Pursue to be Remarkable

This city has changed drastically since I was here in 2000. The airport is a glitzy cosmopolitan place that looks newer and cleaner than a lot of airports in the states. When I was here in 2000, it was a dingy disorganized open room. The subway in 2000 was a surreal single line moving back-and-forth along a few stops. We rode it for fun. Now, it's all pack and swirl as Beijingers commute across the city. At rush hour, you can hardly move your toes.

Olympic "slogans" are ubiquitous in Beijing now. Huge television screens display Jackie Chan giving bottles of water to sweaty athletes in slow motion as Muslim olympic observers celebrate their birthdays with Chinese citizens.

Jim and I snapped into an Asian travel mode upon arriving. It's as if somewhere in our minds, survival skills were established and filed away, ready for use at the moment of squatting on a toilet with no paper or fervently refusing rides in a pedicab or pushing through massive crowds of people. It's a rush.

The Chinese seem to thrive on conflict, chaos and high volume. (Old women selling fruit use battery-powered megaphones to scream pre-recorded slogans at pedestrians . Hawkers in booths set up sound systems to holler at customers a few yards away.) Although part of me looks desperately forward to languid Thai beaches and coffees and laid-back locals, another part of me thrives on the madness of this culture.

When we arrived night before last, we found a hotel close to Wanfujing (the big tourist street that halfway resembles Times Square). It was a darkly-lit hotel whose staff exemplified the seemingly arbitrary beaurocracy that is the Chinese foreign experience. The attendant filled out several sheets of paper after placing and re-placing carbon paper in a receipt book for at least three minutes while nonchalantly fingering through our passports. Simultaneoulsy, she took phone calls and barked orders to her co-workers. The place was dingy and had cockroaches. Needless to say, we checked out of the next morning and found a bright happy little hotel in a cramped hutong south of Tienamen Square--a process in which we walked about five miles, rode two lines of crowded subway and got scammed by a thin man with a bicycle taxi. (Of course, scams are everywhere. A bottle of beer cost between $.25 and $2.00, depending on how entrepenurial the seller feels.)

We are having a ball, me and Jim. Maybe it's sick, but we thrive on the fatigues of dirty air, language barriers and endless traffic. And the food is exquisite and cheap as ever.

We can't view the blog once it's posted--it's blocked here in China-- so we can't read your comments. But please post them anyway. When we get to Vietnam, we may be able to see them there. I know we can in Thailand. Also, we probably can't post photos or audio because the web browsers are Chinese. We post text from memory of which buttons to push.

O yes, and contrary to the New York Times articles, terrible Chinglish is alive and well in Beijing! Yesterday, Jim saw a t-shirt reading, "Learn. Play. Benign.".
Olympic slogans include, "Pursue to be Remarkable" and "Impossible is Nothing".
And on the smutty side of things, I saw an innocent Chinese guy wearing a shirt that proclaimed in bold letters, "Fucking Flake".
As long as it's English, it spells cool.