2/7/09

Oops. Skipped a day. No worries. It was uneventful. Class in the morning and an afternoon stroll to the mall. Speaking of malls. You'd never guess this was a country defined as a communist/socialist republic. Nobody does anything but try to make a sale. I was picturing shelf after empty shelf in the grocery stores with only one kind of breakfast cereal for sale. Beijing is about as western a city as I can imagine existing in Asia. Walking back we were crossing the highway on a pedestrian bridge, a place where people like to set up shop and sell you socks, gloves, clothes hangers and little knick knacks like that. One man on this bridge was selling rugs. Not ordinary rugs, however. These were dog skin rugs - I spied the unmistakeable coat of a golden retriever.

2/7/09

So after a late friday night we all woke up at 8 o'clock to tour Tiananmen and The Forbidden City with our visiting scholar Jeremiah Jenne. We took a charter bus down to Tiananmen like the true tourists we are. We w

alked around through the legation quarter - an old area of land (next to the main sewage canal) given to foreign government

s by the Qing r

ulers to set up embassies. The architecture is odd mix of old German, French, British and everyone in between. Jeremiah described it as a little Epcot.

We made our way to the City Planning Center, which doesn't sound too interesting

 on paper. But this place was nuts. On one floor there was a model of the entire downtown Beijing area. It was massive, and as far as anyone could tell it had every building and every tree.

Tiananmen Sqaure is huge. Supposedly it's the 

largest open public area in the world. When asked what he wanted his people's s

quare to look like Mao answered something like "Like Red Sqaure...only much much bigger"

Not only is it big, but crowded. Thousands of people just milling about in front of Mao's mausoleum (or Mao-soleum) and the People's Congress. We talked to man, an English teacher from Hunan province, who had never spoken English with an American. He was so goddamn friendly. We could tell he was so happy to be using the English that he had probably spent years learning and teaching. It was one of the most (if not THE most) moving experiences of the trip so far. I wish we could have stayed longer to talk, but our group had to keep moving. Jeremiah gathered us together to tell the story of Tiananmen Square. We had to huddle together, speak quitely and in code about the events that occurred there as there are undercover "enforcers" always walking around, listening in on conversations at Tiananmen. We saw the hotel where the press corps was located at the time, intending to cover the arrival of Gorbachev. I'd like to say more about Tiananmen but I want to be able to continue to blog. I'll let you do the research. 

At the north end of Tiananmen stands the entrance (complete with a massive portrait of Mao Zedong) to the Forbidden City, so named because only Imperial family, guests, concubines and servants were allowed to enter the 999.5 roomed complex. It has 999.5 rooms because heaven has 1000 rooms in Chinese culture. This forbidden city, is the closest thing to heaven on earth....supposedly.

You enter the Forbidden City much like a cow being herded. Hundreds of people must enter the front gate every minute. It's really hard to imagine how many people visit this place. It's even harder to imagine what you see when you get in there. Palace after palace built on a north-south axis so that if you opened the front and back door to each one you could see straight through them. Utterly amazing. 

We just wondered through the city being told little tidbits of information by Jeremiah for a few hours. At the back is a park where we saw the tree from which the last emperor hanged himself. FYI....

It was a pretty crazy tour. If we're facebook friends you can check out more, bigger photos there.

I came home and napped for a while. I was awoken by people talking outside. Everybody was getting ready to go to an acrobat show. I made up my mind and in ten minutes i was showered and changed and ready to go out. I'm so glad I hurried because this was the most amazing show I've ever seen. The first act was a bunch of guys jumping on a see saw and launching a fellow acrobat onto different objects balanced on top of a long pole supported by another acrobats head. The next was a contortionist who bent her spine 180 degrees. Her butt was touching her head. Various other extremely difficult and dangerous stunts followed, all of which I never thought possible. It seemed every act had been planned out as follows: 

"Ok, guys I think we can pull this off. I'll do something that requires years of training and incredible strength. There will be absolutely no room for error so obviously we don't need safety precautions like nets or mats. We'll start off doing something seemingly impossible and just keep making it more complicated and difficult. Then we'll start juggling. Blindfolded. Good talk, see you out there..."

My favorite act was the 10 women riding one bike...

I wish I had photos, maybe another student has some. I'll try to post some.

It was a crazy, crazy day. It's China, that's how it goes.