Beijing Part 1

I spent last week in Beijing, fearlessly striking a blow for democracy and freedom against the oppressive communist authorities that have blighted a billion peoples' lives for nigh on 60 years.

And eating some rather tasty dim sum too.

I was ostensibly there to attend and present at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (and yes, it was just as impressive as its title), but as everyone who's everyone knew (Hilary Clinton, The Dala Lamai, Richard Gere, my wife, Kung Fu Panda, etc.), I was really there to ride a horse through Tiananmen Square with my arms out-stretched yelling "Freeeeeedommmm!!!" as the first crucial step towards the country's political emancipation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a horse, so I had to confine myself to muttering "Go on, ya good thing" to my sweaty pedicab driver as he dodged crazed taxi drivers and we-don't-stop-for-anything-bar-a-direct-airstrike truck drivers.

Our flight arrived late in the evening so my first impression of Beijing was one of smell - it has that sweet, warm acrid mixture of gasoline, sewage and cigarette smoke that for me is one of the defining features of Asia. Japan, or certainly Hokkaido, doesn't have this, which is fine as I don't think the auld bronchioles could take too much of it; but the rain washed, fresh air reared Irishman in me does enjoy the unhealthy exoticism of it all.

That's me, parochial to the last breath.

What follows over the next couple of blogs are my impressionistic, eh, impressions of the city, along with some completely objective-grounded-in-the-vast-expertise-I-accrued-in-my-five-day-visit statements about the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them.

The Forbidden City

They wouldn't let us in.

The Forbidden City II

Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Listen, the place is impressive; anything constructed on that scale is bound to impress. It is close on a kilometre from north to south and 750 metres from east to west, giving an expansive but still cosy total living area of some 720,000 square metres (or to everyone in the US of A, the same size as Disneyland).

And that is about all I remember of our tour guide's explanation. There is a lot of history to the Forbidden City, or more specifically, a lot of Chinese history. Call me a bigoted monocultural, Western imperialist lackey from a fatally flawed late capitalist society drowning in its own degrading excesses, but I'm afraid the detailed explanations of all the various dynastic Xings, Qings, Mings, etc., merged into a gilded, incomprehensible whole so I turned off the headset and just wandered off on my own for a bit.

The unceasing grandeur, the indurate spectacle of 'this majestic, you puny' architecture gets to you after a while. It stops impressing and starts oppressing, as I am sure all those Xings-Qings-Mings no doubt intended all those years ago.

Plus, traipsing around (and after two hours, there's no other word for it) in the late afternoon heat of an August day in central Beijing, my less than divine thoughts increasingly tended towards more, mundane, peasant like matters such as beer, preferably ice-cold, and sometime soon.

See, that's me, not afraid to tell it like it is - travel writing as it should be.