Beijing - A very big city

Hello everybody,

Thanks for still reading, and those trusty friends who manage to add their comments! (You will be the lucky ones who are remembered for the Christmas Card List)

Due to trains being booked up to 10 days ahead of travel, we were forced to take our first airplane of our adventures - from Harbin to Beijing.

Although we left Beijing 5 days or so ago, we have been on an "Internet blackout" ever since. Either spending days on trains, or in hotels without the promised Internet connection.

We spent 6 days in Beijing, in a Hotel in one of the "Hutongs". This means "dirty slum" when translated to English. Lee is going against the current "let's preserve these cute little memories of the old days" folk, and thinks that the sky scrappers are a lot better place to live. He continues to think that we should photograph them, and then demolish them for things like Olympic Stadiums, language schools and shopping malls.

Beijing struck us both as a place that is very grand and rich with its massive architectural projects, but also very old and conservative. Of all of the cities that we have visited to date, Beijing is the most English unfriendly - no taxi driver spoke a word of the language, and even the sign posts were mainly in Chinese characters only. It's hard to believe that language will not be a problem for the 2008 Olympics.

Since we were 6 days there, in this massive city (can easily take 2 hours to get to the outskirts), the following is a list of the places, and some throw away comments along with each:

• Tianaman Square - Very large and uninteresting. No signs of student blood or tank tracks are left.
• Olympic Stadium (Birds nest) - We were both very impressed with this - a new wonder of the world, maybe?
• Olympic Stadium (Water Cube) - Looks very dirty and old. No sense of scale. Maybe after a wash and some light it will look ok.
• Gardens to north of Forbidden Palace - Really nice. This mountain was made from the mud left after digging the moat around the palace. Not too many people, and very calm.
• Kazakhstan Embassy - In a nice part of town, but the "service" was very "east block". Saying that the local security guards were nice, and we got a better visa than we had hoped for in a shorter time (no 'Borat jokes' helped, we believe)
• Forbidden City - If big is beautiful, then it's beautiful. We kept saying "But I have seen this before...", and "To big to be cosy". Still, its sheer scale is impressive.
• Summer Palace - See Forbidden City - took 100,000 men to make the lake bigger.
• Beijing Acrobatics - If you have no problems with very young actors, then this is a real gem - for one and a half hours we were stuck to our seat with admiration and "oh that will hurt if it goes wrong" sentiments.

We were there on 2007/08/08, which our more astute readers will recognize as exactly one year before the Olympics. We went with the big question "Will they be ready?" After living here for a year, and seeing what they can build overnight when they put their minds to it, then the infrastructure will be there. The only two problematic things are the pollution (which could really stick in your throat at times) and the language issues. If these are overcome, it could well be the most extravagant Olympics that we will probably ever witness.

Obviously we did other things, but this is enough for one blog!