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TRAVEL BLOG ENTRY
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“China, here we come! Hang on, I’ve got to have another cappuccino first…” |
After some years of imagining, anticipating, expecting and envisaging, Beijing finally came to me in a dream-like swirl of greys and browns, on a cold October night at 2am and on a bicycle riding to the guesthouse we had booked. Unbeknownst to us, the cabby had dropped us at the wrong hostel, which we only found after zig-zagging our way through alleys with backpacks fit to burst and still sleepy from the 8 hour plane trip from KL. Having informed us that we needed to go two kilometres or so to Templeside Hostel II, the young caretaker of Templeside Hostel I slipped a dressing-gown over her cotton pajamas, stumbled into a pair of flip-flops, flung our backpacks onto the back of a half bicycle-half buggy cart and produced two rickety old bicycles which we would ride through minus-two degrees of smog and grit, following her to the correct location.
“I never imagined this would be my introduction to Beijing on a bicycle,” I said to Felicity.
Deep within a dense metropolis full of contradictions and equivocal interpretations, home to 15.4 million people and clothed in what our guidebook affectionately terms “the great pall of China,” one wonders how a blone-haired, blue-eyed Aussie – let alone any westerner – could really ever fit in.
At home in Sydney, I’ve long since regarded myself as an honorary Asian (my Fillipino -Australian friend Marc first gave me that honour). With my penchant for wearing nice shirts, sipping green tea, slurping down a pho and frequenting hairdressers in Dixon street, Chinatown, I felt Beijing would be an automatic extension of my personality. I was certainly in for a surprise.
The sprawling mass of office blocks, hutongs, western restaurant chains and factories is nonetheless a city that grows on you, perhaps faster than the soon-to-be shopping malls, hotels and furnished apartments springing into existence. Buildings of all shapes and sizes materialize so quickly, as if drawn in fast motion by a pretend artist’s hand superimposed over an animation.
Speaking Chinese? That’s not something I had counted on doing this time around. But with an absolute dearth of English speakers, one has little choice but to try learning a few words, or at least having phrasebooks and fingers at the ready to point out your daily needs. Perhaps because many Chinese know they are unable to communicate with you, at times you feel as if you’re invisible walking down a main street, but for the occasional inquisitive glance from an out-of-town construction worker. Taxis often pass by when flagged down, a sure sign that drivers often find working out where you want to go just too difficult.
Sitting in Starbucks sipping your cappuccino, you realize that you’ve just walked four kilometers on a particularly cold day just to confidently order a beverage without having to mime your way through the mad-hatter’s tea party and stare blankly at indecipherable symbols – until you spy someone a few metres across the room and somehow meaningfully convey, “I’ll have what he’s having!”
But – no doubt about it – this place is a great introduction to China itself. The realisations that you are a tadpole in a vast ocean, that you have momentarily become a part of a megalithic economic-powerhouse perpetually rolling forward into the twenty-first century, and that your language isn’t, in fact, spoken by most people in the world can all be pretty daunting. But beneath the haze of unstoppable development lies a several thousand-year old culture waiting to be explored, lived and appreciated. China, here we come! Hang on, I’ve got to have another cappuccino first…
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