When spring rolls around in Beijing, it means more than just the appearance of green  after months of grey and early darkness, more than singing birds and flowers and the occasional rain shower.  To old school Beijinger’s, springtime means the beginning of park time, and Beijing’s many parks begin to show signs of life after barely stirring during the winter months.
There are a million reasons to go to Beijing’s parks for the average city resident, myself included.  Chief among those reasons is the desire to see the color green and to escape the seemingly inescapable hum of the city, blaring of cars, and squash of teeming people so omnipresent throughout the city.   Whether they are free or it’s necessary to pay a few jiao for a ticket, once inside a city park, the atmosphere outside just melts away. It’s no wonder that parks are such a popular place for the elderly, who seem to show up in them at the crack of dawn and don’t leave until past dark.  On a day where it just makes sense to get out of the city – without actually getting out of the city – a retreat to Ritan, Beihai, or Xiangshan seems to make perfect sense.  And seeing the types of activities that go on in the parks in the spring and summer months makes them all the more interesting to visit.

On a typical afternoon’s stroll through Ritan Park in Beijing’s Sanlitun Embassy district, for example, the shade of cypress trees lets sunlight filter through the leaves but seems to clean the air of the traffic and noise that somehow seems to permeate through everything else.  Old men and women shuffle along with their hands behind their backs down the tree-lined pathways, and gardeners cut the grass with sickles on their hands and knees.  People will be drinking tea from their thermoses while sitting in some of the many benches, and it’s actually possible to hear birds flitting about and singing.  They aren’t the only ones, though, as high school and college students will walk along intently reading out-loud from English language readers, working on their spoken English skills.  I’ve found myself on more than one occasion averting my eyes from eye-contact, old curmudgeon that I am, as an ambling foreigner becomes a fantastic opportunity for them to start up a conversation, inevitably in bad English.  It is, however, the cost of entry and for the first timer in Beijing, can be fun way to meet interesting people.

Continuing the walk, you may come across people passing the time fishing for incredibly tiny fish out of one of the ponds.  Almost all the parks in Beijing have lakes or ponds, and people pay by the hour to fish with long bamboo poles in hopes of making a catch (the fish are released, and are pretty much inedible).  Old people will be practicing tai chi chuan in an open area, slow, deliberate movements which can’t help but add years to life.  Tai chi, in China, seems to be the province of the elderly, with very few younger practitioners, although it is one of the most formidable of martial arts with thousands of years of history. Further along, an exercise yard in the Chinese style will have people working elliptical machines that operate only on hinges, wheels that serve no other purpose but to be turned, and see-saws made for adults, not children.  I could think of no other reasons for these machines but to improve circulation.

In the end, a day in the park is best enjoyed with an ice cold green tea ice cream, or half hour in one of the tea gardens sipping one of the many varieties of tea available there.  For the city dweller, the parks of Beijing are one of the best places of relaxation around.

Vocabulary

Park                 公园            gōng yuán
Grass                草地            cǎo dì
Tree                树            shù
Taichi                太极拳        táijìquán
Flower                花            huā
Island                 岛            dǎo
Lake                湖            hú
Hill                 山            shān
Play area             游乐区        yóu lè  qū

Beihai Park            北海公园        běi hǎi  gōng yuán
Ritan Park            日坛公园        rì tán  gōng yuán
Fragrant Hills Park         香山公园        xiāng shān  gōng yuán
Temple of Heaven         天坛公园        tiān tán   gōng yuán