北京，再见! (Farewell, Beijing!)

I can't believe I didn't actually post from Beijing while I was there. Actually, I can.... the one place I had cheap Internet, it was free and dreadfully slow. Everywhere else, it was between 6 and 10 RMB per hour.... after the 2 that I get in Tianjin, it's hard to pay that much.

But it was amazing there! First thing I did, I walked from the bus station at the Third Ring Road to the Far East Hostel about a quarter mile from Tiananmen Square. It's in a hutong, which means that the streets are narrow and the public toilets are eye-watering (and quite public) and it's probably moments away from being razed for the sake of "progress"... but I digress. If you've never taken the time to walk the streets of a new city, you're really missing something. Every city has a pulse, an undercurrent that shows up in the way people greet you (or don't), the feel of the shops and the cars and the dirt and everything. Beijing is still in the afterglow of what is almost universally seen as a spectacularly successful Olympic Games, and the five days I was there exemplified that. October 1 is the National Holiday, which means that most businesses are closed for the week, and everyone goes on holiday. In this case, everyone went to Beijing -- five million of them.

Let me repeat that, with emphasis. Five freakin' million Chinese people went to the capital city on their one-week holiday. That's the entire population of the Bay Area, plus Bakersfield thrown in for good measure, added to the 12 million in the Beijing metro area. I went to the Summer Palace and there were 87,000 visitors that day. That's a little more than the population of Alameda at the Summer Palace, crammed into about 3 square kilometers of park and sightseeing. There was so much to do, and so many people doing it.... pure insanity. But in a good way, if you can believe that. I met a few expats -- a Brit, an Irishman, and a few Germans -- who gave me a break from the constant Chinese and broken English. "Hello! Come in! Very inexpensive! Only 100!" and "You want rickshaw? Three!" were the most common... the last is a scam where they insinuate that you're going to get a ride for 3 yuan, and instead they want 300! Such is life in a city that caters to tourists and a history of ripping them off. It turns out that the Irish guy went and got the cops to chase one guy who'd run that scam away.... China is definitely making an effort, no doubt about it.

So it was the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall (where I got rained upon) this trip. I'm going to have to go back when the city is a little more sane if I want to do anything else... which I do. Pictures will come, but I have to get the proper cable to make the connection. Turns out that's the one thing I forgot to bring with me. That, and one of my camera batteries is DOA, so I don't have any pictures from Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City.

Enough for now. I'm back in Tianjin, where life is somewhat cheaper and I'm actually starting clinic! More on that in my next post, along with some impressions of Beijing.