1. My unpardonable and heinous irresponsibility when it comes to updating my blog this year. I have maybe a handful of posts written in the last 6 months.
My bad.
2. STUPID DARN CAMERA CABLE! I can't find the cord to connect my camera to the computer. Hence no pictures, hence no fun. Luckily my mom's got pictures, I'll just borrow and make due.
3. A lot of other not-interesting excuses.
So! With that out of the way, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Beijing!
After hours and hours and hours and hours on a plane, my mom and I made it to the Beijing airport. Actually for the 13 hours in the air, the flight wasn't all that bad. We took ANA (also called Nippon, as ANA stands for All Nippon Airways), a Japanese airline. There was really good Japanese airplane food, a good selection of in-flight movies (I watched Rain Man for the first time), and a brief layover in the Tokyo airport. Both the Beijing airport and the Tokyo airports were very nice and not too crowded. The international terminal of the Beijing airport was particularly nice, still spruced up from the Olympics with statues of people sitting on chairs doing the sorts of things people would do, except that the statue-people were silver-colored and had no faces. It was very neat.We arrived in Beijing at night, so we went straight from the airport to the hotel, by coach bus, and quickly to bed. Thankfully, the beds were gloriously comfortable so despite the 15 hour time difference, I didn't have the slightest bit of trouble sleeping through the night. We stayed at the Westin Beijing Financial Street, which is, you guessed it, right in the heart of Beijing's financial district. Financial Street is essentially China's Wall Street, although I don't know that I would have guessed just from driving around, but at that point, I didn't know China very well. Or really at all. I can't say that after only two weeks I know China all that well, it's too darn big and complicated (for an introduction to China, I recommend Rob Gifford's China Road, which I'm still working on). But I digress.
So we woke up bright and early the next morning and met up with our tour guide Jack, a Beijing native, who would be with us for the duration of the trip. Altogether, the tour group we were with consisted of something like 150 people, but we were broken down into groups of around 28 (at least that's how many were in our group). The smaller group each had a Chinese guide (with an American name) who would stay with us the whole way. So we were in Jack's group. Jack is in his mid-forties, is married with a teenage son, and has been a tour guide for a while, although I never did ask how long. He works for two weeks straight with a tour group then has two weeks at home before another two weeks with another tour group. So two weeks on, two weeks off; not a bad gig if you like traveling. Not that I would want to be in his shoes, I imagine he goes the same places on most tours and doesn't actually get to see them most of the time because he's tending to all the behind-the-scenes stuff, travel arrangements, emergencies, and whatnot.
Anyway, Beijing. First stop, Tienanmen Square.
Association:
What I saw:
Yes, the framing is nothing special, so how about this one:
At this point you might be thinking, oh my, either Shannon can't take a photo to save her life or it was overcast and foggy, in which case, she shouldn't be held responsible for the general blandness of colors represented. To this I would respond: well, I don't have the photography skills of a genius, but I can take a better picture than a Chinese monkey (more on those later). However, it's a little difficult to capture the essence of a square, because it's purpose is to be a lot of openness. That aside, it's neither overcast, nor foggy, it's all smog. The grayness of the sky, the reduced visibility, the blander color palate; yes, Beijing tried to clean it up for the Olympics, they went so far as to basically shut the city down for a month. But whether they cleaned it up then or not, it's certainly smoggy now. Part of this is pollution from factories, and I heard part of it too is the city's geography/topography; the air just hangs there and doesn't move. It's a little rough on the lungs, and I'd argue, a little tough on the soul too, but I've been spoiled with sunshine for most of my life (granted it's overcast today in California, June gloom).My mom and I wandered the square taking pictures of various buildings while listening to their associations with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party. Tienanmen Square is also home to Mao's tomb which has visitors from the Chinese countryside lined up around the block waiting to see it. While China is becoming a hybrid between communism and capitalism, and while most westerners (and even a growing number of Chinese) have a less-than-rosy view of Mao, he still has a 70% approval rating among the Chinese.
I'm going to stop here for now, although we went on to the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace that first full day in Beijing. I'm going to hunt again for that camera cord...
