Friendship Hotel

About a month after I arrived in Beijing, my employer assigned me to live in an apartment in the Friendship Hotel compound, a complex of residential buildings surrounding a hotel in northwest Beijing. The Friendship Hotel -- a.k.a. "Youyi Binguan" -- is well-known and has a long and interesting history. Within ten years after the formation of the People's Republic, China and Russia had become wary rivals. This less-than-comradely relationship gave rise to a series of "friendship" gestures, with the Chinese looking to lessen the chance that Beijing would be blown to itty-bitty pieces in a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Friendship Hotel, built especially to house Soviet engineers helping to build Beijing in the 1950s and 1960s, is the literal monument to those lofty hopes.


Living in the Friendship Hotel apartments is like taking a step back in time. It is easy...a little too easy...to imagine yourself as a homesick, hard-working, vodka-swilling Russian drone stuck in a big city in a strange country, where no one spoke your language, no stores stocked any familiar food, and no communication reached you from Moscow for weeks at a time. My apartment featured a stove and a fridge that were created in the era of the Philco television sets in the U. S. The walls were painted a depressing shade of Soviet-era grey, and the courtyard had all the charm of a Siberian gulag.


The hotel itself was magnificent, but the staffers were decidedly less than friendly. Once they discovered I was a foreigner who was living in an apartment in the compound -- not a hotel guest -- the reception turned as chilly as a Cold War launch code conference. When I arrived with my two 40-pound suitcases, I asked the concierge if I could check them at the desk while I inspected the apartment, which was on the 5th floor of the building next door.


"I'm sorry, we do not allow that," he replied, in barely-accented English.

"Yeah," I said, "but if the apartment isn't in good condition, I'll need to ask for another one, and it wouldn't make sense to take all the stuff up there just to bring it back down here."

"We cannot store suitcases at the desk," came the response.

"Can't I just leave the bags here for just a few minutes, while I check the apartment out?" I protested again, trying hard to be a good, patient foreign guest.

"Why?" said the concierge.

"BECAUSE THEY'RE FREAKIN' HEAVY, THAT'S WHY," I shot back.

There went the Nobel Peace Prize.


So, I toted both bags up the five flights of stairs (no elevators for the Soviet strongmen), and fortunately, the place was in decent shape, complete with a full-sized bed featuring a mattress as rock-solid as the Berlin Wall. Plus, there was a western restaurant, a TGIFriday's no less, right across the street. However, my angry act-out in the lobby earned me more than the typical mistrust of foreigners among the staff. I was ordered to the desk for a "routine" passport check on more than one occasion.


I witnessed my first Chinese New Year celebration during my residency at the Friendship Hotel. Beijing residents casually blasted their own fireworks displays from the sidewalks in and around the compound. At one point, a stray Roman Candle landed in some dry hedges at the gate and caused the landscaping to immediately burst into flame. The fire raged for more than 15 minutes before a crew showed up to put it out. The next morning, I walked past the charred brush which left a blemish on the hotel's otherwise immaculate front entrance. Now, I'm not saying I know just exactly how it happened. But I've got some ideas.