China - Part 1, Beijing

This has been a busy month for travel as I spent a week in China, recovered for a few days than popped down to Italy for a quick visit. It's all to do with work and I won't bore you with the details, but the good part is that I got to spend a little time being a tourist and having a look around.
I'd never been to China before so was really looking forward to the experience. I started off in Beijing, visiting a nuclear energy conference which was held at the National Conference Centre, inside Olympic Park. It was kind of strange seeing the famous Birds Nest Stadium, the torch  and the Water Cube, which were such iconic features of the last Olympics.
However the day I arrived I headed into Beijing city with my collague. Figuring we were going to be jetlagged anyway having missed a night of sleep we may as well just keep going and get to see something, we braved a Beijing taxi and walked around the Forbidden City, People's Palace and Tiananmen Square.


"ummmm...do I stand out here?"

My caption of choice for the photo above would be 'spot the tourist'.  Kay and I were literally the only pale skinned blonds in a crowd of thousands. It was the week of China's most important public holiday, Tomb Sweeping, kind of an All Souls day. Tens of thousands of locals take the opportunity to play at being the tourist and visit spots of national importance. The crowds were horrendous. Mao's tomb (above) was hugely popular and at one stage we found ourselves literally shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder through a long pedestrian tunnel which funnelled us into an ever-narrower press of humanity. Just when we felt things were starting to get a bit hairy the crowd in front of us suddenly turned around and started pressing back! The doors had been shut at the far end so we had to make our way out the way we'd come. Fortunately there was no panic and we all eventually spilled back out into the large square but it was an uncomfortable sensation accentuated by the fact that there were soliders and police everywhere, both among the crowd and watching from the edges. Apparently there had been talk of protests being staged on China's social networking sites the week before, so the government had shut down Facebook, Twitter, and all the Chinese equivalents. Locals later told me that as a result probably a fifth of the crowd in Beijing was undercover police/military but fortunately we didn't have any problems.

I was looking forward to seeing the famous Tiananmen Square (above), although it would have been more impressive if it didn't have six lanes of traffic whizzing over it! I never realized that it's used as a major thoroughfare in the city. 

Beijing is an unusual city, very business like and despite China now being relatively open to foreigners most of this capital city was surprisingly untouched by Western influence.It was only early spring so it was quite cold and bare of greenery, which exacerbated the problem the city has with dust being blown in from the Gobi desert. Deforestaton is making this problem worse every year, and as one fellow conference delegate said, it's the only city he's been to where he wants to shower three times a day. In the evening we found a small local restaurant and using sign language and a menu which thankfully included photos we ordered some delicious dishes of celery and lily buds, prawns, and garlic kai lan. It was great to be eating real Asian food again!