Total Miles Traveled: 38,243
Beijing. Why after Bali? Well, my cousin Jenn happened to be going to the states for a few weeks so she graciously offered up her apartment for us to stay in… Beijing, it is!
OK, are you ready? Brace yourselves, here’s the obvious statement of the year, China is HUGE. Yes, it’s got a lot of land, but it has a ridiculous amount of people – 1.3 BILLION of them (China’s decimal point is the size of the US!). What are our first impressions? Read on to find out!
We happened to be staying in Beijing over the “Golden Week” national holiday, when millions of people travel around China to go on vacation – think Thanksgiving in the U.S. But, we weren’t going to let that deter us from seeing the sights – because experiencing the crush of thousands of heads with jet black hair was a tourist destination in itself. We headed straight for Tiananmen Square, site of the 1989 Massacre and the Forbidden City to have a look. Here’s what we found… Chinese people – as far as the eye could see! Imagine that!
We too seemed to be part of the tourist attraction. Zhong guo ren (chinese people) and lao wai (foreigners) alike would stare and gawk at me and Lisa as we walked by, and a few locals took ‘candid’ photos of Lisa. If we had a nickel for every photo…
Experience the sheer number of people…
There were very few “lao wai” because many of them, the expats, had gotten the heck out of Beijing because they knew it would be insanely crowded. But, there was one “lao wai” among all of the locals. It reminded us of the Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others… can you guess which one of these things don’t belong here…”
Here’s what I call a “surveillance Christmas tree” – a collection of cameras for monitoring the crowds in Tiananmen:
It’s a madhouse going in to the Forbidden City:
Thankfully, there are police, military, and Chairman Mao around to maintain order…
Upon entering the gate, it must be good luck to touch the knobs on the door. The lower knobs were worn down to the steel underneath:
For us, the mass of humanity and people watching was more interesting than the Square or the Forbidden City itself. Thousands of people milled about, sat on the stone floor to rest with umbrellas to protect them from the sun, various tour guides holding flags to keep their group together…cameras – thousands of cameras – slung around necks and snapping photos of the palace … and long long lines. It was because of the latter that we decided to skip the Forbidden City this time around, but maybe we’ll return when the crowds are gone.
Meanwhile, here are some photos we took of the outside of the Forbidden City.
Gotta be like a local right? Flash the peace signs!
And here are photos of nearby Zhongyuan Park (dedicated to Sun Yat Sen, an important figure in modern Chinese history – the man who ended the Qing dynasty, the last Chinese dynasty, and became known as the founding father of the Republic of China).
Now, for a representative photo of strange fashion in Beijing. We encountered this woman on the way back from Tiananmen. There’s a lot of, let’s call it “self-expression”, in Beijing. I should create a website about it. 😉 Seriously, this, and the funny Chinglish signs we see are worth taking pictures of. We’re going to start doing that.
Our First Impressions of China
We were expecting some places to be dirty, smelly, and crowded, but so far we’ve been pleasantly surprised. Beijing is very clean and orderly. The malls, restaurants and other venues are crowded, of course, but very nice and modern. In general, people are polite and especially patient with Lisa trying out her new-found Chinese. It’s much better than the Beijing I saw 10 years ago when the first subway line was being built. Some of it must be a result of the Olympics in 2008, but I think China has come a long way in terms of opening up to capitalism/western ways, and it is scary to think how soon it will become even more impressive than it already is.
Also, it’s very clear that the Chinese middle class is growing. By how much? We don’t know because many people (so we have heard) are earning their money through the gray economy and so it’s difficult to assess the true wealth of individuals. We’re told that people buy big purchases like cars (US $50K) and houses (US $500K) in CASH!
When you see/feel the number of people China has and meet them (very smart, extremely hard working people), you start to feel very humble. People here seem to work VERY VERY hard. It’s a highly competitive environment and people have “a kill or be killed” mentality. You start to understand why jobs are going abroad and how the world may change in the near future. Anyway, by the end of our stay in China, we’ll post some more of our observations and see whether our initial impressions have changed.
Here’s the slideshow of all the photos:
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