forbidden to none
two days in shanghai was a pitch perfect start to our two weeks in china; different enough to be interesting but without too many must sees to chase. after a night in and amongst the glittering lights with some cocktails on the 87th floor of the jinmao building, we spent the sunday wandering around the glitzy shopfronts of the east nanjing road before going for a foot massage which managed to simultaneously be both incredibly relaxing and eye wateringly painful.our first experience of chinese internal flights was slightly hairy, though not in the way in which i had imagined. after an exhilarating 300km/h journey to the airport on the bullet train, making the naming of the heathrow express something of an embarrassing joke, we checked into the 20.55 air china flight from shanghai to beijing on which we had booked seats. having checked in, handed our bags over and been gruffly presented with two boarding passes we were upstairs having some noodles when i noticed that the 20.55 had been delayed. to 00.30. not good. there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth until i saw there was another air china flight at 20.35. sensing an opportunity i rushed downstairs to try to convince the duty supervisor to bump us to the earlier, non delayed, flight. when i explained our predicament, he looked at our boarding passes and, a look of mild surprise and annoyance passing his face, passed them back to us saying that we were already booked onto the 20.35. i looked at him blankly; surely some mistake? but no, there it was imprinted on the passes; our check in clerk had booked us onto the earlier flight and not bothered to tell us that he had done so. it was only because our original flight was delayed that we even noticed, otherwise we would have been twiddling our thumbs as we missed our last call.
in any event, the flight itself was extremely comfortable and we touched down in beijing, negotiated the monster taxi queue making a mental note of the legitimacy of barging to the front and checked into out hotel without too many problems.
first impressions of beijing? the smog. it hangs over the city like a permanent cloud, blocking out the sunlight and creating a haze which refuses to lift. it was the smog which actually was one of the main negatives around our day of wandering around tianamen square and the forbidden city. tianamen square is, in truth, a joyless looking place anyway, a grey paved car park filled with patriotic chinese and their soldiers and hemmed in by hundred of cc cameras, the stereotypical communist utilitarian space designed for functional communal enjoyment unfettered with bourgeois aesthetic concerns. we did enjoy the hordes wandering around with their red flags bought from the hawkers dotted around the square; this is a very much a place to both buy into the communist ideal but, possibly even more importantly, demonstrate to anyone who may be watching how much you believe.
the forbidden city is however definitely dimmed by the greyness which envelops it, its magnificent buildings and sheer scope undermined by the cloying smog which smothers it. the other problem, and the one which bothered me the most, was the sheer number of visitors who were there. i am not naïve enough to expect solitude at an east asian site such as this one but the volume of other sightseers was amazing, especially when you consider how vast the forbidden city complex is. i suppose given how many chinese tourists clutter the various temples of south east asia, it is no surprise that they decamp en masse to something as significant as this in their own land. even the various back alleys were teeming with people and megaphone toting tour group leaders with their flocks.
judgment is still therefore reserved on beijing. a beautiful city is in here somewhere, and you can occasionally glimpse it peering out from amongst the narrow alleys of the hutongs; the smog and the sheer volume of people however means that, currently, it seems a nearly but not quite.
we topped of our day's wandering with some steaming cups of tea in a little tibetan cafe; i had a mug of tibetan sweet tea whose restorative qualities were impeccable. vicki, however, thought it would be clement to season her ginger tea with salt as opposed to sugar. hmmm. if there's not a proverb about people who fiddle too much with things striving for perfection there should be...
posted by bicrom @ 9:30 pm
<< Home