Beijing with photos

On October 17, 2009 I flew on an Air Canada B-777 to Beijing. I think went over the North Pole, but the questions was way too complex for the Stewardesses to know. But I did see massive snowstorms and really wild blizzard winds whipping up huge drifts below us. Arriving at the beautiful new airport in Beijing, officials were scanning the temperatures of all arriving passengers due to flu concerns. One five star hotel downtown was also scanning every person who passed through the hotel lobby. I wondered what they planned to do with them if they came up swine flu radioactive?

I took the airport express bus downtown to Sidan Square where it was supposed to cost $2.20 to go from there to my hostel. But, of course, the first cab wanted $15., the next $7.50, and the next 6.00. Finally I walked a block away and got one at the correct price. This set the pattern of negotiating everything for the next four weeks.

I was staying right next to a wall of the Forbidden city (FC) and it was my first visit. I have avoided Beijing for years as I thought it was just another big city, but I was wrong. The FC is colossal and the only thing bigger are the crowds waiting to get in. Years ago when I first went to China, foreigners were the tourists, but now they are mostly Chinese - who suddenly have enough money and leisure to visit places like the Capitol. But the immensity of the visitors is overwhelming. They mainly are in groups which are always led by a person waving a triangular flag and holding a bullhorn. There are wave upon wave of these batallions crossing in many directions with bullhorns challenging each other. As a solo traveller, I was like a fly among herds of buffalo. The charge to get into the FC is about $10 and I estimated that between that and the Temple of heaven, they must take in $1 million before noon each day.

The FC was impressive and chilly. I was glad to get to the rear area where there is a beautiful garden which includes places that offer hot tea. The trees are old and their limbs are almost all held up by crutches - which you can see in one photo above. My photos are very sharp and lively, but for some reason washed out here. Hmm, they are also stacking backwards so the FC photos are now at the bottom of all the photos and the Tiananmen Sq (TS) photos are above them.
The Square is of course, monumental. But it is so vast that it is impossible to grasp without being there. There is a security scanner to get on to the square. But this place is so popular with Chinese that it is almost full of people all hours of the day and night. The battalions of flag-led tours cross in every direction late in the day. But early in the day, they all head to Mao's mausoleum (Mao's oleum?). This box of a building (shown above with statues) is criticized as breaking up the once grand square and offending the traditional buildings near it. In the morning, Mao's body rises mechanically from a refrigerator under the floor and truly incredible numbers of the faithful line up outside. The lines are about four-wide and go on for blocks. Inside (I did not go in), the guards hurry the armies though because Mao can only deal with about six hours a day of this exhausting exposure and he settles back down for the night, leaving the tardy to line up again on the morrow.

Not far from TS is The Egg. This is the performing arts centre built for the olympics. There are many critics of its odd appearance. But I think that after the disaster of Mao's tomb, this understated anti-style fits nicely into the neighbourhood. Bj sits in the midst of a desert and there is a question of how they will ever keep this thing clean, but it was sparkling while I was there. I had intended to hear a German Radio Orchestra (Rundfunk) there, but the cost was remarkably high and I had walked more than eight hours and was way too tired. Part of my exhaustion was five hours of difficult chasing and fighting to get an air ticket to my next destination for the next day. When I finally achieved that, I arrived at the Egg to find that Kiri te Kanawa was making one of her farewell recitals there the next night and tickets at a reasonable price (I recall about $70) were available. But I could not imagine going back and trying to alter that air ticket, so I had to pass on a performance I would have loved to attend as I had seen/heard her in New York before and it was a great evening. I think there are four different performance halls in the Egg and she was in the largest.

I think the Temple of Heaven is remakably more beautiful than the FC. I am sure that can be attributed to its being in a park setting which I believe is more than 200 Hectares. Surely this is one of the most beautiful places in all of China. The park is packed with beautiful trees, and where there are not trees, there are Chinese playing many games, dancing, exercising (in troops of course), playing music and flying kites among other things. It is such a lively place. It was a place the emperor went before certain religious holidays to purify himself with prayer and abstinence (how very Catholic). Curiously, this was a religious place, but to my eyes, every vestige, even references in travel guides, do not indcate which religion it was. It probably was Buddhist, but I am not sure whether Taoism was important then. I did see a couple of people kneel and pray in front of a historical stone tablet and I suspected they were Buddhist.

In any case, the architecture, use of colour and height is pleasing to the eye and the whole place is a great experience.

One misconception about Bj is that it flows with bikes. Not so. With the completion of the beautiful and efficient subway, which costs .12, and the vast and great bus system, which costs .06, bikes are irrelevant. More so because of the electric motorbikes which are popular there - although not to the level that bikes were formerly. More surprising to me was the very high level of the autos in Bj. Every Communist party government (high) functionary has his own black Audi with darktinted windows and often with a driver and sometimes with blue/red flashing lights. Apparently, the next flunky down gets a huge Buick - top of the line, usually dark blue and very Tiger Woods. I have never seen so many Buicks in one place in my life. Next, some level gets Jettas and there are a lot of them. But outside of government cars, the general run of cars on the streets are not the cheap brands/levels I usually see in Asia.

One of the joys of China is that if a Chinese person speaks to a foreigner, it is because he/she wants to. In every other place on this trip, as in Bangkok and India, people only spoke because they had a gimmick. But most of the Chinese were really nice and they were by far the happiest population I saw on this trip. Yes, you do feel in Bj that you are looking at the massive new office towers and seeing the tail that is wagging the dog of DC, and that these are ultimately the new bosses of the USA. The thought cannot be overlooked either that not only are they taking over the world, but they are at present a very happy people. They adore being loud, and joining a party, and drinking and gambling, oh and being louder than anybody else, and eating and being loud.

I used the busses and subway freely and it worked pretty well. One of the things I had to see was Big Underwear. This is the CC Tv ultra-modern building in the main financial district. The odd shaped building was about completed near some public holiday about a year ago, and some enthusiastic CCtv employees decided to use company money to buy fireworks to celebrate - despite being told not to (allegedly) by the company. They didn't just buy fireworks, but rockets. They shot them off in the street and some landed on the new Sahngri-la hotel and convention centre which is also a part of the CCTv project. That hotel was so close to occupancy that they were loading in the furniture by the time the rockets landed on the roof of the convention centre and burned down the whole place in a spectacular fire which was ever so much more fun for the Chinese. Now, they seem not to know just what to do with the cadaver. It is huge, and looks to me to be mortally wounded, but it is probably a quandry as to how to get it down - and of course how all the corrupt officials involved can profit from the tear down.