Beijing!

Nihao!

Arrived in Beijing after a 12 hour flight that should have been ten hours, they needed to replace a “battery” on the 747 on the tarmac and made everyone sit in their seats for an hour on the hottest day in summer, cabin temp being raised incrementally to the point I started to think it was the slow boiling frog experiment with humans or that the plane was fitted with a thousand CCTV cameras and we were now the unwitting stars of a new condensed Lord of the Flies type reality show. Anyway, joys of long haul travel aside, we finally arrived in Beijing! Or as the Chinese call it…Beijing! To describe Beijing in the words of “One word weather with Nelson Mandela”: SMOGGY!

i.e. “Lot of fog around today…oh, that ain’t fog.”

You can tell from the airport and the drive in that parts of the city are like London if the British still had money and less planning regulations: the airport terminal is the size of a couple of Heathrow Terminal 5’s, they have six ring roads around the city…six! In England we’ve been struggling to repaint the hard shoulder of the M25 since 1987.

The city itself is like a giant grid radiating outward from the forbidden city. All the buildings are ordered in design, this pleases my wife, who likes ordered things, this consequently pleases me; happy wife = happy life and all that.

The Forbidden City is second clue to Chinese culture, when they put their minds to it - they don’t mess around. The place has 8,000 rooms and a building for every function, e.g. This is the building the emperor puts his robe on, then he goes to the next building to have a rest after putting his robe on - the robe resting building. I thought Topkapi Palace was impressive, and I’m sorry Istanbul, you know I love you dearly, but Topkapi is a model train set in one of the buildings of this place, then there is the summer palace…

It was while we were here that I first noticed how people were staring at us. Two tall caucasians stick out a mile here. They particularly stare at my wife - a five foot eight blond beauty floating serenely amongst a seaweed of four foot nothing clone hairstyles is a sight to see. It’s like travelling with a celebrity as kids take pictures of her. The kids also occasionally run up to yell practice the solitary word of English they know which is of course “Hello”. Initially we were covering our pockets against the swarm but soon realised it’s not like Europe where it is some co-ordinated pocket pilfering by itinerant caravan dwellers - here it is just enthusiasm for for some tall foreign devils. Even at that young age, they probably also realise there is a plain clothes policeman about waiting to violate their human rights if they damage brand China. This is most noticeable on Tienanmen square - pretty much more cops than tourists. Wouldn’t give anyone five seconds to strip down to a “Free Tibet” T-Shirt before finding themselves at the bottom of a collapsed scrum. The positive side of all this of course is the place is very safe! Walking around at night even, never felt in danger and Ass Peril alarm not gone off once.

The city has some nice parks and shiny new shopping malls…which play Kenny G as muzak…all the time…like its the new shizzle…urgh…even the Eastern Europeans have graduated to playing Phil Collins in such places.

The locals are friendly though the language is tough; totally tonal language. You’re stuffed trying to read it off the page, so you get them to say it and you say it back, what they just said and they say it’s wrong. How can that be wrong? I’ve just repeated what you’ve just said! Nope, slightly out = wrong. The word “ma” means four different things depending on the tone - got to be bang on. Cue hand gesticulating frenzy. We are surviving on the vegetarian front too, despite their penchant for putting pork in even their tea. We have had some interesting culinary adventures, which we knew we would - we will upload a picture of the “Condom of cheese” when we can - a picture still speaks a thousand words. Also saw some live scorpions and big ass bugs on skewers at the market, and I mean like still clawing the air live - we moved on swiftly before the inverse of the aforementioned Happy Wife Universal Constant was invoked.

We are meeting some friends of friends who are locals today, they have been most welcoming and hospitable, so will be great to pick uplocal insight from them.

Overall, having a great time, there is so much to see in Bejing, still need to get to the Olympic park, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, kung-fu, acrobatics show etc etc. then at some point think about moving on south…

Until the next exciting episode…remember, “Be safe. And if you can’t be safe - be legal.”

www.GarethFlood.com