Beijing - girl

We were in Beijing on three separate occasions: pre and post North Korea and post Xianjing. It began to feel like home in a weird way. We stayed in an extremely friendly hostel not far from Tiananmen Square.

 

Coming back to Beijing from North Korea was extremely interesting. The sheer number of people, the eight lane highways full of cars, good food and freedom (pretty much). At this point I was certain that the most important things to do in Beijing were: eat sushi and eat McDonald's. We managed both. Hurrah for capitalism, globalism and freedom.

 

I remember quite liking Beijing as a city but not being enthralled by its tourist attractions. This view held firm. A trip to the Forbidden City was precisely as I remembered it: dull. The Bell Tower afforded no great views, the Heavenly peace place was dull but with far more tourists than I remember. They've chucked a couple of massive tv screens in the middle of Tiananmen, which I think ruins the effect as the square no longer feels so mind-bogglingly enormous. Surely the point of communism is to make people feel small and insignificant, not let them watch big tv?

 

A trip to the Great Wall was fine. We took a tour that promised a 10km hike along a secret section of wall. Well, there was no one else there and it was long and hot but the number of old or fat people in our group who thought they would hike 10km up and down a steep section of wall in very hot weather was quite surprising. Of a group of 20 of us, four walked at normal speed (two others, C and me), around eight more were a little slow and the rest I thought were fairly selfish for insisting on walking the entire length when there were plenty of opportunities for them to turn back. We took two and a half hours to complete the walk. The slowest took five hours so we had to sit in the sun and wait for them. Of course I'm pleased they achieved something but I don't think it's fair to make complete strangers wait around, especially when we'd been promised we'd be back in Beijing  by 6pm at the very latest. We weren't, at all.

 

Last time I paid a visit to Mr. Mao's plasticised body I had the hangover from hell and had to restrain myself from vomiting in the corner. This time I was a little more restrained. The overpowering smell of formaldehyde has gone but Mao still looks as plastic. The Chinese still weirdly lay flowers to the man who orchestrated the murder of their millions, the foreign tourists still look on in a mixture of horror and amusement and the queue still moves at rapid pace. The only change is that now, after visiting the body of the man who personifies Chinese communism more than any other, one is ushered into a shop selling all sorts of tourist tat with his face on it. Brilliant. I think the zebras have done a perfect job here. There is no better way to destroy Mao's ravings than this, except that people don't seem to notice the irony as they snap up key-rings and lamps with Mao's face charmingly engraved upon them.

 

C has been on a quest to find the perfect kung-fu performance since we arrived in Asia. We did not find it in Beijing. What we did find was an over-priced tourist demonstration of some fairly weak kung-fu where people didn't even manage to jump around in time. Extremely disappointing.

 

We did manage to sate C's need for duck in small pancakes whilst in Beijing and he even discovered a new found love for duck fat covered in sugar. It's fine, I don't need a husband with teeth. And, to keep our tradition going, I took C. to a seafood buffet in Raffles. Pretty good but not excellent. We enjoyed trying new seafood wonders such as sea snail and giant clams before chowing down on Boston lobster.

 

We also used our time to see a few movies (Prince of Persia [officially the worst movie ever], Toy Story 3 and Robin Hood), visit a tailor and eat a lot of sushi.

 

I've definitely enjoyed China more than I did last time: I think that's partly down to China and partly to me. I'm much happier than I was eight years ago and haven't been dealing with the shock of a teaching placement going horribly wrong this time. I was happy to meet a girl whose recent placement ended in much the same way as ours did in 2002 - the head teacher going crazy and accusing the western staff of all sorts of nonsense. It reaffirmed my hope that we really weren't to blame. I swore I'd never return to China, was persuaded into doing so by C and truly, I don't regret it. I'm glad China and I have been reconciled. It'll never be my favourite place, nor will it top my list of countries to which I'd like to return but we're more at peace. The constant spitting, pushing, shoving and shouting are hard to deal with for me, possibly harder than for others but I can just about cope with them now. Our effort at learning some basic Mandarin before leaving in February did come in handy although not as much as we'd have hoped. We certainly didn't get to a level where we could do any more than basic exchanges with taxi drivers and waiters so we remain excluded from the 'real China'. Perhaps one day...