Day 1: jet lag & first impressions.

Most of our first day in Beijing passed in a daze of sleepiness. The airplane crew thought it best to wake us early for breakfast, a good hour and a half before landing, i.e. 1.30 am body time, a scant 4 hours after lights-out.

We did a little bit of sightseeing before lunch. We were taken to see something the guide called “anti street” but I think meant “antiques street”, with little shops selling figurines, ink paintings, ink brushes, old books etc. (The real name is Liulichang.) Mostly it was a good chance to stretch our legs after a long time of sitting still, but also a gentle introduction to street life in Beijing.

After lunch we checked into our hotel. Some people in the group then went for a walk around the neighbourhood; I slept instead. Then, dinner and another little walk along some local street markets. The weather is warm this time of the year and the city is crowded, so quite a lot of life seems to take place in the streets: vegetable and fruit stalls, raw fish and meat, noodles, sidewalk restaurants, card games, just hanging out, etc. It reminded me of the residential back streets in Egypt, except that this was a lot cleaner. I wonder how they take care of their grocery shopping in winter.

Both lunch and dinner took place in large restaurants. The whole group (10 people) sat around a large table with a Lazy Susan in the middle, and that was then filled with rice and various dishes. At lunch I counted 10 different dishes for the 10 of us – and they weren’t small either, not single-person servings exactly. They must throw away A LOT of food. I hope it goes to some happy pigs somewhere.

I had expected the food to taste more foreign than it did. It was really quite similar to Chinese restaurants at home. I guess they must be mostly based on Beijing cuisine.

Beijing is vast. It seems that you always need to drive to get anywhere. It’s not like central London where the tourist sights are all crammed together – look left and you see one, look right and spot another. Here it’s a 15-minute drive to someplace, then another 15 minutes to lunch, then another 20 minutes to the hotel, etc.

Most areas looked and felt the same to me on a large scale – I got no feeling that different parts of the city had a different character. In fact the city as a whole lacks character, I think. It’s a spread-out mass of buildings, rather than a coherent whole.

The city was amazingly clean and tidy, with no litter and no dust anywhere. It was also unexpectedly green: almost every street was lined with trees, and there were greens and lawns along many larger roads. And despite what I’d heard, the air felt and smelled reasonably clean (although it looked hazy).

There weren’t as many bicycles as I’d expected. Most large streets have a wide bike lane, which hardly sees any use. Where are the hordes of cyclists I’ve read about? The car traffic is dense but orderly, no jams and no honking, but bicycles seem to drive all over the place pretty much as they please. And they apparently have right of way ahead of pedestrians. On smaller streets there are no sidewalks and pedestrians mix with the traffic, keeping a constant lookout for cars (which you can generally hear) and bikes and mopeds (which sneak up on you from behind).