Jiao tong le!

I see butt cheeks!

This dad looks like he's going to kill me. Get your baby to a real bathroom dude!

Scooter outside the temple.

Tai Ji Quan!

So many people...

Pretty roof tiles.

Peking duck! Greasy greasy...

Tiananmen Square. Mao is watching!

New performance hall glibly called "the egg." A bit spacey and out there. Characteristic of the dissonant look of Beijing.

Skewer of cicadas.

Skewer of scorpions and seahorse.

Outside of Forbidden Palace. March on young soldiers!

Palace in the center of Forbidden Palace.

Spiffed up new paint job.

Beihai Park. Look, the White Dagoba!

Sponge-brush calligraphy. He dude wrote my name for me, though he got one of the words wrong and also wrote that I was a Korean. Only way to explain how I can look Asian and have such miserable Mandarin.

The Great Wall rising in the mist.

The steepness and stairs would be enough to scare me off if I were a Mongol.

My feet hurt! So let's see... I don't think this post will be too detailed but I should mention some highlights.

- Butt pants. It seems like most kids up to the age of 2 wear crotchless pants sans underpants so that they can conveniently squat where they are to do their business. Seen way too many little kid butt cracks hanging out in Tiananmen Square and in and around temples. I know it saves on diapers but don't little kids sit in stuff?
- Man beaters. So the Chinese version of those unsightly wife beaters is a translucent white number where the neck and arm holes slope down a little too much, sometimes exposing man boob nipples. This is often tucked into shorts or pants that are pulled up very high on the waist.
- Demolition/construction. Beijing right now is mad about getting things ready for the Olympics. Everywhere there is the sound of jackhammers and cranes. Old historic neighborhoods, albeit all concrete and decrepit, are being razed and replaced with a cacophony of very slick but entirely mismatched condos, shopping malls, and hotels.
- People. Tai duo ren! I guess you could say that Beijing people have that New York kind of rudeness. Why? Because there are just too many damn people in the city. It is downright overwhelming. And it rubs off in the way ppl interact. With one restaurant hostess, she greeted every new customer with, "Kuai dianr!" Hurry up! To get anywhere you simply have to push. No pauses for niceness b/c if you stop you will lose your place or get smashed. Ppl have no qualms about getting up too close to you if it means they will get a space on the bus or get past you in line. Ah, so as if the city's heat and humidity doesn't make everyone smelly enough, you get to rub up against everyone else's bodies too. Nice!

So, mini observations aside, let's see about what sightseeing has already taken place.

- Temple of Heaven. Kinda turned into a local park with ppl doing taiqi, badminton, kicking a shuttlecock. Very calm and filled with trees.
- Forbidden City. Huge! There is no way to capture the size of this place. It is just enormous the area that is encompassed by the walls of the Forbidden City. It has a really gorgeous garden too. Overrun with Chinese tourist. One of those bodies pressing up against bodies experience at the entrance.
- Mao. The guy himself is kept in a glass enclosure that you can go see him at in the middle of Tiananmen Square. He is looking like he is now made of orange wax. Seeing him is free to the public but you do have to pay for packets of plastic flowers that you can lay at his statue. Which they simply sell over and over to people.
- Beihai. A lake park with an island in the center topped with a temple called the White Dagoba. Calm and lovely with paddle boats floating within.
- Wanfujing. A big shopping street with a street lined with regional food stalls. There are skewer shops that sell scorpions and sea horses on skewers!
- The Great Wall. We went to a less visited portion, apparently there are a few you can choose from. We had to take a bus and then hire a driver, who was our bus driver trying to make a few extra bucks. In any case, it was nice that we didn't hit the most tourist developed area of the wall so there weren't as many people there. Even so it had a road lined with souvenir stalls. "Hello, t-shirt. Many colors!" And then of course we took a cable car up to the wall. Which was amazing! What a sight to see! Battlements and wall snaking on the ridge of the mountains. Lots of steep climbing up steps. Lots of the battlements smelled like poop b/c that is probably what ppl do way up there. But really absolutely amazing. And than, which actually rivals the wall itself in coolness, we tobogganed down. Woohoo, zipping down a snaking toboggan slide was so so fun. At one point one of my friends got stuck and we had bottlenecking, but it all worked out and we didn't have to cash in our 1 Yuan insurance ticket. Nice!

In conclusion, my feet hurt. A lot. One more day of Beijing and then on the Xian where we will see the tombs of the terra cota warriors. Wee, vacations are excellent things. Hard on the feet, but good for the spirit.

Taxis don't stop in front of Tiananmen!

A very unhostel-like hostel.

The little courtyard in the hostel. Gorgeous!

Outside the entrance to our hostel.

The very hard to locate alley that led to our hostel.

Am finally safely ensconced in our hutong hostel. Man, you cannot get a taxi for nothing in Beijing!

So let me do some recap of the day. Went to work. Did home visit, rapped up work stuff, zipped out of there -- freedom! Caught a ride from my friend to SF airport. Got there super early as I am want to do at airports and settled in with Blink (I actually ended up finishing the book on the plane. So much that is applicable to how I have been feeling and raised questions for me around child welfare. Anyway). The flight was 12 hours long. So needless to say I felt like a dehydrated zombie once I disembarked in Beijing. (Watched The Golden Compass and Martian Child. Why do planes always play the cheesiest American movies? They were also playing a Korean movie about a woman with a brain tumor who falls in love with the brother of her deceased husband. Isn't that like every Korean movie?) But Beijing's airport was gorgeous. You can see all the work they are putting into everything for the Olympics. I still have doubts if transportation will truly be up to snuff, as evidenced by the lack of available taxis! But more about that.

So I stuck around in baggage claim to meet my 2 friends arriving from Seoul. Chatted with a diplomat from Egypt there to meet some people arriving from Cairo. I also saw a flight arriving from Pyong Yang, which I thought was a bit wild. The airport is absolutely swank. And filled with young employees, some cutting up a bit with luggage carts. I met my friends and we grabbed a bus into Beijing. The weather is humid and appeared foggy, which turns out to be smog. So thick it is like fog. After a few hours my nose is starting to burn a bit.

So we ended up getting dropped off in front of Tiananmen, which really made real that we are in Beijing. There it is. Huge plaza, inclined planes for millions of ppl to stand and gather. Mao's face, huge and looming over the square. The whole area was dark, but bathed in lights that shone off the wet pavement. Amazing. One minute in SF, the next in Beijing. Traveling always trips me like that.

So then was the 2 hour struggle to hail a taxi. Until we found out that taxis can't stop on the big main street. And once we were able to flag down 2 taxis, after streams of filled ones, the drivers said they didn't know where our hostel was and zipped off. Crap! It was 10pm and were walking the streets not knowing ourselves how to get where we needed to go! Technology saved the day. We busted out a laptop to figure out what buses we could take. The bus ticket lady thankfully knew where were headed and about a mile off from where we were we got down at a shady alley. These hutongs remind me of pueblo streets in Mexico. Narrow and badly paved. Little shops doting the gated dwellings. Dude, one things I have to comment on is that Chinese ppl are so unhelpful! Geez, they will throw you off just so that you will leave them alone! Cursed failing of Chinese culture... Anyway. Time to get clean and showered, reposing in my nice clean hostel bed. So far so good! Not robbed! Not injured! Wee!

Beijing on my mind...

So, I'm going to Beijing in two weeks. That is provided that the Chinese consulate grants me a visa. I've gone to the office twice and been turned away for insufficient documentation. Keep in mind that I have to drive from Oakland to San Francisco, leave on a work day and get a number and wait in line, only then to find out that I was supposed to bring my airline tickets or signature and id number for a relative in China. It's ridiculous! How am I going to get into this country! Argh!!! I chatted in the waiting area with a white girl from Stanford, going to the Beijing Olympics to watch her friend on the women's polo team. And she's also seeing Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Bali. Oh man. I won't have that kind of time to travel ever again... In truth though, long trips make me antsy and I tend not the enjoy them. This jaunt to China will include Beijing and Xian and will be a whirlwind of sightseeing. A perfect antidote to burnout with with my job. If I can just get my visa! So things that need to happen on this trip to make all this grief worth it:

- I get hugged by a panda baby that tells me, "Wo Ai Ni!"
- I eat original, served-to-the-emperors, recipe peking duck
- I discover a new tomb of terra cotta chickens at Chi Shi Wang's tomb