Sep 20 2007
Day 17
I walked from my hotel through Beihai park to reach the Forbidden City this morning. Past a lady doing tai chi, a group of women practising tap dancing, a tutored group of people doing tricks with circus diablos and finally past an intensive training group of 5 people playing happy-sac in a tight ring holding each other at the shoulders and rotating with every keepie-uppy. It seems like everyone is in training for the Olympics…
I found Wangfujing snack street and had some lunch amongst stalls selling coconuts with straws, sticky toffee covered kebabs of fruit and nuts and what looked like little scorpions on a stick. Later I got stuck in a torrential downpour at the forbidden city that lasted until the next morning.
Beijing seems like quite a relaxed city, there is a lot of life happening on the streets. Men playing Mah Jong with a small crowd of onlookers, or middle aged women watching an evening go by chatting and gossiping on the street. The hutong and the park running through the centre make for a wonderful unique and enchanting area. Outside of the 2nd ring road, though, high rises and apartment blocks are filling up any unused space, in a faceless fashion, and behind the scenes there are rumours about hutongs being walled to disguise them for Olympic-tourists or even destroyed at a rate of some 10,000 dwellings per year, http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2144434,00.html and stories in the newspapers talk about the dubious conditions that labourers from rural areas live and work in while preparing the city for next year’s sporting events. In spite of low incomes and censorship (I’ve just had to install a patch so that I can look at the photos I uploaded on flickr, where images are surpressed) people seem optimistic and friendly and I’m really enjoying being in Beijing.
