Beijing –
We stayed in a very brown hotel and the city is very grey. The air is also very grey, and thick and choking. When it rains it stings. It must be so depressing to have to live in permanently. It’s very utilitarian and how I imagined it – but with more ‘generic’ touches, like Starbucks everywhere. I read ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’ while I was here which might have flavoured my overall experience.

There was a great food hall place across the road from the hotel we discovered so we ate most of meals there. Peking Duck, of course; hot pot; and a few other things.

The ‘tourist’ food we were fed on our excursions was uniformly disgusting. I don’t even want to think about it. And I believe anything we didn’t eat at lunch was recycled for the next batch of tourists for dinner. Foul, greasy and tasteless. I don’t know whether it because they were making something that they thought tourists might like, or whether they just didn’t give a shit. Maybe both.

The Forbidden City and Tianamen Square were really interesting. And the Great Wall was indeed great. But at 38 degrees I found it really hard going. It’s very steep in the part we went to. So steep in places that you have to climb up the steps on all fours, like a ladder. Extremely hard work. We saw the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube which were a tiny bit interesting. But it was about 41 degrees that day and the pollution was choking so I was pretty over anything at all by then that wasn’t a Tsing Tao.
We went to the Temple of Heaven which was lovely. And the Summer Palace which was fascinating. It was a Sunday afternoon, and whilst I am very prone to exaggeration for effect I can honestly tell you that there were half a million people there that day. That in itself made it a fascinating experience.

Went to a cheesy Kung-Fu show one night. It was like ‘Jackie Chan does Vegas’. Lots of dry ice and flashy lights. I think the story line of the performance was something like “if you love your Mother or have sexy girl thoughts you can cure that by breaking things with your head.” I think. The kids loved it. And spent the next two days kung-fuing everything/each other.

Overall Beijing was more orderly and unAsian than I had expected. They seem to have bulldozed anything of character and replaced it with something big and grey. If I had to live in that pollution everyday I would commit suicide.