Still Alive in Beijing

A note from China, brief because the internet connection here functions at the pace of mild geological activity and because there is more to say about the Philippines than I’ve managed to write yet, and the Philippines deserves to be done properly.

I’m in Beijing. I’m well. The country is enormous and strange and fascinating in ways that I haven’t yet assembled into coherent sentences, which is partly why I haven’t written. The Great Wall is real. The food is extraordinary and occasionally unidentifiable. Thirteen hundred million people is a number that doesn’t mean anything until you’re standing in Tiananmen Square on a Tuesday morning watching the human volume of the place and trying to locate a frame of reference large enough to hold it.

There is a specific complication about cameras in China. The import of GPS-equipped cameras is technically illegal, which means I cannot buy the replacement camera I need until I cross the border, which means the photographic record of this part of the trip is being maintained on a phone with a camera that does its best under the circumstances. The circumstances are demanding.

Beijing itself sits in a bowl of geography that produces, in the absence of wind, air quality that the official measurements classify diplomatically and that the lungs classify more directly. The city has been expanding at a rate that makes London’s development look like a planning meeting, the skyline changing year by year as the money that has been moving through China since the economic reforms of the late 1970s continues producing buildings. Between the towers and the ring roads and the Olympic infrastructure there are hutongs, the old courtyard alleyways of the city, narrow and low and smelling of coal smoke and cooking, sitting inside the modern city the way the past always sits inside the present in places that have had enough of both to produce the contrast.

More soon. The Philippines posts are coming, I promise. There is a lot to tell you about the Philippines.

dave@launchcx.com

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

Still Alive in Beijing

“The country is enormous and strange and fascinating in ways that I haven't yet assembled into coherent sentences, which is partly why I haven't written.”

Beijing itself sits in a bowl of geography that produces, in the absence of wind, air quality that the official measurements classify diplomatically and that the lungs classify more directly.

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Beijing itself sits in a bowl of geography that produces, in the absence of wind,
air quality that the official measurements classify diplomatically and that the lungs classify more directly.