Beijing

Hi Guys,

Sorry about the lateness of this post, but I've been very, very lazy with my blog this week.

I just want to congratulate Mr Steene on picking up a grammatical error that Hugo had somehow missed - that's quite an achievement. You also shattered my dreams of having a post without any mistakes, thanks.

Last time I wrote to you, I had spent the weekend in Shanghai. This past weekend was spent in China's capital, which was an altogether different experience.

I had chosen to resist the temptation of taking a 14-16hour train to Beijing and instead, flew into Beijing airport on Thursday morning. I had to wait for three hours for Mum and Dad to arrive, but I occupied myself by walking round and round the airport. It was not the most interesting experience.

That afternoon, we had no excursions planned, instead, we went to another market. Here, I was further able to enhance my bargaining ability in Chinese.


The next day, we visited the Great Wall. I can't describe the scale of the whole thing without you seeing it for yourself. We climbed up the Mutianyu section, which is over 3km in length and very high. For those of you who don't know, the wall was built by the various dynasties in China, originally to protect China from the Mongolians and parts of it are over 2000 years old. Whilst much of the wall is ruins, there are still some parts that can be climbed. I won't say any more, I'm just going to post some of the photographs that I took from various stages on the wall.


I've decided that I no longer like this narrative style of writing and am just going to describe the rest of Beijing as the thoughts come to me.

Over the next two days, we visited Beijing's other sights: Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Temple of the Heavenly Emperor, the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square was one of the most impressive sights I had ever seen. It is in effect, just a huge city square (apparently the largest in the world), but surrounding it are monuments famous in China's history (both imperial and communist). The square was also crowded with what must have been hundreds of thousands of tourists - it was amazing, seeing all these people coming to see Beijing; I can only imagine what it will be like during the Olympics. These tourists would soon become tedious, as we visited Beijing's other attractions. Seeing Mao's portrait in front of the Forbidden City was a very powerful, poignant image.

I have to say, though, that I was a little disappointed with the other attractions. I appreciate the history behind them, and I was shocked by the sheer scale of everything but there was other factors that ruined the experience. The tourists that I mentioned were even more numerous in these places - most of these tourists were Chinese people, coming from other parts of the country. I understand that this was perhaps a once in a lifetime experience, visiting China's capital, but at the same time, these are possibly some of the rudest people you will ever encounter. They go around in huge tour groups, all wearing comical caps of one colour, but they are very noisy, and have no qualms about pushing people out of the way to get a better view for themselves. Whilst we were bemused at first, after a while, it just got tedious, and made us want to leave as quickly as possible. I don't want to put anyone off going to Beijing, but just be warned about the number of tourists. Also, I'm not sure how authentic a lot of the places were, a lot of it looked relatively new, for buildings that had been built hundreds and hundreds of years ago. In preparation for the Olympics next year, a lot of the buildings were covered with scaffolding.

Below are a couple of pictures of the Forbidden City just to show you the sheer scale of the number of people.

I'm sorry about only writing a paragraph about three of China's most famous landmarks but the experience was not very enjoyable.

We also visited a small region called Hutong. This was originally a region where some Chinese officials had lived. I think it had been made up to resemble an old-style Chinese city but I'm not sure how convinced I am, seeing as there was several Western bars and dozens of English speaking shops. We were taken to an "authentic" Chinese house, which was quite nice, but had obviously been redone as well.

After reading this, I suppose that Beijing sounds like a place that wouldn't be worth visiting. This isn't true at all, just be prepared for a different experience to what you were expecting. Beijing is an akward marriage of Imperialism, Mao and now capitalism. In some ways, it tries to replicate Shanghai with its skyscrapers and businesses, but fails in doing so. In other aspects, it is trying to preserve its history. Its definitely an interesting city.

Other than that, not much has happened this week. We had another basketball match, and lost - now we're eliminated from the tournament. We did make some awesome yellow T-shirts though

Let me know the goings-on in the UK.

Hope all is well.

Miss you lots,

Nihal