Flitting around the globe again I find myself in Beijing. I've been here just over a week, long enough to marvel over the irony of visiting a tibetan lamastery in China and to realise there is a place more polluted than Seoul. Wandering around today it finally clicked where all the grey comes from. The bicycle country is filled with cars and in a nation of over a billion people that's a lot of fumes even though most are still freewheeling happily around the traffic congestion. But there are little tricycles rolling around the back "hutongs" filled with things to sell including a huge amount of coal which must still be the basic fuel here.
Monika and I hired two wheeled transport of the old beijing style and trundled around the city the other day, following like sheep whenever serious traffic negotiation is needed. It's just crazy here. I crossed the road, with the pedestrian lights, at the instigation of a police man and a taxi still ran the light and nearly ran me over in front of the policeman who looked on blandly. Wobbling around the back streets was fun and even more so in a way down the major roads which all have about a lane or two's width devoted to a bicycle lane which is separated from the road by a median strip. Such joy! Pity about the pollution!
A couple of nights ago we went to see an acrobatics performance. Wow! As one woman we went with said, "the human body isn't meant to do things like that". They started of with balancing acts on balls and seesaws. Friendly big chinese dogs with two people inside
romped around and concluded by two dogs, four people, manipulating a big ball up and down a seesaw whilst wobbly standing, balancing it around. Contortionists pulled off impossible poses and then stacked themselves on each other, a boy balanced on about ten other people stood on a mini seesaw and flicked bowls on top of his head 30 feet in the air, acrobats jumped through hoops, twirled on long pieces of material, astounded and amazed to a marvelously tacky soundtrack. The finale was a group of women balancing on bicycles in a way that would leave any 12 year old bmx bandit gobsmacked; 11 people on a bike eventually which beat the family of four record on a pushbike i saw on my way from the airport.
Yesterday we climbed the Great Wall of China. In parts the word climb is not an exageration. Heading off to one of the remoter sections that hasn't been restored we walked, sauntered and lunched along the only human made structure my dad told me can be seen from outer space. Some places you can spend years near and never connect with but others get to you immediately. This was one. After half an hour or so we left the last of the wanna-be tour guides and drink sellers behind and found ourselves alone in the middle of nowhere. On top of an amazing mountain with only the birds swooping for their own lunch to keep us company. The music from the cable car eventually trailed off and the whispering wind continued the stories of marauding mongols the wanna-be guides had started. It was really, really beautiful. I hadn't expected much, a few old rocks and the kudos of saying I'd been there, but transfixed by the mountains with this really long wall rolling across it one wonders how the hell they built it. The mountains are incredibly steep. They just drop straight down and there's a guard post every couple hundred metres so there's no way you cound get near and not be seen. Cool.
Speaking of Mongols, tomorrow we're getting up really early and heading off on the trans-mongolian train, which later joins up with the trans-siberian. It takes 30 hours to get to Ulan Bataar and I'm really looking forward to chunks of space and blue sky. Yum!
Hope you're all well and if anyone has some books, info on photoshop, quark or design principles please let me know cause I'm looking for some training info for a month long training project I'm running soon. More news later, it's for a really good cause.