Dateline: Beijing, Wednesday, April 23. We ate an early dinner at the Rathskellar again (not its real name, but I don’t know what else to call it.) We had the fish hot pot again. Then we grabbed a cab for the other side of town to catch the “Peking Opera for Dummies” at the Liyuan Theatre. We planned to wander around a bit before the show, but we hit the worst traffic we’d seen the whole trip, and got there with not so much time to spare. The folks we were planning to go with never showed up. I hope they just didn’t come instead of being stuck in traffic for two hours and still missing the show.
The show itself was fun, if pricey (by Beijing standards). There were English supertitles so you could tell what was going on, lots of acrobatics on stage, ice cream, beer, and various activities. The show was a selection of the best bits from a couple of classic operas. I’d never seen Peking Opera before, and thought it all quite good fun.
It was obviously just for the foreign tourists though. This was the first place I’d been where Westerners outnumbered Asians. There were maybe 4 Chinese people in an audience of 400, and for all I know they were Chinese-Americans. After the show, the parking lot was jammed with tour buses; but we had no trouble finding a cab; and the ride home took less than half the time the ride out had taken.
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