Impressions of Beijing

It occurred to us as we were standing in a courtyard at the Forbidden City. Courtyard, perhaps is the wrong word. There are Nascar tracks with less area. It could hold about 100,000 people comfortably. Nicole turned to me and said, "They didn't just lick this up off the street, did they?"

The "this" is scale. Beijing is big. In every possible way. It's a big modern city with big boulevards, big buildings, big theaters, big sidewalks, big benches, and big ambitions. Tian 'anmen Square is so big that the vast buildings that surround it look flat. The Forbidden City is so huge that even though it had tens of thousands of tourists in it, Nicole and I found a quiet cafe inside where we the only people having a cup of coffee. In certain corners of it, you could have conducted howitzer practice without worrying about raising your insurance rates.

That said, Beijing is so striving so hard to be modern that, except for scale, it is hard to describe. Think of any large city, add a few pounds, and then strip out whatever it is that makes it that city, and you have the parts of Beijing we have visited. They are modern, slick, and excessively clean (Beijing might be the only major city I've visited where I'd recommend the public toilets). But it's hard to say what it is beyond that. Of course, there may be other parts of it with more character. Without a decade to explore the place, you can't be sure.

We've spent the last two days walking through the tiniest fraction of this place, marveling at the number of skyscrapers, and being somewhat shocked at the smog so thick that it hazes up buildings a hundred yards away. Our first day, we took in Tian 'anmen (too large for pictures to do it justice), and passed on to a touristy hotel where we feasted on pig knuckles and two-colored tofu ($6). The next day, we walked through the weird Forbidden City, which took eight hours simply to walk through a few parts. It was the home of the emperors, and though described as a pleasure palace, it was a vast monotony of red-roofed buildings with ornate gardens, cold palaces, collections of indifferent gems, and concrete avenues.

Today, we are off to visit Chairman Mao.

(The photos are from the Forbidden City. In case there's any photographers looking at these, the sky is not washed out, it's actually smog-overcast.)