Raging in Beijing

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Well I'm stumped and stifled and stilted: I cannot think of a single joke using the word Beijing...so I'm in mourning for the punnage potential of Shanghai and Xian. What a Shanghaily disappointing Xianticlimax to my literary tour of major Chinese cities.

Oh oh oh! Wait! As I sipped my black tea in KFC yesterday (I'm a sucker for Chinese culture), there was nowt but Christmas music on the radio...Deck the Halls, I Saw Mommy Kissin' Santa Claus, I Wish it could be Christmas Every Daaay. Sure I was only waiting for Beijingle Bells. YES!!!! (Sorry Mam, I'm sure you saw that coming a mile away!)

So, here I am in this capital of culture, staying with the lovely Song (a musical girl, indeed) in her lovely flat in the west of this sprawling metropolis (God, it's a long time since I saw metropolis attached to any other adjective). (Already there are too many brackets in this blog entry) (Note to self: down with that sort of thing). On arriving we went for dinner with Song and her 12-year-old student Tian Tian, who she teaches for 6 hours every week, solfege, score-reading, composition, music history, piano. I played some of his folksong arrangements in Hungary last year. Maybe this single child is doing the extra-curricular activities of an ambitioius whole family.

Beijing seems to occupy a larger area than Shanghai, though the population is a lot smaller. The buildings are mostly only 20 storeys high, dwarves. However, the metro is very easy to use and covers the places of interest to the average tourist, which I, of course, am. Yesterday Hailing and I headed straight to Tiananmen Square, which is a serious place...a carefully chosen adjective as it is hard to know what to say really, apart from that it made me feel serious, and gave rise to one of our occasional discussions which come to no conclusion but emphasise time and time again the power and importance of the media, and which nevertheless are one of the joys of this international friendship. The Mao mausoleum was closed by the time we got there, which made my decision for me as to whether I would go in or not. I was relieved.

Through the Tian an Gate we went, and the Forbidden City was next. We spent a few hours wandering through each celestially titled and curly roofed building, and kept our ears tucked in as best we could from the biting, chewing cold. No snow here, but it is a real struggle to walk against the wind. We saw the National Grand Theatre, also known as the egg, then we scrambled off and strolled along a few shopping streets, picking up a few bits of Olympic merchandise.

Yesterday was an important day in the Spring Festival - the time to welcome the rich ghost, so the fireworks were again deafening. We braved the warzone to go to a Japanese restaurant, where we feasted and laughed ourselves silly, helped by Tsing Tao beer and Japanese sake.

I will put photos up later as we are off to the Summer Palace now. And when you are looking at the photographs I hope you will appreciate the great sacrifice I made in taking my bare hand out of my thick layered glove for the purpose. Brrr!

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