Weekend in Beijing
After getting over the shock of Friday’s near loss of passport, I had a great weekend around Beijing. First of all, English is not widely spoken - probably the least of any major places I’ve ever visited - so having a Mandarin-speaking friend is a big bonus. Actually maybe “first of all” should be the pollution barrier, which you encounter before the language barrier. It really does just sit in the air everywhere - I’ve never seen anything like it.
Because I will be spending the subsequent 8 or 9 days with an Intrepid guided tour, and seeing the major touristy sites there, I wanted to see some of the more out of the way places of Beijing on the weekend.
One of the interesting things I hadn’t heard of before was the existence of Hutons, which are apparently collections of accommodations forming mini communities. Quite amazingly, some really old ones exist quite close to the center of Beijing - although it would be a safe bet that they will fall to the urbanisation of Beijing. It’s quite a sight to see the roads and sidewalks being rebuilt kilometer by kilometer.
Saturday night I was really impressed by the nightlife - some great bars and at great prices! This even included a “hole in the wall” lounge-type bar in the middle of a Huton.
Sunday I saw a couple of great places. The first was known as 798 Art Zone, which was full of some great painting/photo/sculpture displays and some nice cafes. According to Wikipedia it’s been scheduled for destruction since 2004 or 2005, but I’m not sure how it’s managed to stave off gentrification.
The second great place was Jingshan Park. The park has a temple on top of a hill that overlooks the Forbidden City. Due to the pollution, only really the rooftops of the city were visible, which made it look like some kind of ancient Chinese city with the mist at dawn (although the mist was somewhat brown in colour). The second nice part of the park was that it was filled with hundreds of Beijing residents, mostly older ones, standing around singing and dancing in groups of between 5 and 50. These people were belting out the tunes, and some guys even brought along their own microphone and portable speaker so they could be heard above the sound of everyone else!
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take my camera with me on either day, so no photos here.