A Short History of The Husband - 1

Chapter One: Destined to Meet

It was early March. There was only one thing on my mind - my week-long March school break, which I had failed to plan in advance. Well, it wasn't really a week long, I had a 2-day professional development workshop and so it was effectively just 5 consecutive days of holiday. Five days of idyllic rest at home would be nice, I thought. However, barely a week to the shortened break with no overseas vacation in sight, I was getting depressed and irritable like a coffee addict who was not getting his daily caffeine fix. The traveller in me had to go somewhere!

So there I was, staring at the Zuji website just days before the start of my holiday with no destination in mind. Five days should be nice for someplace near like my usual choice of Thailand, Taiwan or Hong Kong. Even if I were feeling slightly more adventurous, I would have opted for Borneo or Laos. But no, it was as if a higher being had taken over my body, or rather, my mouse clicking right hand. It swiftly got me a ticket to Beijing, the quickest and also most last-minute travel decision in my life.

I swear that it was not my doing. Firstly, having visited China several times in my childhood and early teenage years, I thought I had seen about enough of China to decide that it wasn't my favourite place to spend a hard earned 5 day holiday. Secondly, the ticket I had booked wasn't for a direct flight to the far flung Chinese capital - it stops over in Hong Kong, losing precious hours of my already short vacation. It just did not make sense. Moreover, I had no friends in Beijing and I hate Peking Duck.

Then came the question of what I was going to do in Beijing. If I asked you for a list of recommended things to do in the city, I bet you'd mention the Great Wall, Peking Opera, Peking Duck, Wangfujing... Man, just what else is there in Beijing??? (Now you see why it was not someplace I'd have endeavoured to visit...)

Thankfully, that said higher being (or perhaps it was an alien abduction) gave me an idea - hutongs. I have no recollection of how in the world I learned about the word 'hutong' or what it meant. Miraculously, it had me devoting hours past midnight researching and drawing out maps on hutongs to visit. To complicate my hasty holiday further, I even decided to book myself into, not one, but three different hutong-style accommodations for a true feel of Old Beijing. The madness hadn't end there, being the obsessive travel researcher that I am, I also trawled countless English and Chinese reviews of places to eat, shop and visit, resulting in pages of illegible scribbles of addresses and opening hours which I never got to use, as you shall see in Chapter Two...