Beijing

Today was a really big day for us.  After breakfast at the hotel (which was very hearty and mostly American-style), we headed to the Forbidden City , the imperial palace for Chinese emperors.  Absolutely incredible, the size of this thing.  Pictures don't do it justice.  The outer walls were gigantic and massive.  Every time I thought we'd seen the biggest building and the largest courtyard, we passed through a gate into an even larger building and courtyard.  After that we walked through Tiannamen Square .  It felt like we were walking through hallowed ground, like a battlefield.  (You remember the student protests and what happened, right?)  Their version of Parliament was right next to the Square.   General impressions of Beijing: huge (16 million people will do that to a town), filthy air that was barely breathable, highrise after highrise after highrise as far as the eye could see in every direction, some nicer areas but a lot of grungy, Soviet-style apartment buildings that looked ready for the wrecking ball, no suburbs whatsoever, plenty of traffic but not as bad as I would have thought given its size, and fairly reasonable prices considering it's a major city in a large country.  Even locals can't drink the tap water or they'd get dreadfully ill. It's incredible to me that, for all their economic growth, they don't have the infrastructure to deliver potable water.    After the morning session of touring we briefly stopped by the Olympic complex for photos.  The Water Cube already has accumulated an impressive layer of brown filth since the 2008 Games.  And everyone's breathing that air all the time.   Next, we went for lunch at a tourist-trap-type of place.  Food was only so-so.  Even though Christy had ensured the food would not have MSG, something clearly had it because she started getting numbness and tingling in her extremities.  Fortunately she didn't ingest a big dose of it, or she would have had a serious attack, including breathing problems.  I've seen it once before and don't care to have it happen again, especially in this country.   Then we went to the Great Wall.  It's actually over 6,000 miles long, but the most popular spot is just north of Beijing .  Even just walking a relatively short segment of it was quite a cardio workout, as it was mostly vertical up a steep mountain.  The steps were up to 2 feet above each other; I felt bad for short-legged people on that climb.  It took us over an hour to make it to the highest point, and having to breathe a mixture of smog, cigarette smoke (incredibly enough, some Chinese were smoking while they were climbing), and rank B.O. didn't help.  Were it not for the smog, the view would probably have been truly spectacular.  Christy and I took a different part of the wall back down to the foot of the mountain, but ended up in a really unfamiliar spot and were fairly lost for a little while.  That was unnerving, since absolutely no one spoke a wisp of English and we had to get back to our tour bus ASAP.  Thankfully we eventually did get back, and only a few minutes late.   All day everyone was looking and pointing at me—guess they don't see too many 6'4" white guys walking around.  Several groups of Chinese, and one Pakistani group of girls, even wanted to get their pictures taken with me.  Sort of like I was a celebrity or something.  Nice feeling—I could get used to that.   In all it was a spectacular day given the significance of the city and the sights we saw, but until they improve their air quality I wouldn't go out of my way to visit again.   So now we're settling down and getting ready to fly to Nanchang tomorrow morning.  We'll be receiving Clarisse tomorrow afternoon.  Fitting that it should be on Mother's Day, don't you think?