My First Taste Of China

  Beijing, China
Sunday, August 29, 2004

************************************** Update - February 2006 ***************************************

I've been fortunate enough to get back to Beijing, and China, as part of the another trip. Check out the entry here. It's a bit more informative than this entry and has some nice pictures (but I would say that, right?)

************************************** Update - February 2006 ***************************************

Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station
- Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

So having said goodbye Korea we caught, although just about, our short flight to the Chinese capital of Beijing. And what a nice flight it was. Sort of reminded us of our flight from Bangkok to Hanoi back in December 2002, because, just like then, we seemed to be given business class seats for the journey. Nice, even if it was only for an hour or so. China was always somewhere I had wanted to visit and I was looking forward to the 5 nights B and I were going to be spending in the city, at the end of which I would be embarking on a solo loop of China and B would be returning to real teaching commitments back home. I was looking forward to seeing the rest of China but I'm not sure if I was actually looking forward to the travelling alone bit. It was going to be my first solo travelling experience and, by all accounts, China isn't the ideal place to go it alone for the first time. But I wasn't going to worry, if worry is the right word, about that having just arrived in Beijing. We had a city to discover.

China

01 Tian'anmen Square

Everything about China is big: it is the third largest country in world and it has a population of over 1.31 billion people, making it the world's most populous country. Its capital is, of course, Beijing, the recognized political, educational, and cultural centre of

02 Mao

the country, a city second only in population to Shanghai. The People's Republic of China, as the country is officially known, has been lead by the Communist Party of China (CPC) since the state's establishment in 1949, following the victory of the Mao Zedong lead Communist Party over the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War (the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan where they remain today). Considered by commentators as an emerging superpower, it is the world's fourth largest economy and despite market-based economic reforms that have, since 1978, helped lift about 400 million people out of poverty, China is now faced with a number of other economic problems, including a rapidly aging population and an increasing rural-urban income gap.

Our Time Here
Beijing is undergoing some pretty radical changes ahead of the 2008 Olympic games which are to be

02 Temple of Heaven

staged there. The whole city is being modernised to put on display to the world as the 'New China'. Even now, 4 years ahead of the opening ceremony, the work on the ground, from workers rebuilding paths to old buildings getting demolished, is clear to see. The work goes on unabated, 24 hours a day. There was even an ungodly racket outside our Novotel hotel room window from very early in the morning. Seemingly the bank next

03 Forbidden City

door was getting renovated. It's good to know business is booming but that is my lasting memory of Beijing - construction. Everywhere. That and the lovely food.. real Chinese food. To be honest folks, to best see what we got up you should take a gander at the accompanying pictures. Sorry about that. I didn't mean to bore you with the above facts about China only to dump on you by telling you to look at the pictures,

04 Great Wall

but, and here's my excuse, they really do a better job at showing what we got up to that I could by endlessly typing here. And you know the pictures you'll be seeing, right? Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall etc. Yep, they are all there. Hope you enjoy them.

Moving On
When all was said and done in Beijing, B and I said our goodbyes and parted company, a sad occasion for both of us. It didn't feel right as we'd pretty much travelled everywhere together up to this point, including our rtw trip. But that was all in the past and now I was about to embark on something completely new: solo travel, and in a strange country to boot. So with B gone I boarded the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai armed with my guidebook, my Mandarin phrasebook and trepidation about what lays ahead. Tons of trepidation.