Beijing beginnings

Beijing has kept many of its old neighborhoods and building styles so, unlike Shanghai, parts of it look Chinese.  But it is not much smaller than Shanghai and the traffic is just as bad.  Worse in my opinion, but I took the Metro a lot in Shanghai.  Here I have a driver even if we only go half a mile and I know I can walk faster.  With 22 million residents, Beijing is the third largest city in China, just behind Shanghai with 24 million residents.  The largest city, which no American has ever heard of, is Guangzhou with over 30 million people.  The numbers continue to boggle the mind.  Although it has 22 million residents, Beijing has "only" 8 million cars.  It has six or seven concentric ring roads (beltways) with the first ring road being the most central.  Beijing controls the number of new cars that can be purchased with annual weekly lotteries; anyone can buy a car, but you have to win the lottery to get a license plate and be able to drive it.  Once you have a car, you can only drive it six days a week, and non residents can only drive in Beijing for very limited time periods.  No one in China does road trips.  Beijing has the second largest metro system in the world (behind Shanghai) with twenty one lines and 400 miles.

Beijing has kept some of its old neighborhoods called hutongs which consist of small houses on narrow alleys.  The houses may or may not have running water but do not have bathrooms, so every hundred yards or so in each alley is a public bathroom.  My hotel is extremely small - only eight rooms - in a hutong (although it does have bathrooms.)  It could not be more different from my room in the forty story Hilton in Shanghai.  It is a real Chinese neighborhood and I have seen only a handful of western faces as I walk around.

Besides the metro and too many cars, there are bicycles and scooters everywhere.  There are separate traffic lights for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, but the scooters do not obey any traffic laws.  They drive fast, on either side of the street, bike lane, or sidewalk, and often run red lights.  And they are all electric so you cannot hear them coming.  Everyone assures me that Beijing is extremely safe and I can walk around without worrying about theft, BUT ... if I am not careful, I am liable to be run down by a scooter.  It is always interesting to me that there are no thieves here but you really have to be careful when you go there.

In my first two days in Beijing, I went to the two big attractions:  the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  They both deserve their star billing.  The Forbidden City tour starts in Tiananmen Square which is so immense that no picture can do it justice.  It is surrounded by barricades and you enter through an underground passageway after showing your passport and going through security.  The government is not taking a chance on a repeat of 1989.



From Tiananmen Square, you cross the street to the Forbidden City, now called the Palace Museum.  It is truly a city with dozens of buildings and nearly 1000 rooms originally with over 800 surviving.  There are various exhibits to see but the buildings are the real attraction.

Everyone says you have to see the Great Wall to believe it and everyone is right.  I knew it was loooong - over 13,000 miles.  It was built and rebuilt over a period of centuries.  But I never quite had grasped that it was built on top of the mountains.  In the pictures of people walking on the wall, you can't appreciate the steepness of the wall and you absolutely can't tell where exactly the wall is.  From the parking lot at the base of the mountain, a bus shuttled us up about five miles of switchbacks.  Then we took a cable car to the top so we could walk a portion.  Of course you can hike up about a million steps if you are too proud to take the cable car.  I am not.  And there is a shortcut coming down:  a toboggan.  Of course.

You can see the wall snaking up the next mountain behind me.  When they started building the wall in the fourteenth century, every brick and every stone in the wall had to be carried up the mountain by people.  Although it had rained off and on the entire previous day when I visited the Forbidden City, we had a beautiful, clear day at the Great Wall and could see ridges of mountains far in the distance.

On a culinary note, I had traditional Peking duck on my first night in Beijing, and it was delicious.  The second day I tried Beijing style dumplings and the third day, I had dim sum.  Each day I try something new but the foods are still familiar to me.  The dim sum restaurant has four floors and is open 24 hours a day.  Both their dim sum and dinner menus had pictures and descriptions, and I have to say that the latter had many dishes that I have never seen.  Not just the unusual meats or pickles.  For example, they served boiled beef filet with something.  I would never boil a beef filet; sounds like a terrible waste.