April 11, 2008
Phil: T minus 2 days until we meet Elinor. Yesterday was an extremely busy day of being tourists—I think they were trying to keep us occupied, and to keep us from sleeping during the day. The boys held up extremely well, considering all the walking and the strange foods.
Impressions: Beijing is a very busy, crowded, growing city, trying desperately to erase its impoverished past. The Chinese seem very proud of their country, and of the Olympics. I was surprised at the number of Chinese tourists—westerners are still a small minority, even at the tourist sites, and our boys got photographed several times. Also, when our tour guide was explaining things, a small crowd of Chinese would gather around us, either practicing their English, or curious that one of their countrymen was speaking a foreign language.
Tiananmen square is vast, a clear reminder of Communist-era gigantism. The emphasis on Mao is interesting—his portrait presides over everything, he is on all of the currency, and he is on the junk watches that people try to sell you as soon as you get off the bus (joke on the bus: the Mao watches always keep the wrong time, but you have to accept that they are right). The Forbidden City is enormous; most of the signage is in Chinese, so it was hard to get a good idea of what the various buildings were for, except for the anecdotes our guide shared. Despite its importance as a tourist site, there was an air of neglect over the rooms, although they seem to be restoring some of the buildings in preparation for the Olympics.
Not all of our stops on the tourist circuit were equally edifying. The obligatory visit to the silk factory was a tedious exercise in pressuring us to buy stuff (they’re promising a visit to a jade factory today). The acrobat show was amazing, but we were nodding off by that point. Perhaps the oddest activity was the tour of the Hutong, one of the remaining old neighborhoods of Beijing. The government is now trying to preserve a few examples, and seems to be encouraging them as tourist sites. We were brought to the plaza between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower and loaded on to bicycle rickshaws for a hair-raising ride through the narrow, twisted lanes—more a joyride than a tour—where we dodged other bicycles, pedestrians, construction workers, piles of garbage, and at one point, a busy four lanes of traffic—I was sure we were done for! It gave me a good sense of what it must have been like to be a Roman aristocrat, borne through the streets of Rome on a litter. We then stopped and dismounted, where our tour guide, an intelligent fellow named Daniel, gave us a brief explanation of the history of the Hutong (the name comes for the Mongolian word for well, as each alley had its own water source.), and the design of the courtyard-houses. We then went in one, belonging to a friend of his. Although it was originally designed for an elite member of the civil bureaucracy, it was very modest by American standards. We were ushered into our host’s living room, all twenty-some of us, perched knee-to-knee on stools, where our host served us tea and sweets while Daniel explained our host’s life. He went into great detail about the traditional hobby of raising grasshoppers as pets, and crickets for fighting (a traditional gambling activity) (Leslie: As the guide talked about how important fighting crickets were to his childhood, I realized that they were the gameboy of the time). It was interesting if a bit disturbing— apparently the crickets don’t actually try to kill each other, but the loser gets fed to the birds. But the whole time I found myself wondering how it would feel to have a large group of foreigners brought into my living room for a lecture on my leisure-time activities. Tourism is an odd way of connecting people.
