My first "touristy" weekend part 2 - the old and the new

On sunday morning, despite not having gotten quite as much sleep as I may have liked (you never do when you only get to bed at 4:30am), I headed back off into town to go to see the big thing everyone has to see in Beijing: the Forbidden City. When they say "city" they mean it - we're not talking a town with pretensions (like kilkenny), this place is HUGE inside! The first three areas you hit are just big huge courtyards, each one maybe twice the size of a football field, with big huge walls and big huge pagoda-style halls at each end (ok, I'll try to stop using the word "huge" now). This is just one of them, the "smaller" inner courtyard! Once you get inside the 3rd great hall (the Hall of Suprme Harmony, where the emporer used to hold court. It looks impressive even now, with only the throne still in thre, but before the furnishings used to be magnificent. After you've been plundered a few times by the mongols, hte british & french, the japanese, and then your own commie leaders (during the cultural revolution), you tend to lose a lot of stuff and the rooms are mostly empty.

After you get past the great hall, things become a bit smaller, but only in a relative sense. It still took me about two hours to wander around maybe half of the inside of it, altho I was going at the pace of the american package tour I was sort of shadowing (grabbing myself a free tour, I'd accidentally just so happen to be close enbough to hear whenever the guide was explaining stuff). If you dind't have a map, chances are you'd get lost and possibly never be heard from again. The Forbidden City had a staff of over 1,500 to look after the emperor and his concubines (altho one emperor apparently had 72 concubines, so I guess they took a lot of looking afer) - all that to look after one man! A fine job if you can get it!

One of the stranges things I saw int here though was aa snall slice of modern life - a Starbucks. Yup, they actually have a Starbucks in the forbidden city, for when you get tired of walking around and just need that esspresso hit to keep you going. Granted it's not a big monstrousity of a place, but it's still fairly jarring to see it, and a lot of chinese are really up in arms about this symbol of yankee capitalism getting a toehold in the heart of chinese history!

Having said that, they aren't all that bad at the auld capitalism themselves. After I left the forbidden city I went up Wangfujing street, which is the shopping heart of the city. If that was communism, roll on the revolution! Two big huge shopping centers, bigger than anything we have at home, one at each end of the street, with tons of shops in between! The closest equivalent I could think of was maybe Oxford St in london, except it's not the same 5 shops repeated every hundred yeards like oxford st! The strangst part though was that at one point, if you wander off a side street, you're into the markets, all the trinkety little stalls with the owners shouting "looky looky" when they se a westerner, and all the food stalls selling god-knows what (I recognized the locusts and beetles on skewers, and the baby seahorses and calamari on skewers, anything else was pure guesswork), which I was insufficiently brave enough to try. Bit of a contrast to the jewellers shop and the mobile phone shops that they back onto on the other side of the block!

What did piss me off though was that I got tapped 3 times for the "art/calligraphy student" thing I mentioned in my last blog (where they try to persuade you to see an art "exhibition" and end up trying to sell you a load of paintings). I have a feeling that if this keeps going I'm going to get the same sort of sterotype feelings I got in Hong Kong - there it was any indian guy I see is going to try to sell me a suit, here it'll be any chinese person starts talking to me in english is trying to sell me paintings.

Anyway, after a bit of walking around the shops feeling like a country bumpkin, I decided enough was enough, and headed back "home", to recharge my camera batteries before heading out to the lantern festival. So, a busy day, with big contrasts, old traditional imperial china versus new brash consumer-oriented-commie-in-name-only china!