Our first full day in China included work for me (giving a talk at the conference), then an excursion with KLC in the afternoon. The idea was to go to the Summer Palace, which is relatively close to our hotel to give us something manageable to do for a couple of hours.
Let me start by saying that Beijing, as everyone probably suspects, is massive. I’ve heard estimates of the population between 17 and 22 million people – at least two times that of NYC. And so far what have I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem nearly as dense as New York. There are some tall apartment buildings, but it feels more spread out yet completely congested with people, bikes, and cars all at the same time.
I say this because it turns out that the Summer Palace was relatively close to our hotel as far as being in the same neighborhood, but it was still a good ten metro stops away. We made it there after a while and did find an entrance (there are several to this giant former complex for the emperor). We wandered around for a while and then headed back to the hotel. Our small trip ended up being a
The next day was one of the big days that we had planned outside the hotel. KLC had researched reputable tour companies and we had booked a day-long trip through the hutong (dense old neighborhoods), Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City. There is a lot to say about this very full day, but the short story is that we saw a lot. I really liked the hutong portion of the day – that included my first ride in a pedicab – and the Forbidden City is overwhelming in just about every way. It's a giant, truly enormous, complex designed to demonstrate the power of whatever particular dynasty was in charge. Mission accomplished. I was exhausted just walking across it.
We finished off the day with dinner on Ghost Street – a busy street with lots of restaurants and bars – with my cousin Paul. I haven’t seen Paul in at least twenty years, but it turns out that he’s living in southern Beijing. It was quite a random thing to get to see him again, but we had a lot of fun catching up.
Wednesday, October 12th
I went back to my conference for this morning, while KLC explored the Lama Temple on her own. In the afternoon, she met up with us when the conference took a field trip went to the Beijing Planetarium and the ancient observatory. The Planetarium (which was right next door to our hotel) is a fairly typical modern one with exhibits and a digital theater. The ancient observatory, however, was much more interesting. It was built in the 15th century and looks great for its age. Today, it sits in the middle of uber modern and urban Beijing.
The eye-opening experience was the bus ride from our hotel on the northwest side of Beijing to the observatory roughly in the southeast of the city. Beijing has a series – maybe five? – of ring roads. These are multi-lane highways that always seem to be full. When we left for the observatory, it was bumper-to-bumper, crawling traffic and it took us over an hour to get a few miles. Basically, the traffic in Beijing always seems horrible unless you are driving around at midnight (like we did in our cab the first night we landed.)
That night, KLC and I left directly from the observatory because we had bought tickets through the hotel for a kung fu show. We left ourselves plenty of time (we thought) to grab a cab, get something to eat, and make it to the show. Here’s when we encountered another problem we found most of the week: it’s not always simple to catch a cab in Beijing. There are long stretches of very busy roads where you think you should be able to hail one of the seemingly zillions of taxis whipping down the road. However, many times we were obviously doing something wrong because we could never get a cab when we needed one.
The next frustrating thing -- at least for those of us who don't speak Chinese -- was that if we did find a cab and driver parked on the road and they agreed to take us, it was off the meter for some huge price. The last major, but perhaps the most significant, issue is that most of the cab drivers we found don’t speak English. And, of course, they don’t read it. Unless you have an address written in Chinese, then chances are you are going to have a really hard time getting there.
We did finally get to a good place for dinner (recommended by Lonely Planet which was our saving grace the whole time) and then, after much walking, we found another taxi to the show. On the way, however, we saw what we realized was an inevitability in Beijing: a taxi (not ours) crashed into a scooter. Hard. Like one of the scooter guy’s shoes was in the grill of the taxi and the other was flung down the street. When we drove by, he was on the ground not moving. Hopefully he was OK …
If you saw the way traffic works in the city, you would realize this must happen all of the time. The intersections are huge, the drivers are super aggressive, and no one on bikes or scooters wears a helmet. We were late to the kung fu show, but it was really good. No matter what the entertainment, however, the image of the guy on the street after being nailed by the taxi is something that was hard to put out of our minds.
No comments:
Post a Comment