Asia Update #5 - Beijing

Well, one thing I can say about the Chinese emperors - when they do something, they go big. Real big! A wall that is thousands of kilometers long, a palace that fits a city within its walls, and huge summer palace for when the main palace isn't big enough. I got to visit these, and more, over this past weekend. This will be a bit heavy on pictures and less on text…

I am now a real man. The Chinese have a saying that you are not a real man until you have climbed the Great Wall. Did that on Saturday. I had to upload the picture of me standing on the wall to prove that I was really there. Being that I am really not too photogenic, I also added a picture of the wall without me blocking the view. Overall, the wall is amazing. It is thousands of kilometers long (I've heard both 2000 and 6000 kilometers long, so I am not sure which - but either way it is very long). The majority was built at about 200 BC and it is all on the ridge line of their mountains. Between the size and location, I couldn't imagine such a thing being built now, let alone 2000+ years ago.

On Sunday, I spent the day visiting some of the attractions within Beijing itself. The first place I went to was the Summer Palace. This is where the Emperor would spend his days in the summer, when he needed to get away from the Forbidden City (his regular home). Here's a picture of the lake (quite a large lake - probably a few miles long by a mile wide) with one of the palace buildings in the background.

After this, we went to the Forbidden City, the name for the Emperor's Palace. The photo is from the main plaza. This plaza is amazingly large - the picture doesn't do the size justice. And the plaza is just a small part of the entire city. Looking at a map of the City, I estimate that the plaza is about 5% of the area of the entire Forbidden City. It is a huge area. And the Emperor lived here with his servants, guards, wives, and concubines (the emperor was supposed to have 3,600 concubines). No one else was allowed into the City, besides special guests. Commoners would never get to enter the city, hence the name.

After exploring the Forbidden City, we drove through Tianamen Square, made famous a few years ago when some Chinese college students held a protest and the government sent in the military. As with everything else, it is a very large square. It is supposed to be able to hold over a million people at one time. Here's a picture of the Tianamen building (complete with a picture of Chairman Mao).

Another part of the Chinese going big is the number of people at each of these sites. There were many tourists (mostly Chinese, though plenty of foreigners sprinkled in to the mix), and it seemed like as many vendors trying to hawk their wares to the tourists. You would spend a lot of time working your way through traffic and crowds in order to get to the attraction. And the vendors at the attraction were very aggressive, to the point of being annoying. They would stand right in front of you so you couldn't easily get around them and shove what they wanted to sell right into your face. There also doesn't seem to be rules about where vendors could be - there were vendors with tables hawking postcards, books, trinkets, etc. at many places right on the Great Wall, often impeding the flow of traffic. It isn't nearly this bad at the palaces in Korea, where the crowds were a bit less and the vendors almost non-existent. But, crowds or not, you should go to the Great Wall at least once in your life.

The air was pretty clear on Sunday, as you may be able to tell in the pictures. This was a relief to me - I've been having some troubles with my throat being slightly sore, which I have attributed to the high level of air pollution in China. Sunday was the first day where the sun was able to make its way through the haze. I think I am ready to return to Seoul and the relatively clean air (as compared to China, though Seoul is still no where near as clean as in the US).

Hey, I bumped into someone in Beijing which my biking friends may recognize. I was able to sit down and have a few beers with him and catch up. Here's a picture - anyone remember who he is…