Bored in Beijing

Where is this Beijing place?
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RYAN...

Beijing is boring.

We decided to line up to see Mao Zedong's pickled remains...

We arrived on a sleeper bus from Tonghua (shudder) in the early drizzle and smog of an anonymus part of the city that I have forgotten.  We navigated the Metro (easier than I thought) and got the our Hostel with no problems.  Beijing is big, ugly, polluted (Shanghai was worse), noisy because of all the cars, and really inaccessable due to the four lanes of trafic that run through the whole city. For the capital city of China I expected Beijing to have a bit more to be honest. All I could find in Beijing were big buildings, Government offices and lots and lots of cars.  No shops, no real city centre, no real culture to speak of that we could see. To me Beijing was a big mess and gave me a headache.

I got really sunburnt. Idiot.
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What is there to do in Beijing? Well, walking around the city is a mammoth task because it is so big and spread out. We walked and walked for hours one day only to discover more cars and more big buildings. We couldn't find the actual city where the people go to shop and hang out.  There isn't one. This city is just sprawl, sprawl, spawl. Minus the pollution I liked Shanghai better - that  city at least had a pulse that I could feel.

But what is there actually to do in Beijing? Well we had a big itinery of places that we wanted to go and see. Lonely Planet offered us a variety of new cultural experiences and amazing architecture, but what they fail to list is that for each place there is a heavy price tag and a swarm of people of accompany you for your enjoyment.

It's so amazing!
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First on the list.  Tianemen Sq. Tianneman square is a big slab of concrete. It is the biggest square in the world and it was the place that Mao gave dramatic and influential speaches that moved the people, but was also the place where the governement rolled tanks over the people a few years later when they pissed them off. It was pretty amazing to stand in the square and imagine all history and all the events that had happened there and there were some cool statues dedicated to the people that were interesting. It was also hot. Really hot with nowhere to sit and nowhere to get away from the swarms of people.

We decided to line up to see Mao Zedong's pickled remains.  This involved standing for one hour in the hot sun and making a really big fuss when the policemen tried to kick us out of the line for wearing "slippers" (thongs). Kicking up a fuss seemed to be effective and they left us alone when confronted by Claire telling them that these were our national shoe. There you go mum.  We kicked up a fuss in Tianneman Square and we didn't get shot.  Times have changed.  We were filed past what I strongly suspect was a wax Mao in about fifteen seconds. It wasn't worth the wait.

Next on the agenda.  The forbidden city. We paid the gross entry fee of 60rmb to just walk inside. It was not as spectacular as I envisioned it to be.  The one thing I can say about the forbidden city is that it is big. The architecture is really lovely but because we have been here for such a long time we had seen this kind of thing before. There were lots of buildings but overall the size of the place was just empty ground between the buildings with no trees. The swarms of people really put us off seeing the place so we left pretty quickly. It was nice, but I would not reccommend going inside. To see it from the outside is more than enough.

The Great Wall. It is a crime to visit China without seeing it. This was the best part of Beijing by far. We travelled four hours to an unrestored section of the wall that no tourists go along at all. The wall was so amazing and so old that I could feel the history really strongly as we walked along it. As we walked along and sweated it up in the heat of the day I could envision Ghengis leaping over it and surprising everyone all those years ago. This part of the wall was built on really ruggard terrain and it dips and climbs and streches along the mountains for such a long way.  The view was amazing and we took some really great photos. This was what I wanted to see when we came to Beijing.

What else? Nothing. We decided to rebel against Beijing after our annoying experience at the forbidden city.  Everything is so expensive to get in that we just refused to go anywhere else. I liked going there to get the perspective of the place but to be honest I don't think I would return for a very long time if ever again. In terms of what to see in China I would rate Beijing pretty low on the list if it didn't have the great wall.

What a negative blog... Oh well, at least I was honest.

Next we are braving a twelve hour hard seat train to Xi'an (Central North China).