Pyro Pizza, Beijing, Wudao Kou, 火鬼比萨, must limit foreigners to a maximum of 10, by government order. Here is the entrance from the main street. It is not very large.
Try, as I might, I cannot understand why the Beijing government would limit the number of foreigners that eat at local restaurants. This is in a university area. Yes, China’s National People’s Congress or NPC has started, but do government officials expect trouble from foreign university students?
Wudao Kou is an area very close by at least three large universities in Beijing: Beijing University, Qinghua University and the Beijing Foreign Language Institute.
It has been a long time since I have talked to him, but I still clearly recall going to school with Mark Rowswell. In China he is much more commonly known as “Da Shan”, or Big Mountain. Mark is not only Canadian, like myself, but also comes from Toronto, my home town.
I met Mark while attending classes at Beijing University. As fellow Canadians in a place with many more Americans and other foreigners, we, of course, got to know each other. It turns out that his parents lived near lived near my parents, in the quiet suburb of North York, around Don Mills and Finch.
With much eye rolling and jaw dropping I studied the photos of 2011 student dorm rooms from Beijing University, where I used to study. The article explained that there is a huge difference between foreign and Chinese student dorms. The Chinese students were complaining about discrimination. I would like to put some perspective on this subject.
In the late 1980s the Beijing University foreign student’s dorm was called Shao Yuan. It was a “U” shaped structure with 3 sections, 6 floors, each housing about 100 students. Each building had a guard on the first floor. The guard asked all Chinese to sign in. He also manned the single telephone for 100 students.
