Beijing part 2

After a few lines, and several minutes being jostled by other visitors to the Forbidden City, we finally made it inside.

It's really, really big with 9,999 rooms (one shy of the number for divinity and perfection), and was home to the emperors of China from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. There are various courtyards, rooms for the emperor, the empress, the emperor's concubines, family, servants, etc etc etc. Many of the smaller rooms have been converted into museum exhibits for various artifacts (porcelain, jade, musical instruments), but the larger central rooms, those used by the emperor, empress, and concubines, have been preserved. However, it's difficult to see most of these rooms for any length of time because 1) most of them are not very well lit, but mostly 2) everyone else wants to see them too, and there are a lot of people to see them. But because the palace is so big (wikipedia has it listed as 720,000 square meters, which is roughly 178 acres), it doesn't feel too, too crowded walking from section to section. It's only when they're something of particular interest/historical significance does the jostling crowd appear.

Beijing part 1

Alright, so I'm home and and I've been slow to get any kind of meaningful post online, there are a few reasons for this:

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...

dug a hole to China

When I was a kid, every time I went to the beach the routine was more or less the same: apply sunscreen, dip my toes in the ocean, reapply sunscreen, and find a sand crab or two, go back in the ocean. This would go on for a while, but this was not the point of going to the beach. It was only the beginning of the day. While I splashed in the water with other kids, avoided imaginary (and once in a while, real) jellyfish and sharks, and tried not to get sunburned, there was always something extra in the back of my mind, the goal of each and every childhood trip to the beach: I was determined, once and for all, to dig a hole to China.

I don't know who the amused adult was who encouraged me to believe that this notion was true, but for longer than I cared to admit, I was sure it was possible. With the help of a few friends, we would dig and dig and dig. Sand covered our bodies, we took breaks to make miniature sand castles and eat carrots from those little plastic containers with the ranch dressing, but after a while, it was back to the whole. This time we would make it to China. Sometimes we had to build safety walls of sand so that the water would not rush in and destroy our hard work. Sometimes we were dragged away from our pit by tired parents. And one in a while, we would work until we couldn't work anymore and, yes, I'll admit it, gave up.

But ladies and gentlemen, I would like to openly declare that my dream has been realized... sort of.

Ok, so I didn't dig a hole, I took a plane, but nevertheless, I have arrived in China!

more later.

A quotation from a fictional French shepherd

I was reading a translation of the prologue to Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera Médéé for my French class, Lire Versailles, and I while I was annoyed by the constant (but fashionable and necessary for the time) over-glorification of Louis XIV, I was intrigued by a line given by a shepherd:

In the prime of life,

If you are not flighty,

Tender hearts

Taste but little joy.

The ardour of constant passion

Soon begins to wane.

Do you want happy loves?

Then you must ever change.

In the prime of life,

If you are not flighty,

Tender hearts

Taste but little joy.

It's pretty, in French and English, and it certainly seems true, especially if tender hearts in the prime of life are those that beget those fleeting middle school and high school romances. What about when we're just a little older? When was the prime of life then? 17? 23? What is it now?

for the record

no more thesis

not that i finished

i dropped it at the beginning of this semester

hopeless failure or clever second-semester senior?

i'll let the court of life decide

subkirke

Subkirke, as it turns out, was fantastic. It's a church that lends itself to concerts (literally lends itself) so you sit in a pew and listen to a band play at the front of the church where, on an average Sunday, a service might be held. It's an unusual experience to be sure, and one that might offend a few particularly orthodox individuals, but it seemed pretty inoffensive and the pews were well-padded. It was a little odd to be seated in tidy rows in an almost-really-intimate setting, but the novelty of it was A+. I got there a late and didn't take any pictures, so I can't really share much more than this for now, but I hope they have another super awesome concert soon!

did i say squared? i meant cubed

because I also went to the library Saturday night...

...after failing at life (i.e. failing to get to a concert that was only a few miles away)

yeah, so google gives really bad directions around South Bend

as a result, we completely missed the concert at Subkirke, a brand spankin' new music venue in town because we turned every which way but left (the directions gave us a series of rights which put us on a 1-mile freeway that threatened to lead out of South Bend altogether, all we needed to do was make a left; and yes, there's a freeway in South Bend that lasts almost exactly one mile)

but Subkirke looks like it's gonna be awesome, hopefully i'll find out Thursday 

fingers crossed