Beijing, the marathon
Already at the Beijing airport I felt the chill of change. The Japanese order was suddenly over, the kind gesture and the whisper. China received me with the roar of the crowd, that here abandons any symptom of discretion. A man yelled at his wife, the customs officers were unfriendly and soon I began to hear the concert of throat clearing and spitting, habitual and incomprehensible practice of the Chinese of all genders and conditions.
This time, for logistics reasons, we travel in stages. I arrived first and hours later Yeray would. Paul, However, he flew to Hanoi where he would spend several days managing the Vietnamese route and we would meet again later in Shanghai..
Thus, I took only my first steps in Beijing. I stayed in a comfortable hotel and went out to dinner some chicken with almonds and hot sauce. The street was gloomy and the look of the men cheeky. I ate in a hurry and went out looking for refuge in the hotel room where I met Yeray, that brought a tired smile mixed with the hours of flight and the excitement of a new destination.
The street was gloomy and the look of the men cheeky.
We decided, not without some daring, record the capital of china by bike. A very petite and determined girl named Cathy acted as guide and so, pedaling, we slipped through the neighborhoods of Beijing.
Tiananmen is scary, because this is how empires are forged, dwarfing the man with big squares, with stone horizons, with giant images because in the absence of gods, communist tyrannies often worship their leaders. This is how the figure of Mao Zedong was engendered, today embalmed in his mausoleum. The square is known by the Chinese name of “The Gate of Heavenly Peace”., but on the bicycle a great anguish invaded me.
We move away to places of more human proportion and enter different hutongs, which are neighborhoods with an old flavor, narrow streets built since the Yuan dynasty, mazes with the charm of getting lost a bit in time. one of these streets, Lui Li Chang, we parked the bike to see how the artisans wrote words in traditional calligraphy as if they were painting on their canvases. There you could find ceramics and silks and fruits that were sold in street carts., there China was more Chinese.
They buried seven centuries of history with the blow of an excavator, but it is that in that, now, Chinese is Chinese.
With the holding of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, the chinese government decided to tear down a large part of these hutongs, to build apartments with plasma televisions, very modern and very functional. They buried seven centuries of history with the blow of an excavator, but it is that in that, now, Chinese is Chinese.
The personality of the capital of the most populous country on the planet resides in the absence of any sentimentality, 'Cause nostalgia can be bought with gleaming brick as if power shines better upwards, or across, in skyscrapers or eight-lane avenues.
We visited the Forbidden City, tired of pedaling, and we walked without knowing where to begin to frame such solemnity.
It only gave us time to intuit the greatness of the city. You can't meet her on a bike ride, not in ten. Beijing seems to not want to end and expands, with new neighborhoods crowding city Chinese into tall buildings, but a part of Beijing resists change. His story is told in the secluded little shops, in the temples, in parks with winding bridges who don't understand what's going on, what's that rhythm coming to, that change, that anxiety to grow at any cost.
The man who served me, He smiled before offering me the largest specimen of a crispy black scorpion..
As the sun went down and the neon began to light up the malls, a tuc tuc crossed the city to take us to the Wang Fu Jing market. We had chosen this place to be able to record the gastronomic eccentricity of the city. worms, mice, crickets, snakes… everything is served fried to the taste or displeasure of the consumer. In my case it was rather the latter.. I wanted to try something different but I didn't imagine that scorpions would eat, so, shell and all. The man who served me, He smiled before offering me the largest specimen of all that was there of a black and crunchy scorpion.. I had to eat myself to the sting, while Yeray looked sarcastically from the tranquility of his camera.
I accompanied the appetizer of crickets and a fried cicada. Of all those flavors, the one with the scorpion was undoubtedly the strongest, a mix between cartilage, shrimp shell and a slimy I don't know what. How long did it take me to swallow the tweezers, I had a good time with a rather unpleasant aftertaste. After, another tuc tuc tried without success, to take us to the hotel. After an hour and a half hanging around, we fired the driver, who shrugged before our expletives.
They build cement neighborhoods, immeasurable walls or mobile phones with the same ease
The next day we felt the need to go out to meet the wall, stumble upon wonder, with no more artifice than that of the parade of tourists. It was hot when we arrived and we dragged the camera and the tripod down the steps of that construction that seemed infinite. From a high point we saw the dimension of the Great Wall. Then and only then did I feel the thrill of being in China.. There I understood the exceptional place where our journey through the Pacific had taken us..
The Chinese do not rest, they have no measure, don't give up. They build cement neighborhoods, immeasurable walls or mobile phones with the same ease, they advance and advance, they exalt their communist idols in the squares, while they devour with voracious appetite the hand of capitalism. It was just the beginning, I had to escape from there, get out of the cities, maybe look for the essence of China in the peasants, in the remote villages or in the rice fields, but there was still a lot left for that.
