Today was our first real experience with the Beijing highway system and the downtown area. The highway was completely packed, so it took a really long time to get to Tiananmen Square – the traffic kind of reminded me of parts of New York City. Actually, a lot of the city reminds me of a large Western city – except for some historical sites like the Forbidden City, Beijing looks pretty similar to cities in the US, except for the Chinese signs. I was expecting the city to look a lot more dense and colorful, but it has the same fairly spread out skyscrapers. I guess this is because, as Claudia was saying, the city has very little history – a lot of the historical buildings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
I think a lot of what I was expecting came from learning about China in my high school history class. I also expected that Tiananmen Square would have a huge stigma attached because of the 1989 riots, but Claudia barely talked about these at all during the lecture and only briefly mentioned it when we visited the square. The square itself was gigantic, but it didn’t feel like the largest square in the world because it was broken up by a giant landmark building in the middle and it was surrounded by roads, not tall buildings. While we were standing in the square, a lot of Chinese tourists took pictures of us: some were sneaky and pretended to take pictures of themselves and moving the camera toward us at the last second, while others were more straightforward and came up to us and posed next to us. It was kind of fun being a tourist attraction ourselves, though it was somewhat creepy when some people followed us into the street crossing with their video cameras.
The Forbidden City was really crowded, which made viewing it a little less spectacular. The architecture was beautiful, but I didn’t have much time to observe it in detail because the group kept moving forward. I did manage to get to the front of the crowd right in front of the emperor’s throne. The throne itself was large and elaborate, but again I didn’t have much time to look at it because I was being jostled by hundreds of tourists. The gardens toward the back of the Forbidden City were my favorite part, especially the small building on top of a large rock formation.
After lunch, we had a few free hours to go shopping on Wangfujing Street, which had a little Chinese market. Rachael, Skylar, Ryan and I went through that area, which was kind of intimidating because vendors were very assertive about selling their wares and would often tug on our arms or follow us. Though Ryan was tempted to eat the live scorpions on a stick, in the end none of us ended up buying anything in this market, though a few of us bought chopsticks in a much more tranquil store across the street. We also ended up in a Chinese gift store, which had a lot of expensive jade sculptures that were fun to look at. We were followed around by one sales clerk, who told us some history of China while we looked at the merchandise.
When we got back to the hotel, Rachael and I ended up sleeping for several hours. I guess this means we haven’t adjusted to the time difference yet, but hopefully that’ll happen in the next couple of days. My luggage still hasn’t arrived, but I think it’s actually in China now, so hopefully it will get here tonight or tomorrow morning – I want to wear different clothes!