My 12 days in China

Our group met at the lovely but somewhat natural hour(to me) of two AM, and departed from NYC Kennedy national airport to catch our six AM flight to San Francisco. Everything went smoothly, and the five hour flight to California felt short. In California we waited four hours for our next flight, San Francisco to Beijing. This was by far the longest flight I have ever been on, I remember being on their for so long and hearing someone walk by and say "seven more hours". It was interesting to look out the window, we flew over Siberia, and below us was only rough and jagged mountains of snow. We arrived in Beijing four PM local time, once we got out of our terminal into the airport I was in a way stunned. There were thousands of people waiting, but so many men. There was a time when I was looking around to see if there were any women there. The male-female ratio is very different there than it is here in the U.S. We got on our bus and headed for Beijing, that was when it hit me, we were China.

The next day we woke up early and went to the Temple of Heaven, this was a monument built by one of the Dynasties. The most interesting part about this place was it was a Saturday, and all the locals go there to enjoy a variety of activities, from dancing to exercising. There are these intricate stone staircases leading up to the dome, the dome was a tall thin structure, from the base you have a wonderful view of the city.

T'iananmen square was the next, we arrived there in central Beijing. Our tour guide warned us not to ask her any question about the Chinese government or any of the occurrences in 1989 until we were back on the bus. When we were actually in the square, the large, paved concrete surface surrounded on all four ends by museums honoring Chinese history, several peddlers approached us. I took notice to one man holding a calendar, he was different from the other peddlers, he was not eagerly trying to sell his goods, just standing there right on top of us holding them. When our tour guide was finished I saw him walk away, whispering into his sleeve. Our tour guide said that he was an undercover cop, and she could tell. I walked and took notice the anti-Japanese protests, the murals of Mao, than a little boy about the age of ten approached me holding two one-hundred yen Japanese coins asking me to exchange them because he was hungry. My tour guide said he was a thief that would grab any money I took out and that she sees him all the time. I though about him a lot, imagine spending next to everyday of your life at the infamous T'iananmen square, with the ominous soldiers pacing back and fourth with their expressionless faces. I wondered what his world was like.

We went to several other places while in Beijing: The Forbidden City, The Ming Tombs, etc. The second day we went to the great wall, a short drive out of Beijing. We drove the poverty driven outskirts of the city, through these rough and jagged mounds of earth, they called them mountains, but they were different than any mountains I had ever seen. Then we were there, The Great Wall. The great wall seemed like it went on forever, as far as my eyes could see, it toppled these mountains, these mountains that would be hard to walk on, let alone build a such a structure or fight a war.

After a short flight we were in the city of Xi'an. Xi'an was a smaller city in the mainland of China. It felt so much more Chinese than Beijing, not a tourist or any English to be found: and just like Beijing you couldn't see the blue sky through the pollution. I finally saw other tourists when at the Terra-Cotta warrior site. The Chinese government built these gigantic domes over the entire site, there were an astounding six thousand warriors uncovered, and two more domes of them in the process. These stone warriors did not have a uniform design, they were all different. There were several face molds, different torso, uniform, etc. molds. It was astounding.

Our next stop was Guilin, here in Guilin there was no wind, and it was humid: a felt a little sick from the dramatic climate change: New York's fading winter, Beijing and Xi'an's chilly wind and now suddenly the tropical humidity of Guilin. In Guilin we took a boat along the Lee River through the mountains. This to me was the highlight of the trip, everybody on the boat English, American, Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian we are all so entranced by these mountains all we did was stare up to them. They had these very odd shapes and were covered by Trees, the water trickled down and into the river in these beautiful waterfalls.

We flew to Guangzhou, and then caught a train to Hong Kong. It was nice to get to Hong Kong, it felt so much more familiar, although I enjoyed the change, Hong Kong reminded me of Manhattan. The locals here are really cool with the way they do their hair, their wardrobes and their awesome black, rectangle thick framed glasses. Hong Kong was no doubt a different country, very different from the rest of China. It was diverse and much more capitalist. I really enjoyed this city, and would like to come back.

If there was anything I learned from this trip it gave me a better understanding of what I thought was a whole different world. I went to China with the mentality that it was going to be so different, so different from anything I have ever seen. The people, the culture: everything, and it was. But as different as it may have seemed, I realized just how similar it was, and just how similar we were being the rest of the world to the Chinese. I looked around and saw children laughing and playing just like they do here. I saw people loving life, working, enjoying their leisure time doing so many of the things that we do, so similar to the way we do it. I think that is where a lot of the racism comes from, refusing to accept the fact that your aren't that different from other people(s).