People Watching
People Watching
People Watching
August 4, 2008
Today Jeff and Brandon arrived and after negotiating a bureaucratic nightmare to get guest passes for them to visit me in the secure green zone area, dedicated for athletes and international media we met up and swapped travel horror stories.
It was then time for some preliminary sight seeing. First, a taxi into Wangfujing where there is a main shopping street - I needed to get a local mobile phone and do some people watching.
I couldn’t be more wrong. Well, I did get the phone.
My first impressions of China were so brilliant that I perhaps painted the whole country with that rose coloured hue (indeed, this is one of the dangers of an exemplary Olympics here - it tempts us to imagine all of China and all the Chinese issues have been resoled with equal success and that is not the case.)
Even getting to the shopping street was a veritable gauntlet...I took the underground - taxis were blocked off from going to this particular area - either that or he just didn’t want to - so I was forced into public transportation. I am a huge fan of public transportation for all those green reasons. I am a fan of regular sized people abandoning their cars for subways, trams and busses. I am not a fan of the system for myself. A sure way to make a large person look like a complete monster is to shove them in a small metal cylinder with a hundred other people. In China especially, I look like big foot on the underground. Locals pointing and mumbling to each other, and me frozen unable to move lest and involuntary gesture took out innocent bystanders…
There can be no doubt that I am a total freak to the Chinese. Not in a Yao Ming - “a-hero-walks-among-us” kind of way - but in a travelling circus “what-the-hell-is-that?” kind of way. I became the total focus of the street - the stuff of my nightmares came real.
We abandoned the shopping quest and started to head to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, it wasn’t far so we walked...but wait...was this woman following me? No in fact, she was circling me. A woman so ancient that her face was knotted and gnarled like tree bark kept on silently motioning at me. I took a swig of iced green tea and she motioned again - “she wants a drink?” I finished the bottle and as I turned to look for the nearest bin (and to make a swift escape) she moved, surprisingly deftly for someone so advanced in years and swiped the bottle out of my hand and into her basket...I look up to see three different people videotaping my interaction.
We walked through the outer walls of the forbidden city, it was late in the day so I didn’t get to explore inside, but it was majestic, lined with soldiers and full of people - as if it most of China had come on pilgrimage...tomorrow would be the big day, when the torch would finally finish it’s worldwide relay and enter the forbidden city, carried by China (and Houston’s) sporting hero - Yao Ming.
A dressed up Tiananmen Square wasn’t my speed, but apparently, a Tex-Mex bar in the heart of Beijing was perfectly appropriate! The Cabo bar and restaurant was an expatriate haunt, most of the people in the bar where British, French or American employees and consultants. It was good to have an evening away from serious thoughts and we bedded down at my corner table to have the strangest, but most delicious, raspberry vodka frozen margarita that came with a shot of tequila floated on top...yeah, it was wrong...but really good...I just hoped I didn’t have a hangover in the morning….