En route to EMC office

8:45AM Monday

Well, I'm off to an adventure. . Armed with my laptop and some Chinese saying, "Please take this passenger to EMC....", I thought I would be all set. I checked out of my "downtown hotel", showed the doorman the picture on my laptop, and hopped into a taxi. I said, "Ni how" and he replied "Ni how." Okay, that's it for my Chinese. I showed the driver the picture and he said, "wua ha wua ha", meaning, "I have no idea where you want to go." At least I think that's what it means. I said, "I don't understand Chinese" and pointed at the map again. Evidently he wanted me to zoom in on the office, but I couldn't. He then said something else which was unintelligible, and left the taxi, evidently to confer with other waiting drivers. He's now back in the car driving in what I think is the right direction. I'm left thinking that grid systems and numbered roads are great.

We are now headed west on the 3rd ring road. Not very fast mind you, because it is one huge parking lot. I was warned.

Backtracking....

Sunday was my day to explore Beijing myself. Still being a little off schedule I woke at some ungodly hour, wrote the blog, had breakfast and got an early start to see the forbidden city. I grabbed a cab at the hotel and pointed to the line saying, "Take me to the forbidden city" in English and Chinese. That worked fine. I arrived at the forbidden city and was immediately accosted and offered books, postcards, baseball caps, etc. I'm getting better at making no eye contact and just walking away. It feels rude, but it is certainly the best way to handle it. Getting to the main square where one has to buy tickets, an unlicensed tour guide approached me and offered his services. 90 minutes of tour for 200 Yuan ($30). His english was pretty good, but I declined seeing that I could get an GPS based audio tour. Technologically it is pretty neat. It might not work well in a small confined space, but in a place as large as the forbidden city it is easily able to track your movements, flash the LED on the map and give you an explanation of the building you are approaching. The entire forbidden city is overwhelming. It is huge square after huge square, palace after palace, heavenly this, supreme that. I enjoyed looking at all the beautiful buildings, the emperors garden, the exhibit on Puyi (the last emperor?), and the clock exhibit. I was there for three hours, and yet barely scratched the surface. My Chinese history is a little better now that I've got the Ming Dynasty, the Qin Dynatsy, Sun Yat Sen, and Chang Hai Shek ordered chronologically in my head, but I'm in need of my 10th grade text book on China to sort it all out in more detail.

I exited on the north side of the forbidden city and had to walk back to the South side to see Tienanmen sq. This is no small walk. I walked along the huge moat.

Interuption. We just got on the highway North, to go from the 3rd ring road to the fourth ring road. Suddenly there is no traffic. Now that is great.

TienanmenSquare (photos) is, like most of Beijing, overwhelming in size. It is hard and cold looking, and very much conveys the feeling of an authoritarian regime. Apparently it is modeled after the Soviet city architecture.

Interuption. We reached the fourth ring parking lot, er, road. It was fast getting here, but we are going anywhere fast now that we are here.

The size and scale of the square, the 12 lane road separating it from the forbidden city, and the imposing Mao mausoleum combine to make one feel very small. I cannot image what Beijing was like two decades ago when there were a tiny fraction of the cars. It feels like the city is paved over in the worst possible ways. Huge thorough fares that are impassable to pedestrians. Streets so wide that either side of the street is a different disconnected neighborhood. Beijing could have used an urban planner, IMHO. I did not walk in Tianamen Square, just along part of the perimeter, thinking I would go to the National Museum. But alas it is closed for several years of renovations. Oops. So I decided to take the Subway back to the hotel. I always like to see what a city's subways are like. The subway was fine. A little less commercial than the Shanghai subway. Last year I was surprised by the number of Apple iPod ads in the Shanghai subway. It seemed like there was one on every single support column. Beijing has far fewer ads, and none for Apple iPods. The Beijing subway only gets one for far (er, close). I got off at the nearest stop but still had at least a mile and a half to my hotel. The subway is very well used, and they are in the process of adding several more subway lines -- so coverage of the city will improve.