Advertisement
Published: September 12th 2010
Edit Blog Post
The National Bird of China at Sunset
A Flock of Cranes on the left and a technicolor chemical sunset on the right. We have safely arrived in Beijing! Everyone is
sort of sleeping in the hotel rooms and I write from the hotel lobby at 2am local time after a refreshing 3 hrs of sleep. The kids did great on this long flight.
In fact, given that Joshua has never previously been allowed to consume 3 consecutive full length children's movies at one sitting, this otherwise endless flight was for him a journey deep into the dreamy heart of televised bliss. Hopefully, we can stimulate his mind in the days to come and help his neurons recover to their normal baseline.
Emma contented herself during the flight with a Nanny McPhee movie and cross stitch. I am also happy to report that both kids even did their math homework and journaling! Good kids!
Once at the airport, my novice haggling skills proved questionable as a chaotic series of negotiations with 4 different would-be taxi drivers yielded a ride back to the hotel via a couple dubiously black market unlicensed taxis. (Guys with their own cars who drive people from the airport to their hotels.) But 'All's Well that Ends Well' and we all arrived at the hotel gratefully intact
and none the worse for wear if not a bit sleep deprived.
In short, so far our travel to China has been both pleasantly uneventful and remarkably fascinating.
First impressions:
1. Amazing country with breath-taking rate of building and growth. It's an overdone journalistic topic, but to simply drive across the city from the airport to downtown is to witness firsthand the stunning growth which defines China at this moment. The drive from the relatively displaced airport to the city center is a long one, curiously similar to the trip from DIA to downtown Denver. This commute affords a sampling of the metropolitan anatomy from the mega-'burbs to Downtown, and everything in between.
There's a global shortage of steel and concrete? No doubt! We just saw where it's all going!
I snapped a picture on the drive from the airport and, in looking back at it, there are two striking things about this image.
First, the Pollution. It was a 'clear' day in the sense that it was cloudless, and yet the particulates/smog inherent to baseline Beijing air yielded a sunset distorted by a neon orange hue. Yesterday's sunset was the same and tomorrow's
will be no different. I suppose pollution colors the human experience most everywhere in our world, but certainly moreso here.
Second, I count no less than 14 super-cranes in this one image alone. They literally stretch over the horizon and who knows many more were left unseen. The 'Crane' is said to be the National Bird of China these days and it's not hard to see why. Although a good size U.S. city may have 2 or 3 of these cranes, and a healthy U.S. University is said to be proud of having at least one as a testament to its vitality, we must have passed somewhere near 100 of these cranes on the simple drive from the airport. They are building at a breath-taking pace here. Evidently not content to build a single 30 story apartment tower at a time, they seem to be going about it by throwing them up 16 at time in the same complex! And we passed complex after complex after complex like this. It has an unreal quality to it.
2. The Driving Experience is a gem. There is evidently some alteration of the space-time continuum here which renders turn-signals inoperable. The
driving experience conjures up one of those Disney rides where you're suspended up in front of a 4 story Imax screen and zoomed through some urban corridor at impossibly accelerated time-lapse speeds just inches behind cars, buses, and other large deadly projectiles zipping about helter skelter. And given that seat belts seem to be an unavailable laissez faire sort of thing here, I try to tell myself that it's
just as safe as Disney too. (Turn away Pediatrician! Turn Away! Avert thy Gaze!)
Ignorance is bliss but
willful ignorance requires steadfast determination and real work!
The recipe for this trip is to to spend the first 2-3 days acclimatizing to local time in Beijing via touristy forays then travel to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou to finally rendezvous with Julia! This will be followed by 8 days in the South of China in Guangzhou to finalize her U.S citizenship at the American Consulate.
Plan for later today: The
Forbidden City will be
Allowed.
Thanks for following along!
JC
Advertisement
Tot: 0.122s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0764s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Sherry
non-member comment
Glad to hear you are safe in China. Embrace the adventure!