Everything here is written in Chinese!

Made it to Beijing after 24 hours of travel—had to go through Hong Kong when my original flight to Beijing via Lhasa was cancelled. Took three hours to get across Beijing to my hotel due to rush hour traffic. I was really tired, looking at all the shiny cars, lack of tuk tuks and motorbikes, all the concrete, clean streets, gleaming high rise buildings. Fairly orderly stop and go rush hour traffic. One scraper’s entire side was a TV screen (like the kind they have around the edge at fancy stadiums) playing images of octopus and other sea creatures moving in the water. Felt like I had gone 50 years into the future after being in Nepal and India. Then in my mind, I heard this surprised realization, “Everything here is written in Chinese!” And then quick on its heels, “Ah, that would be because I am now in China…” I have been on the move lately, and that little moment showed me how much moving there has been. Maybe it was a premonition that everything in the future will be written in Chinese. It is the language on the planet with the most speakers. China is investing heavily in education and technological advancements…(fans of Firefly will appreciate the implications here).

Spent my last 4 days in KTM resting and started a different round of pills. It looks like I picked up a parasite from contaminated food or water. In a previous post I thought it was a particular meal, I now think it was water I drank in McLeod Ganj…there is a place you can fill your Nalgene instead of buying bottles. I’m glad I didn’t use the plastic bottles there from an environmental standpoint, but this has been hard on my body. I hope I can kick it before I get to Mongolia. Though it is nice to cut a thinner profile, losing 15 pounds in 2 weeks (that’s after getting rehydrated) is worrisome.

Tomorrow I will go see a section of the Great Wall, then walk around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City the next day. I am working to learn and have an open mind, rather than “prove” what I already think I know about China. I am in a country with thousands of years of history, that has made significant contributions to science and religion over the eaons. Like us (U.S.), China has its shadow sides. It is an incredibly complex place.
My approach here is different than in India or Nepal. I am going to try to see something true about the whole by looking at a small slip of it sideways with squinted eyes (like the way you can see sunlight glimmering on water by looking sideways at a handful of sand or the way you can realize something important about the oceans by listening to a conch shell). I am embarking on a train trip to see part of where Arabia met old China in the Silk Road city of Urumqi.

(Thanks Will for posting this entry…Blogger is one of the Google products that China has banned. I also will have to wait to post more pictures, as apparently Picasa is another.)