China Trip – Day 4: North to Beijing

Part of a series of posts detailing my adventures in China a year ago.

Extract from my journal:
Wednesday 28th February 2007

If I didn’t need to keep up with my journal to make sure I have a record of the whole trip, I’d go to sleep right now. I’m tired, especially after losing the others and having to walk back to the hotel from Tian’an Men square by myself. But I’ll get to that later…

Anyway, back to the beginning: today we flew from Shanghai up to Beijing. It’s noticably colder here, both literally and metaphorically. It doesn’t have the same bustle, the same energy and veneer of modernity. Still a very big and impressive city, but it has a more Communist feel, even amid the preparations for the Olympics.In the afternoon after arriving here we went to the Temple of Heaven, where the Emperors used to go and offer sacrifices as a propitiation to the Gods, to intercede between Earth and Heaven. It’s a beautiful site, in its way.After that we went to the Lama Temple – “Lama” as in Dalai Lama-type religion rather than large South American white animals. It was bigger and less busy than the Jade Buddha temple, and had writing in Tibetan as well as Chinese.

Dinner was good, and I got into deep conversation with Jay about the meaning of life and stuff. We visited Tian’an Men Square – Tian’an Men means “the Gate of Heavenly Peace”, which is pretty cool. The National Congress is going on at the moment, and the square was closed – we could only walk around the edges. Red Guards were marching around the place.

It was after this that I got separated from the rest of the group. We went into a cybercafé in a building which was once a train station, and I was the last to finish on the computer. The others had gone on to wait outside, but there were two exits, and somehow we managed to miss each other. I made my way back to the hotel, hoping they were just ahead of me. Fortunately it wasn’t far and was fairly straightforward to find, and I had a map with me, but it wasn’t exactly a highlight of my trip!