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Eighteen hours on a train, one way, for a three day trip seems, even I will admit, a little odd. Given that the delay we had, thanks to a huge storm on the way back, brought the total travelling time to forty hours - far more than half the time we were there - it looks even more strange. It is, however, just one of the things that you need to accept if you want to visit anywhere other than the city you live in here, and while I can never shake the thought that if I got on a train in Leeds, eighteen hours later I could be in the South of France - albeit that it's equally likely I'd have only made it to Pontefract - you do learn to become quite flippant about spending the best part of a day lying on something that is about as comfortable as being poked in the back with a blunt stick.
Beijing, as you'd expect, was like Xi'an in that there are so many foreigners that you don't get a second glance off anyone, even children who in Xiangyang are the bread and butter of good reactions for this kind
of stuff. Everyday here the amount of kids who stare, point, laugh, cry, walk into things or drop food out of their mouths with shock when they see us, routinely reaches double figures - not in Beijing though, apparently they're above all that. Bloody big city types thinking they're too good to be impressed by a Western face, it makes me sick.
The up-side of there being a lot of foreigners around was that it gave me the opportunity to act like some kind of veteran - because for the next few months at least my passport has the words 'Chinese resident' in it - and raise a knowing eyebrow if I heard anyone mispronouncing a word or asking a question about China that I already knew the answer to (despite the fact that in most cases I'd only learnt the fact or word in question about two weeks ago). There are few things more enjoyable than being able to do this, particularly when you know that not only are you not an expert yourself, but that in reality, the gap between what they know and what you know is so small that if it was in a football
match, there wouldn't even be enough clear air between them to justify an offside decision.
Pretty soon after arriving we headed to Tiananmen Square. As you'd expect, it was full of tourists, with probably the biggest collections of non-Chinese tourists we saw anywhere in the city. In the square is the Mausoleum where Chairman Mao's body still lies, there are two giant screens showing various images of China, another memorial of some sort and a view of the entrance to the Forbidden City complex, with a big picture of Mao's face on it. All very nice and everything but I couldn't help but wonder if the Chinese tourists ever question why Tiananmen Square is something that attracts so many foreigners to it.
As you'd expect, there was no mention of what we in the West would consider to be the most famous thing about the place, which was probably why it had a very different feel about it than I had expected. It was very big, clean, sanitised and to be honest quite unspectacular. I had thought, naively, that it would have an atmosphere similar to other places I've visited that are associated with similarly grim events, but
it didn't, which strangely, in some ways made it even more chilling.
I was told that Xi'an and Beijing are similar cities and that if you like one you'll like the other. Having spent a few days in both, although obviously you need to be there a bit longer to make a proper judgement on these kinds of things, it seems fair enough to say this from a historical standpoint and even in terms of the atmosphere and feeling that parts of the two cities have, but if it came down to a choice of the two, I'd go to Xi'an everytime. Perhaps because Beijing is so much bigger and is also the capital city, it just wasn't as welcoming or friendly. The charm of Xi'an was in it's markets and it's dirty but delicious food stalls down side streets that were crowded and noisy but never threatening or unfriendly. Maybe it is the heightened number of foreigners in Beijing that has taken them away from this, maybe it's the fact that there are a lot more people so they have to simply be more functional, or maybe we just went to the wrong places but there was little
of the good will and friendliness that we found at every turn in Shaanxi Province.
The best example of this came in the silk market, which was an odd place, in that it was a market on seven floors in a building that felt like an ordinary mall, that seemed to sell almost no silk at all. It did, however, sell everything else you could think of, from electronics to clothes, tat-like souvenirs to Chinese art, it was all there. We were warned before going about how aggressive the sellers were. They favoured grabbing your clothes, trying to push you into their stall, or just plain old shouting something about how much your wife would love what they were selling, as you walked past - none of which I mind particularly, my problem is that they were just not as much fun to talk to and bargain with. Obviously there were other ones we didn't manage to find and the fact that this one was the market equivalent of a Walmart, in both size and charm, meant that it was never going to be this trip's small, enjoyable, intimate shopping experience, but truthfully, I did expect a bit more from it. In other places it was more of a good natured game that everyone enjoyed that ended nicely, here it was far more pushy and business-like, and there are few things that will make the smile leave my face and the energy leave my body quicker than a whiff of a business conversation. I guess it's because there are so many tourists, it's easier for them to wait for one who doesn't look capable of finding his arse with both hands than to haggle with me over a fan that is probably only worth 25p anyway - it is still better than being in Pontefract though.
Pura Vida
Dave
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