Beijing: I hear it’s a nice place
BEIJING — I’m not going to write much about Beijing. Because, frankly, I didn’t do much in Beijing. I treated my six days in China’s capital as a vacation from traveling through China. And, the mere fact that I could do a thing like that — the concept initially sounds rather absurd — should tell you that Beijing bears little resemblance to the rest of the country that it governs. It is a foreign city to almost anyone, Chinese or non-Chinese, who visits it. And, as China remodels — no, revamps — its centerpiece city in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing may soon feel foreign to Beijingers themselves, if that hasn’t happened already.
So yes, I walked the Great Wall, and it was indeed “great.” I entered the Forbidden City, and it was crowded. I wandered some traditional hutong neighborhoods, and they were still standing. According to a recent report, Beijing was home to more than 7,000 hutongs in 1949. In the late 1980s, only 3,900 remained. Recently, with the radical pre-Olympic restructuring, they have been disappearing at an alarming rate — more than 600 a year. Soon Beijing may be the Great Wall and the Forbidden City … and a modernish city that no one recognizes.
But a modernish city isn’t a bad place to escape for a while when you’ve been traveling through a third-worldish country. And I made the most of it, eating non-Chinese food whenever possible. It’s strange that the foods that would upset my stomach in America — actually, foods that I would never touch in America, like McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and their ilk — are the ones I have relied upon to settle my often unstable insides during this trip.
09.15.2004, 4:51 PM · Beijing, The Trip · Comments (2)
