Remember Beijing (May 24-28)

"Heaven and Earth are bright under the sun and moon, and the whole world is open and peaceful." – quote found at The Forbidden City in Beijing

Remember Beijing

Keesler, Kim, Katie, Cecilia and I spent several days in Beijing (May 24-28) as the first stage of our Asia trip before going to Tibet, Nepal and India. We stayed at the very nice Jade International Youth Hostel in East Beijing, and spent most of our time exploring on foot. We had a rough idea of the landmarks we wanted to see but mostly went into our journey with loose expectations, and an open mind. We had a great time, and a fantastic first contact with Asia for most of us. Some of the key highlights of our Beijing trip were: the viewing of Mao Tse’dong’s body at the Mao Tse’dong Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square; exploring The Forbidden City (former Imperial Palace North of the square); hiking The Great Wall of China at Jinshanling to Simatei (4 hours, 12 kilometers); eating two orders of Peking Duck at a local restaurant (by mistake; lost in translation); successfully riding Beijing Subway; seeing the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple; navigating our way around with maps in Latinized Chinese that only we could read; and many more. In honor of this first stage of my travels in Asia, below is my personal Ode to Beijing.



Ode to Beijing

Beijing. You live schizophrenia of trying to balance your old and new; concealing the old, walling it off, closing it off to the foreign eyes amidst your Olympic preparations. Infusing modernity into your veins, keeping your clashes in your very middle, your history, your core in your forbidden palace grounds, and your bleeding red in the square of your 20th century: Tiananmen, Mao. You grow in concentric circles, dancing your dance of the planned unplanned, your traffic circulates in two-way one ways, and you don’t want to carry the burden of the foreign bags in your taxis. You are trying to find yourself; you’ve joined the choir of the globalized cities trying to sort out their character, apportion the streets to the historical versus the malls; the small street eats perpendicular to your KFCs, your looks of awe and wonder tinged with suspicion of the restless, curious traveler walking your streets endlessly; trying to enter your unopened new museums, your guarded buildings, and your temples. You bask in the mist of the very fog you produce; you outshine your shiny self at every other corner; you exhibit your paranoia in very subtle ways as you gauge the distance you should keep one at; you are orderly and lack sense at once; you disguise your depths well and make one wonder the direction you are going in time, with space.. you color yourself common as you build into the skies; you bulldoze your small old roofs of perfectly aligned brick to construct towers of empty, for what? Who are you calling to yourself? Where are you rushing to? Are you hiding yourself from me, or yourself? Let me see your Underground City. Let me look at your past. Peel off your layers, open your many gates. Reveal yourself. Our time is so short.


(For more of my images, please see http://deetravelogues.shutterfly.com/)