There are two things that have become immediately apparent to me during the two days I’ve spent in Beijing:
- The people here have been welcoming and friendly.
- The air quality is at least as bad as everyone said.
Let’s talk about the second one first.
The air in Beijing is a gray miasma that looks right out of a post-apocolyptic movie.
This is what the air has looked like the entire time I’ve been here. And it’s not just fog, as it might appear, this is the full-on smog I was warned about. I’ve just been here a couple of days, and I’ve noticed that it burns the eyes and has led to a persistent cough. And it’s not just me. (And this leads to my second point…) I had a nice conversation yesterday morning with a local gentleman who was waiting outside the hotel to meet someone for breakfast in the restaurant, and he mentioned how terrible the air was. He did note that it was sometimes better in the fall.
My other observation about Beijing is that the people have been friendly and pleasant to me as a foreigner who has been more than slightly confused and who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. The waitresses at Grand Pa Le’s last night (a lovely local restaurant in which we were the only Westerners) all did their absolute best to meet our needs as we tried to order off our picture menus. And the driver for our tour (who spoke no English – that was our guide’s job) pantomimed raising up an umbrella to make sure we all took umbrellas with us to the Great Wall.
(Our guide’s miming of the umbrella is the best charade I’ve seen since my father memorably did toast popping out of a toaster in a game of charades at our house several years ago.)
People’s friendliness extended to the crowds at the Great Wall, where a group of young people asked to have my colleague’s daughter Amanda have her picture taken with them.
Amanda gets her picture taken with Chinese tourists at the Great Wall.
Visiting the Great Wall was a lot like visiting the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Lots of crowds, lots of steep, difficult steps, and an incredible sense of history. The steps were endless and irregular, with some being a couple of inches tall and others being more than a foot tall. As you can see, there was also a huge fog bank over the area we were in. The Wall is up in the mountains outside Beijing, and everything was covered with damp. That’s not to say there wasn’t still the air pollution, but there was also real fog. Visibility was largely limited to 100 yards or less, though that improved somewhat by the end of our visit. I can’t complain about mountain weather being mountain weather (the fog was like what you might get in North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains – minus the pollution), but we were never able to get a real view of the Wall progressing over the mountains.
Oh, one other note on that. You know those photos of the Wall you’ve seen that show long flat walkways extending for miles? They weren’t taken in the Beijing area! There were stairs as far as the eye could see.
One of the coolest features of the wall were the Beacon Towers, which clearly served as models for the beacons for the Rohiran in the Lord of the Rings movies.
The beacon towers along the Great Wall made me feel like I was in one of the Lord of the Rings movies. The fog makes it hard to do them justice.
On our way back to the city from the Wall, we stopped for a brief photo opportunity in front of the Birds Nest Olympic Stadium. I would have liked to have seen more there.
A quick photo opportunity in front of the Birds Nest Olympic Stadium.
We got back to the Tianamen Square area too late to do more than just see this historic area, but even that was fascinating.
Along with the monuments, buildings, giant video screens and crowds, Tianamen Square also had some beautiful gardens.