Well, I've arrived fit and well so that's good I suppose. The flight to Hong Kong was uneventful but I did have to avoid watching HellBoy II about three times during the 11 hours as the young Chinese woman beside me surfed the inflight movies - it just wouldn't be the same watching it on such a tiny screen. The only annoying thing is that I haven't managed to organise a phone yet.
The flight to Beijing was delayed but again uneventful. Chinese customs was singularly uninterested in me and my luggage ended up ariving on the same plane as me. So far so good. Now can I find Laura in the sea of Chinese humanity thronging the Beijing International terminal or Paul, whom I'd met once about 8 years ago? Actually, yes I could. There was no teeming throng of humanity; the airport may be huge but it turned out to be about as busy at that time of night as Christchurch International Airport, and Laura had already managed to find and intrroduce herself to Paul. In fact by the time I arrived, I'm pretty sure she knew more about him than I do! I got to bed about midnight, which of course was 5am New Zealand time . . .
Monday saw us jumping on the subway and heading off to look at the Olympic stadia. Laura's pretty much redundant now as the subway is unbelievably easy to use. (I've told her that!) We went into the Birdnest and the water cube. The birdsnest is cool, it's quite a sight, even for my architecturally untrained eye. The cube is more weird; it looks like it's made of thick plastic skinned bubbles, but in fact it's made of thin plastic skinned bubbles - 0.2mm thin in fact. I'd be surprised if it takes off as a building technique; it seems more like a curiosity with the method featuring more as a component than as a whole building. It does enable buildings to go up with a very light frame though.
We had lunch in a sort of snack area in the middle of town and headed to Tiananmen Sq just in time to inadvertently witness the lowering of the flag, which is a daily ceremony in Beijing.
I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence of socialism in action! The place seems to be run on entirely capitalist lines to me . . .
I don't have a camera yet so photos will have to wait for later as they are all on Laura's camera and it is morning in Beijing, so the chance of Laura being awake are approaching zero. But at least I've figured out how to navigate the Chinese icons to update the blog so that's progress.
Today we're off to see the wall - yes, I'll be banging on Laura's door soon to wake her up. Predictably, the alarm does not seem to have functioned as intended . . .
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Fantastic! Great to hear you got there safely and you're on your way.
ReplyDeleteAnd what evidence were you expecting to see?? ;-)
To be honest I didn't expect to see any. Some people think this is some sort of workers' paradise though. So it's more a case of seeing how such a huge part of the economy is entirely market driven. So more evidence of capitalism than lack of evidence of socialism.
ReplyDeleteOsu Senpai, thanks for the blogs. Very interesting to read. I'm very jealous because I'm back at work on Monday. Maia still has a few weeks holiday to go.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't really miss a classic with Hellboy 2 but it was funny as I recall.
Osu