Capital City

Beijing is huge. The cabbies speak better English than anywhere else in China, they tend to pay heed to the occasional traffic light, and it’s a good thing they do, ‘cause you’re bound to spend at least twenty minutes in a cab to get just about anywhere around town. Tiananmen square, one of the biggest public squares in the world, is just that…big, and unless you’ve got a panache for undertaking (Mao’s curiously preserved body can still be seen a few hours everyday in an extremely guarded…and cold…hall), and aside from the ominously massive Great Hall of the People and Chinese Museum, there’s not much to see aside from the hundreds of thousands of people that can fit on the football field(s) sized commons.

Once you’ve have someone take your picture in front of the towering poster of Mao between the arches on the massive red walls to the Forbidden City (where the only forbidden thing now is spitting), it’s another ten minute walk past China-riffic vendors and English-speaking “students” trying to “help you” (read as “rip you off”), before you get into the actual ‘city’; a vast hodgepodge of buildings dating back fifty to thousands of years old, a few under construction for the upcoming Olympics, the rest modeling everything from newly renovated walls and windows to relics from the ____ dynasties. I spent about two hours walking through the city before my hands started to freeze and I couldn’t take another picture of yellow sweeping roofs.

My favorite day in Beijing began with a haphazard venture to a store recommended by a friend who had visited a few months prior. I ended up walking around for hours, exploring little shops and cafes, talking to artists and store-owners, buying hand-made journals, learning about porcelain-making in the Shanxi province as well as paper-cutting techniques from a local artisan who sold his work for about 7 cents a piece. Walking into a cluster of rickshaw drivers, I decided to take an hour-long rickshaw ride through the “hutongs” (the best way to see them, apparently, lest you get completely lost), which are basically century-old, community-style streets that spider through the district directly surrounding the Forbidden City.

Each street shares communal male and female bathrooms, a single telephone, and during that one hour my one-handed rickshaw driver (his call number was 007) drove me by an old woman pedaling her child along in a cart, singing (or just screaming, I wasn’t sure) at the top of her lungs, countless stacks of what I can only presume to be coal being pedaled around and delivered to the individual houses, tables of older citizens playing mahjong, a man getting a straight-razor shave on the street, and countless pieces of laundry hung out to dry in the near-freezing weather. In a city where every pagoda, every large building or monument, and every other tourist attraction harked back to visits to Epcot rather than the “real thing,” riding through the hutongs and seeing people living like this, in this century, in this part of the world, brought upon quite the jarring change.

Beijing is certainly a city to visit for its culture, and it is transparently evident that the government or whoever is in charge is trying to retain that “culture” for the rest of the world to see, even if it does have a string of Christmas lights on it. Every other store displays kitschy Beijing Olympic 2008 products in its window and even the cultural relics, the tourist experiences, and the city itself are so prescribed that I felt like I was merely checking items off the list with every new experience I had. There is a ton to do, for sure, and I hardly feel like I scratched the surface, but I think another day of that pollution would have had me running to the store to buy a mask for breathing. I wonder how the Olympians will do…