Mao and Me

I'm back from China and have been gradually getting my story worked into shape. Since my return, I've written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words, which is at least a good excuse to have not gotten the blog updated. The other problem is that I probably would have done some updating while in Beijing and Shanghai, but the government sees Blogspot as an enemy of the state and hides it behind the Great Firewall of China.

I had no idea what China would be like. I've never been a Sinophile. It's never been a place of much interest to me, but I was glad to have the opportunity to visit and, while I'm still not exactly a Sinophile, I'm looking forward to going back someday.

My trip to China was not the typical tourist trip. I built in a few hours here and there to wander around and see things, but most of my view of China was from upper floor conference rooms and the backseat of taxis. I did manage to learn a lot about China's new corporate income tax law, and am probably now the office expert on that subject. I will not bore you here, but will be happy to send you my masterpiece if you're having trouble sleeping at night.

I went to Beijing on Easter Monday. Since that's a holiday in Hong Kong, I went early in the day in hopes of seeing a bit of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. A bit is exactly what I saw. By the time I got through customs and immigration (the immigration form lists one of the possible reasons for visiting China as "to settle down"), figured out the taxi queue, rode the 60 km into the city from the airport and got checked in to my hotel, it was already pushing 3:30, about an hour before the Forbidden City closes.

One cool thing I did see on Monday was at the airport, where I saw an old Soviet-made Air Koryo jet waiting at a gate. Beijing is one of the few places in the world where you can see the North Korean airline, which operates just a few flights a week from Pyongyang. As Americans are pretty much out of luck when it comes to getting a North Korean visa, this is the probably the closest I will come to seeing the Air Koryo fleet.

The one thing I was not prepared for was the distance between places in Beijing. On my map, it looked like everything would be close together and easy to get to. Things were definitely further apart than I thought they would be.

On Monday, I made it to the outside of the Forbidden City and then on to Tiananmen Square. I probably could have found time to see a bit of the Forbidden City, but my interests lie more in modern political history than in ancient Chinese architecture.


While inside the gates, I took a number of photos of soldiers drilling. I don't know if they're from the People's Liberation Army or some local or national police force. My knowledge of official Chinese uniforms is completely lacking in this regard.



After a quick ride on the subway -- just to get the hang of the system before I headed off for my first meeting on Tuesday -- it was back to my hotel where, in a nearby mall, I found dinner at Sizzler. Yes, yes, I went all the way to China and ate at Sizzler. But, as I told Shelly when she raised this point, I live in China. I also found a Dairy Queen, which I haven't seen in months and months since the one near our house in Manila closed. Best of all, I didn't have to share a Blizzard with Shelly. Instead, I had a small plain cone all to myself.

When I got back to my hotel room -- in hopes of posting these photos -- I started looking around at the electrical outlets. I found this beast right next to the desk:


The one on the left is a standard Hong Kong -- and Great Britain -- outlet. The one on right can accommodate several different plugs. The top, for example, could take an American plug, as long as it didn't have the grounding plug. Of course, the 220v electricity might fry whatever you plug in it didn't have its own converter, like most laptops have.

The street near my hotel was full of shops and pharmacies, including one where I saw the whole staff, clad in their white labcoats, doing their morning workout to music blasting over a loudspeaker. Having lived in Japan for three years and having taken part in this morning ritual a time or two, this did not shock me. If it had, I probably would have thought to get my camera out in time to take a photo. Instead, I got a nice shot of some interesting Chinglish, which I took to mean "We're open during renovations":


And that was about the end of the tourist portion of my visit to Beijing. The rest of the trip revolved around lots of walking, subway rides and taxi rides from one office building to another. I did, however, get the occasional cool view from the 34th floor conference room, like this one of the main north-south artery crossing the main east-west artery. Wouldn't you know it, my next destination after I took this photo was to the north, which is to the left in this photo.


Part of the coloring in this photo comes from the tinted windows in the conference room (I cleaned that up a bit in Photoshop), but most of it comes from the fact that Beijing is an amazingly polluted city. Rumor has it -- from Shelly, who says it came from "word of mouth" -- that Beijing will be shutting down all the surrounding factories something like five weeks in advance of the 2008 Olympics to give the smog a chance to clear out.

Photos of Shanghai should be posted soon .... maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon.