The first thing that I noticed when I arrived in Beijing were all the bikes. There are large, sep­a­rate bus lanes that peo­ple were using, even in weather close to freez­ing. One can tell that the peo­ple there grew up with bikes all their lives sim­ply from how com­fort­able they were rid­ing them. Some had large propane tanks or oil drums strapped to one side and didn’t seem to notice. Friends will travel with the rid­ers by sit­ting on the back plat­form with their legs dan­gling out to one side, hands in their pock­ets, not need­ing to hold onto any­thing for sta­bil­ity. Some peo­ple have their busi­nesses run from their bikes; a small cart is attached, an oil drum is placed inside, and a fire can be started inside the oil drum to cook sweet pota­toes or chest­nuts. The ven­dors can ride around, and choose a bet­ter loca­tion when­ever busi­ness is slow at one.

From what I can tell, Beijing is as devel­oped as Hong Kong, except it’s more dif­fuse. There are tiny back alleys and run down apart­ments next to fancy restau­rants. There’s quite a large gap between upper income and lower income fam­i­lies. Just walk­ing off a bus at any tourist spot, one will be approached by hordes of ped­dlers, shout­ing at you to look at their hand held wares, such as cheap watches out of suit­cases, pressed flow­ers, or lit­tle dolls. They’ll fol­low you around, right back to a bus some­times, and try to get in the faces of every­one they can. One ped­dler was try­ing to sell things while her lit­tle boy was run­ning around, and she had to stop approach­ing peo­ple every now and then to make sure he was okay. It’s hard to imag­ine some­one stand­ing in one place all day, barely mak­ing money from cheap, shitty items, but with no other choice.

The peo­ple can be crude, but are friendly. Parks are very social, and peo­ple will gather there to play cards, sing songs together, prac­tice some danc­ing or Tai Chi, even play a few racket sports. Some older men like to prac­tice cal­lig­ra­phy on the ground, using big brushes and a bucket of water. The let­ters are large and beau­ti­ful, and in the win­ter, they freeze and begin to sparkle.

The entire Forbidden City is an amaz­ing piece of archi­tec­ture. Walking into it is like walk­ing into a cas­tle, due to the scale of the open areas and orna­men­ta­tion. One can def­i­nitely under­stand how an emperor would have ruled from such a place when com­ing into the gigan­tic south­ern court­yard, where offi­cials had to walk through to brief him on the lat­est events.

Right next to the Forbidden City is Tienanmen Square, where the pre­served body of Mao Tse Tung is stored. To visit the body, peo­ple line up around the square, some­times for more than an hour, to get a chance to see the leader of the Cultural Revolution. Loudspeakers pro­claim the rules for vis­it­ing, while troops with mega­phones are con­stantly telling the crowd how to line up cor­rectly. The square is extremely busy with peo­ple walk­ing back and forth, a few of them fly­ing kites. It’s very heav­ily patrolled, and there just hap­pened to be a march­ing line of troops when I was there.

I hap­pened to visit one of the newer parts of the Great Wall, which was only about 600–800 years old. The steps are of uneven height, and the sec­tion I climbed was very steep; just look­ing down was dizzy­ing. I thought that it was hard enough just going past a few watch­tow­ers, so I can’t even imag­ine what build­ing the entire thing would be like. I can’t def­i­nitely see the strate­gic advan­tage of such a wall though, since the view from only half-way up a moun­tain was amazing.

An inter­est­ing place I had a chance to visit was the 500 Lions Bridge (or Marco Polo Bridge). There are 500 lions on the bridge walls, look­ing inwards, each one dif­fer­ent from the next. It was the start­ing point of the first shots fired by the Japanese on July 7th, 1937, which led China into World War II. Most of the road has been refin­ished, although a sec­tion has been left untouched and one can see that the pave­ment has been so weath­ered that it’s dif­fi­cult to walk on.

The Summer Palace (or the Garden of Nurtured Harmony in Chinese) is the place where the emperor and his fam­ily could stay dur­ing the sum­mer, where it remains fairly cool. Even in the win­ter it looks beau­ti­ful, as all the water has turned to ice.

Food Street is a huge row of ven­dors in down­town Beijing, sell­ing assorted types of foods, although mostly meat. Each lit­tle busi­ness has two red lamps above their huts, and usu­ally con­sists of three employ­ees (one will do the shout­ing to attract cus­tomers, one will do the cook­ing, one will accept the money). The food is usu­ally on a kebab skewer, and can be flame roasted or deep fried. As can be seen in the sec­ond pic­ture, there are prices for “Fried Silk-worm” (the brown, maggot-like things second-left on the top row), “Dog-meat bunch”, and “Fresh-rabbit bunch”, although there are things such as squid, locusts, and scor­pi­ons avail­able as well. Some of the ven­dors are Turkish, who mod­er­ately speak Mandarin, and roll their tongues to stand out from the other ven­dors. A pop­u­lar treat is the stick of fruit, which is slightly glazed like candy apples. Traditionally, it’s the Chinese date (the small, round, red fruit) that’s used, although peo­ple now use straw­ber­ries, kiwi, etc.

Being able to travel to a place so rich with his­tory was great. I’ve been to places such as Budapest, Sydney, and Banff before, but I barely remem­ber any­thing about them. To be hon­est, I don’t care that I’ve for­got­ten almost every­thing about my pre­vi­ous trav­els because they were all mean­ing­less to me at the time. In this trip, how­ever, there was pur­pose, and I wanted to learn about my his­tory, and how it has shaped my life today. It’s taken me a while to mature enough to appre­ci­ate his­tory and cul­ture of other places, and if I were to travel back to a coun­try that I’ve been to before, I’m sure I’d see it in a dif­fer­ent light now.