We Live In The Country!: A Month in China! The Cricket-Fighting Master of Beijing- and Wine!

The Cricket Fighting Master of Beijing!

Me and Singing Grasshoppers!

Rickshaw fun!

Mr. Liu and the singing grasshoppers!

Dan and our Rickshaw Driver...

Trading Places!

In perusing all the many tours available in Beijing, I short-listed many, but one in particular stuck with me- the opportunity to explore several Hutongs (historic neighborhoods) and meet the Cricket Fighting Culture Master of Beijing! It intrigued me as it was a unique opportunity to see an "off-the-beaten-path" part of the city, as well as meet someone who is a living window on a world we know nothing about! I found and booked it thru Viator, and together with our guide, Storm Li, we started our day at the lovely old Opera House (where I So wish we'd had time to see a performance...), and then took rickshaws (motorized and pedal) through two different Hutongs. Winding our way through the narrow streets, we passed the old brothels and opium dens, historic buildings and small shops...

Opera House

Our Hutong transport!

Riding in style!

In the Hutong...

Dueling rickshaws...

The Tea Museum

At the Tea Museum

Having tea at the Tea Museum

Dan creating a "Living Tea Museum"!

We stopped at the Tea Museum to have bowls of that wonderfully fragrant jasmine tea, and see the exhibitions, which included beautifully detailed dioramas of all the different kinds of tea houses...

An artist painting watercolor at the Tea Museum...

We had a light lunch with dumplings in a small restaurant tucked away deep in a winding Hutong alley...

Dumplings!

Chef meets chef!

And then (best of all), we went to meet Mr. Liu, the Cricket Fighting Culture Master, and his champion crickets and grasshoppers! A truly famous personality, he has been photographed for many magazine feature articles, as well as Time/Life's "One Day in China" book!

The Cricket Fighting Champion of Beijing!

Baby Champion Fighting Crickets!

Storm Li took us to Mr. Li's home, fronted by a courtyard filled with plants and singing and talking birds, where he showed us how he cares for his champion fighting crickets and their wives, with their little houses, and their little feeding dishes, scales for weighing them (they fight, like professional boxers, according to weight class), and the many tools he uses to carefully move them about and encourage them to fight, such as a "fighting" brush made from white female mouse hair! We then got to "meet" his big, bad, black "Mike Tyson" of fighting crickets, who is now, in the twilight of his months (the lifespan of a cricket being about 100 days), a Stud Cricket! We got to see his tiny, valuable offspring, too- there is some Serious Money involved in cricket fighting, and a Champion Cricket can cost over $1500! The National Cricket Fighting Championship is a two-day event held annually in Beijing, following regional competitions at 25 locations around China! Mr. Liu is very sad whenever one of his champion crickets dies- for obvious reasons- he even has little coffins made for them...

Cricket Fighting Tools...

According to Wikipedia, cricket fighting was nurtured by Tang Dynasty emperors more than 1,000 years ago, and later popularized by commoners. In the thirteenth century, the Southern Song Dynasty prime minister Jia Sidao wrote a how-to guide for the blood sport; his obsession with cricket fighting is believed to have contributed to the fall of the empire! During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), China's Communist government banned cricket fighting as a "bourgeois predilection", but it's now undergoing a revival among a younger generation eager to embrace genuinely Chinese pastimes...
The best crickets are apparently from counties in northeastern Shandong Province; crickets have pedigrees, and are carefully bred by knowledgeable keepers. Each cricket must be kept in its own clay pot, and they eat a variety of things, such as ground shrimp, red beans, goat liver, and maggots. Yum. LOL Before fight night, female crickets are dropped in the pot to increase the male's fighting spirit... Why am I not surprised?!

Champion fighting crickets...

Cricket toys and tools...

A fighting cricket in his little home...

The "Mike Tyson" Fighting Cricket!

Mr. Liu is a delightful man; as we don't speak Chinese and he doesn't speak English, we conversed and laughed with him and learned from him through Storm Li, whose English is excellent! We also got to meet and hold two huge singing grasshoppers- one brown and one green! The Cricket Master has special wooden jars for them that he puts under his shirt, and when the grasshoppers warm up they sing! (I wanted to have a singing grasshopper down my shirt, too, but it takes an hour to warm them up to the point where they will sing!)

The singing grasshoppers and their homes!

Me and the singing grasshoppers!

Dan and the grasshoppers!

The singing grasshoppers and their jars!

Mr. Liu

Storm Li also took us to the Beijing Drum Tower, and we had a Tea Tasting Ceremony in the Bell Tower opposite it- if not for Storm Li we'd never have known that within the Bell Tower is a Tea House Museum! I finally bought some of that fragrant jasmine tea we'd both fallen in love with- though not enough to bathe in. LOL

Tea Ceremony in the Bell Tower

Dan warming the tea cup!

Kids playing badminton...

After the tour Dan and I went on a fruitless shopping excursion thru the mall and down the main shopping street to try to get a Nikon camera battery (our camera's battery having died the first day, leaving me with only my phone for photos of this entire trip!), but the good news was that we re-found our fave Peking Duck Stall in the Wangfujing Street Market, and enjoyed two of them with a glass of hot fruit "soup"!

The Peking Duck Masters of the Wangfjing Food Street

Getting a Peking Duck Crepe in Wangfujing...

Wangfjing Food Street Gate

I wrote in a previous post about our unsuccessful attempt to find the trendy and fun-sounding Capital Spirits Baiju Distillery and Bar that I'd read about on the internet, but that had closed shortly before our arrival in Beijing. Not to be deterred, on our last night in Beijing we decided to try to find another one of my Time Out Beijing "internet discoveries", the Nuoyan Rice Wine Bar, an elegant artisan distillery and restaurant that was featured in the Wall Street Journal as a hang-out for the trendy yuppie girls of Beijing! Storm Li was kind enough to call them for us, and was promptly told that "everything on the internet is wrong". Tell me about it! LOL They are not open from 11am-5pm as stated on the website, but FROM 5pm to midnight! The helpful Concierge at the wonderful Beijing Hotel NUO called them for taxi driver directions, and I actually spoke with Ms. Joyce Pan, the founder, who arranged a wine flight tasting for us that evening, as we couldn't attend one of their tasting events! We took a cab to the main street near the Nuoyan Rice Wine Bar, walked down the alleyway... and this time we actually managed to find something I'd discovered on the internet! LOL A lovely, chic wine bar and restaurant, but with Nothing in English anywhere, the barman called poor Ms. Pan at least 5 times, and she charmingly helped us order both wine flights and food, all of which were splendid! We tried tiny cups of 10 of her wines, including the Original, Rose, Osmnanthus Flower, and Vanilla, all of which were delicious, bought bottles of Osmanthus and Original to take with us, and a bottle of Original to enjoy with our delicious plates of beef with mushrooms and BBQ squid.

A Rice Wine Tasting at Nuoyan

Flights of artisan Nuoyan Rice Wine...

A yummy dinner of beef and mushrooms, and BBQ squid...

The Nuoyan Rice Wine Bar occupies a visually and historically interesting space in the in the People's Art Printing House complex in Beijing's Dongcheng neighborhood; filled with art, it's set in a restored 1970s tea house. Nuoyan specializes in craft rice wines made from glutinous rice. Six of their wines are labeled “fresh,” meaning they've been fermented for between 30-90 days; others are categorized as “mellow”, meaning they took 90 days to two years to brew. They also make a sparkling rice wine, as we were to learn...

As lovely as it all was, it was also a bit lonely, because we don't speak any Chinese, and no one spoke any English... and we both SO wished we'd had friends with us to enjoy it all, as everyone else around us did... The fun started, however, when I went to pay our 589 RMB bill (which I perceived as about $100), and found out they didn't take MasterCard! I offered $100 in $20 bills (as I wrote in my post on China Trip Planning, it's imperative to have cash in China, and only PERFECT US dollar bills, as any that have even tiny markings or small tears will NOT be accepted anywhere!), and one of the restaurant's guests, a young government clerk who spoke very good English, came to the rescue with his smart phone currency exchange app, and found out it was only $78, so I gave $80 and we all celebrated: the barmen gifted us with more wine, and topped it off with a bottle of their yummy Sparkling Rice Wine! Then the young man informed us that he had made a mistake- it was actually $10 more. So I added another 60 RMB and we all had some More Sparkling Rice Wine! There was a lot of laughter and it was a lot of fun.

Nuoyan Sparkling Rice Wine!

Our new friend!

After we left the bar, Dan and I walked down the neon-lit street of light-wrapped-trees and 101 restaurants... and found a 7-11! I wanted to go in to see what Chinese 7-11s stocked, and we wound up buying a $12 bottle of Puerto Rican Bacardi Rum- to enjoy on our sleeper train to Harbin!