Beijing At Last, and Adopted Babies!

We have safely arrived in Beijing, and are in the gorgeous State Guest Hotel, and have already had dinner with the Gaungdong group---lots of baby girls, some of them crying, all of them lovely! ... By the way, within hours of being here, Beijing had easily stolen from Kowloon the title of Asia's most haunting, breathtaking city. This is the place you want to come to, to see a reality shifted by many many dimensions away from the reality of North Atlantic western culture.

Beijing is pure 1950's, Maoist block architectures mingling with the Inner City/Forbidden City style historic Chinese structures, and featuring sights that are alien, ancient, otherworldly. Hard to capture how foreign and fantastical this city feels, so different from anything we've seen so far. The heart of China beats here, and it is rural as well as urban ...

One example: we took the new superhighway leading from the airport into the city, one of two such highways (the other is only about thirty meters to one side, and will be completed by 2008 and the Olympics). Kath noticed that all the cars crowding the highway are new cars---because so much of China's population is new to driving. While I noticed that wild sheep were grazing between the sparse trees on the strip of land between the two superhighways leading through the city.

Have never seen sheep grazing along the 401's passage through the heart of T.O., nor have I seen ancient walled Imperial Gates (ancient water gates, our guide explained) nor Imperial houses backdropped by bleak Stalinist structures draped with feeble attempts at Western advertizing, nor 'outdoor gymnasiums' of workout equipment, mechanical stairmasters and ellipse machines being used by old men in Communist winter-drabery and other dressed-for-snowstorm passersby who step onto the machines in their parkas and boots, do ten reps, then continue on past painted wooden shopfronts so old and elaborately designed they look like priceless medieval heritage buildings ...

China's heart is a clash of histories and styles and a promise of the future that seems not to have arrived yet. Beijing is the most improbably different place I have ever seen; if it did not exist, it would take a China Mievillean act of imagination to conjure it into being ...

Ciao from the State Guest Hotel!