2003-01-13 - 5:47 p.m.

Leaving Beijing

Excuse me folks, I've gotten a little sidetracked recently. I'll try to finish up the China story quickly.

Beijing, Nov. 17

Continuing the story of our trip to China

Our flight to Xi'an was not until the afternoon, so we still had some time to run around in Beijing.

Unfortunately the first order of business was getting me some new gloves. It had turned bitterly cold, and it seems that I had lost one in our travels yesterday. I have this image of one lonely gray wool glove lying next to the Great Wall. Well, I don't think I wore my gloves at all yesterday, so it most have fallen out of my pocket unnoticed at some point.

There was a little store near the hotel that sold scarves and mittens, and they'd previously tried to collar us as we walked by. Now, somehow, they could sense that we were actually in need of what they were selling so they were all standoffish and refused to really bargain. It was cold, and we didn't want to linger so we paid what they wanted, which was nevertheless much cheaper than what such things would be in the states.

We both bought scarves and I bought a pair of "North Face" gloves. Were they really North Face gloves? When you buy from a street vendor you have no way of knowing. It's very likely they were brand name knock-off gloves, perhaps made by the same Chinese factory that makes the REAL North Face gloves. All I know is that these suckers are about the warmest gloves I've ever owned. The only drawback - when I wear them it feels like my fingers are enormous sausages.

We looked at a couple of the book stores in Oriental Square - I was looking for books on Chinese chess, but I couldn't find any in English. This is "foreign barbarian" thinking, but I found it stupefying to be in a huge bookstore full of books, all of them full of gibberish symbols I couldn't decipher. What the hell is up with that?

There was also a sizable "foreign language" bookstore, but there were still no books on Chinese chess. Oh well. I guess I'll check Amazon.com when I get home. Lily did find something though, "From Emperor to Citizen," the autobiography of Pui Yi, the last Emperor of China. Needless to say, in this book he looks like a better person than in the movie "the Last Emperor."

We made our way back to the hotel and our bags probably earlier than we had to, but this was a good thing. The Beijing airport was a long way from the city center, perhaps an hour by taxi. This seemed to be a feature of Chinese cities - the airports were none too near any of them.

We were taking a plane to Xi'an instead of a train because it was something like a 20 hour journey. Of course it was much cheaper, but right now time was a more valuable commodity than money - we had less than a week left in the PRC.

The trip to the airport seemed to be over recently-built superhighways. With a little chagrin I noticed that the superstructure of Beijing seems to be better than around nearly every U.S. city that I have visited. Everything seems nice and clean and some careful landscaping was evident around the highway once outside the city.

I also noticed a charming quirk of Chinese roads - every single bridge we crossed over, no matter how small, had its own name. I guess the Chinese take the idea of roads passing over water more seriously than we do.

Continued