of hawkers trying to sell us watches or cameras, and up Chairman Mao's mausoleum. This imposing structure is the final resting place of Chairman Mao, and would have been interesting to visit...but it was already closed for the day. The security arrangements were also quite strict - you needed to leave all cameras, bags, phones, wallets etc at the entrance, and you required official ID (e.g. passport, which we didn't have with us) in order to gain entrance.
After a quick bite to eat (not very many places to get food or drink around the entire TS area) we wandered past a few of the other major buildings (Great Hall of the People, National Museum of China) and decided we'd seen enough of the area. Our next stop was the Bird's Nest stadium and the Olympic area. We looked vainly for a taxi for about half an hour before giving up (terrible layout for tourists - massive 6 lane one-way roads surround the entire area, and there are fences blocking access to the roads, so even if you could manage to flag down a taxi, you'd have no way to actually get into it) and finding the nearest subway station. We had to take three different subway lines to get to the Bird's Nest stadium, but it ended up being extremely cheap (40c AUS to go to any station on any line) and didn't take too long. The stadium itself had it's own station (obviously built for the millions of people visiting during the Olympics), and only five minutes after getting off the train we were at our destination.
The Bird's Nest is an amazing piece of architecture - a stadium that has a unique appearance, it's the largest steel structure in the entire world and cost almost half a billion US dollars. And just like Tiananmen Square, I was amazed at how large it is. We were interested in going inside on a tour, but we all the gates were locked and we couldn't find anyone that could tell us if tours were even on offer or not. At any rate, we had no opportunity to go inside, so we simply took a bunch of pictures and moved on. We wandered down the rest of the Olympic Green (lots of open space as you would expect with so many stadiums and Olympic venues around) and had a look at the Water Cube before sitting down and relaxing for a bit. At this point I called Edward, a guy whose number I had gotten from someone I met in Shanghai. Edward is a Beijing local that hires himself and his nice car out for trips to the Great Wall. We arranged a time for him to pick us up the next day, and ater a few more photos and a quick cup of noodles for Cookie, we decided it was time to get back to the hotel.
After a quick shower and change at the hotel, we were ready to head out and get some dinner and have a few beverages. We didn't really have any plans on a place to eat, so we just went to the Workers Stadium, a large soccer stadium which supposedly also had a bunch of bars nearby. Upon arriving we found a half a dozen bars within a short distance...and an Outback Steakhouse restaurant. For those of you that haven't been overseas and had the pleasure, the Outback Steakhouse is a restaurant that claims to be 'Australian'. In the past, they've had dishes like 'Kookaburra Wings', and 'Roo burgers'...things that we obviously don't eat in Australia. Add that to the fact that they don't actually stock any Australian beer, and the place is a bit of a joke. However, we were hungry, and they do sell some decent burgers there, so we went in and chowed down on some grub. After a few quick beers, we decided we'd try out one or two of the nearby nightclubs to see what they were like.
The first thing that turned me off was the fact that each place had a cover charge - never like having to pay to get into a place. We went down into a place named VICS, got a funky ultra-violet stamp on our wrists, and entered...to the booming sounds of R&B music. For those of you that know me well, you'll know that I hate that particular genre of music, so I was not impressed, to say the least. The atmosphere seemed ok, although the place was pretty empty (it was about 9pm or so) and we ended up only staying for a couple of beers before leaving. We tried out one of the other bars (MIX), which was right next door and had an extremely similar decor and style of music. At this time I suggested we go looking for a club that I'd read about during my extremely brief investigation of places to go in Beijing - Club Banana. This proved to be more difficult than we had expected.
We got into a taxi and I showed him the address (in Chinese) that I had written down. He initially said 'ok', and started driving, but after a while he asked to see the address again and that's when the problems started. He drove us to a major road that he seemed to think was the place, and couldn't find any buildings which matched the number. He then stopped the taxi and rang someone on the phone (I couldn't get through to the club on my mobile to get directions) to try to find the place. When they didn't know where it was, he stopped at a nearby taxi rank and asked another driver for directions. When they didn't know, he gave up. We ended up going right back to where we started, and while it didn't cost us much (only $AUS6 in total), it was a pain in the backside. We were going to give up and walk around to try to find somewhere else, but I suggested trying one more taxi driver...and this guy actually knew where he was going.
We rocked up at the funky-looking Club Banana a bit after 10, and were quite pleased by what we saw. It's a massive multi-floor club, with a smallish dancefloor and bars on different levels. The music was much better than we'd been subjected to earlier (much dancier which suited the three of us just fine), and the place was extremely busy which added to the atmosphere. Shotty tried to take some pictures of the place at one point, but one of the DJs on the stage got out a laser pointer and pointed it right at us, and a staff member approached us pretty quickly to ask that we put our cameras away. It was a bit odd. Anyway, we picked out a good empty spot with convenient access to the bar and a bit of space for some dancing if the mood took us, and proceeded to while away the next few hours listening to some good tunes. We could have ended up staying there until the early hours of the morning, but considering we were going to be climbing the Great Wall the next day, we prudently decided at around 1am it might be best if we went back to the hotel and got a decent night's sleep.
Two friends (Shotty and Cookie) are in town at the moment, and as a result there has been a distinct lack of blogging going on. Got plenty to write about but will be waiting until they leave mid-next week. Some teasers include dance-off, $AUS20 all-you-can-drink, and a weekend in Beijing.
