My vacation finally began. I arrived in Beijing late in the evening and spent the next twenty hours rediscovering the city, especially the hutongs around my first accommodation.
I love to travel solo, and to be honest, it was fun and exciting to wander aimlessly and get lost in those neat old alleys. My immediate surrounding of courtyard houses and shops was enough to interest someone whose last visit was 17 years ago on a school trip - which meant remembering nothing but visiting friends in hotel rooms. Everywhere I walked, there was so much culture and history, I didn't need a map nor recommendations, and the pile of research notes that I had brought along was forgotten in the deep of my backpack.
So far so good, no unsettling indications of being manipulated by said higher being yet (see Chapter One). Or so I thought.
On the third day of my solo trip, also otherwise known as That Fateful Day, I had ventured into a different part of the city as I checked into a different accommodation. That is more hutongs to explore, and so I left the room as soon as I put my suitcase down.
Pleasurably wandering, I chanced on many good photo opportunities in the neighbourhood - colourful cotton blankets hanged out to sun, chessboard and mixed-matched chairs waiting for old masters to finish their breakfasts and come play, chatting grannies minding their toddler grandchildren whose ruddy bottoms peek out of their open crotch pants...
I came upon a sleepy street that looked rather quaint. It was a hutong, only fancier and lined with rows of little shops and cafes. Nothing seemed to be opened at barely 10:30am. I looked longingly into shop windows and wonder what time they will allow me some shopping. I snapped some pictures and began to search intuitively for a place where I could sit around and wait for the action to begin. The cafes, with potted spring flowers and old wooden doors beckoned to me, but some looked like there were still closed. I walked on and finally saw one that seemed to be open and stepped in.
There, I met The Husband, who of course wasn't The Husband at that time yet. He was wearing a bright blue T-shirt, standing behind the bar counter cleaning up and preparing the cafe for a new day. He looked rather startled to see me, clearly wasn't expecting customers at that time of the day. I was also quite startled that he looked so startled to see me, realising immediately that I had barged in before opening hours. Stumbling for speech, I lost my Chinese part of the brain and reacted by asking if I could come in, in stuttering English, uncertain if he could understand me. Stupid tourist, I said to myself.
So my entrance was nothing short of alarming, but I was lucky he was in a good mood and signalled for me to come in with a nod and a grunt after establishing that I was a just another (stupid) tourist.
Now some background before we move on: He was relatively new to Beijing then and barely spoke Chinese, though he could understand most part of it. The cafe, which also was a performing space for minority folk bands, was owned by his cousin who was also a photographer and went on annual photographic pilgrimages to Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. At my point of visit, he was there helping to manage the cafe along with two other establishments while his cousin was at his artistic pursuit.
Back to the cafe, I chose a tiny two-seater table and sat there waiting for some form of service, but I got none. He was intently working on something behind the bar counter that I had to walk over to get the menu and tell him my order. It was as if I were a regular patron made to feel right at home - just not much service to shout about.
After he made me a pretty decent cup of cafe mocha and finished whatever he was doing behind the counter, he came over and chatted with me in his broken Chinese. He wasn't much of a conversationalist but felt obliged to since I was alone. For the record, I was also always an introverted solo traveller, I hardly chat to strangers and could go on for days without talking. (Much later on he told me that if I were to visit a month earlier, he wouldn't be able to converse with me in Chinese at all; one month later and he would not have been helping out in the cafe.)
The first thing he asked was if I were Mongol. Strange question you'd say, but yeah he thought I might be one, maybe because of my round face. It was then that I learned of his ethnicity, and we chatted cordially a bit more about that. The old house in which the cafe was housed had a surreal aura to it; the March weather was a little chilly and melancholic, yet the sun was warm and lazy. It did feel like we were two people in another world, but it wasn't at all seeping with romance or anything you'd imagine.
When my cup was emptied and I sat long enough to seem like a pathetic and lonely traveller, I decided stroll along the hutong a little before heading to the famous Lama Temple for a quick look. I asked him for directions and although he barely knew the way, he gave me a used map and tried to figure it out for me. I saw a strange script written on the border of the map and enquired about it. He told me it's Classical Mongolian script that they use back home, and offered to write my name in it. So for my parting gift that day, I had a small piece of scrap paper with two lines written on it - my name and his name in Mongolian.
Before I left, he asked what I was going to do the next day and I told him frankly - I didn't know. He then casually said, "Come here then, if you have no where to go." (Much later on, he told me that it truly wasn't a pick-up line, he was really just trying to help in case I had no where to go!) I wasn't thinking of taking up that offer, surely there are plenty more places for me to visit, but I asked for a business card anyway. He told he they were out of business cards, but wrote me the cafe name and phone number. (Only days after I came back from Beijing did I realise that I had stumbled upon the chic Nanluoguxiang unwittingly and his cafe was coincidentally the one that I've read great reviews online. Its very name, address and phone number were scribbled eerily in my pile of research material that I never used! How random is that!)
And I recall, that day at the Lama Temple, I thanked the Buddha for the new friend found.
More amazing coincidences in Chapter 3...
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