While I was still in Chengdu, Google pulled out of mainland China, moving its operations to Hong Kong – still part of China, but with a whole different set of laws. I think Google is doing the right thing, but I don’t know how much it will affect anything in China. One thing to note – the censorship of Google has always been only in Chinese. When I use Google in China I use the English version, which, as far as I can tell, gets its search results from the USA Google. So, even while in China, I can get search results on all sorts of forbidden topics – Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Chinese human rights abuses, etc. The results show up fine, but if you click on a link the resulting page is usually blocked by China’s “Great Firewall”. So whether or not Google shows uncensored results, the Chinese government still blocks most political sites and all social networking sites (Google Groups, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, etc.) Google’s cached websites are also blocked – so you can’t sneak around it that way either. Still, the more free information there is the better – it makes China’s attempts to censor that much harder – so I think Google’s move is a good one.
I left Chengdu, saying goodbye to my favorite guesthouse (Sim’s Cozy) and the great staff, especially Chen and Leo, and headed north to Pingyao. Pingyao is a well known tourist city that has been preserved in the old style. The old quarter is surrounded by renovated “ancient” wall and the main streets are full of tourist shops selling trinkets, postcards, and even Che Guevara T-shirts.
But if you turn off the main streets and walk down any of the small alley-like streets you immediately find yourself in the real Pingyao – a city of people who work and live in the old-style buildings.
After two days in Pingyao I took the train to Beijing which dumped me at the Western Train Station. I knew if I could get to the subway I could get to my guesthouse, but I had no idea how to get to the subway. I found an information booth and they told me what bus to catch, but I couldn’t find that bus – someone else told me to catch another bus. It didn’t help that I didn’t know the word for “subway” and kept saying “train” and pointing at the ground which only confused people because we were at a train station. Finally I got on the correct bus and found a young woman who spoke a little English and told me what stop to get off at.
Beijing is a large sprawling city of enormous wide streets, big open squares and pedestrian underpasses. I had a few errands to do in Beijing (buy some camera things, a jacket, some other necessities) and I found it took me days to get things done. No matter where I needed to go it always seemed to take at least an hour and often taxi drivers or other locals wouldn’t even know the place or store I was looking for. The subway system is excellent though – you can go anywhere in the system for 2 yuan (about 30 cents). The system is still being built and is expanding so fast that many tourist maps are missing entire lines.
I lost some of my photos of Beijing, I had a computer problem and lost some data. Most of the photos that I lost were very touristy, so just Google “Forbidden City” or “pictures of Mao” and you’ll see the same things I saw. Here’s some other photos, mostly from the smaller streets, or Hutongs.
And here’s a few pictures from in and around Tiananmen square. I found myself most fascinated by the stone faced soldiers.
I also spent a day at Beijing’s art district, called 798. The photo on the front-page is from an collaboration between a European installation artist and a Chinese architect. It was basically a huge room full of fog and hidden lights that gave the impression of being in an infinite space. It was pretty nifty.
No trip to Beijing would be complete without a visit to The Great Wall. I decided to hike along a less traveled portion of the wall and my trip turned into a bit of a fiasco – I managed to get lost. I know, you’d think it would be hard to get lost when there’s a big wall to follow, but it wasn’t as simple as I thought. There’s a video below documenting my little trip to The Wall. The video may be a little indulgent on my part, I do talk too much in it, but hey, I just bought a video camera and wanted to use it. My apologies to Pink Floyd and to any of my readers who listened to the awful cover of “Comfortably Numb” on the front-page. Perhaps it’s hackneyed, but I couldn’t resist the Floyd/Wall connection. Lastly, for all my filmmaking/editing comrades out there, I would like to note I had only one battery for my camera while at The Great Wall and had to be rather stingy with shooting and let us please remember that I edited the damn thing on an underpowered netbook with a screen only 400 pixels high.
You can see or download the video at the link below:
Sorry to all the peeps in China. Blip.tv, along with every other video site, is blocked in China. Proxy anyone?
After my sojourn to The Wall I finally left China. Wow, I feel like I was there forever and I’m not sure where all the time went. I hopped on the Trans-Siberian railway – well, technically, the Trans-Mongolian Railway – and now I’m in Ulaanbaatar (aka Ulan Bator), Mongolia.
I’m here to see a man about a horse.
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