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A Billion People


Before I visit some-where I read a lot about it, buy guidebooks, look on the net, ask people who might have been there already. I've read a great deal about China, am aware of their human rights record, am appalled by their treatment of the Tibetan nation and have seen movies from The Last Emporer to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. I think that travelling all around Europe, a few Muslim countries, and the US, I have never really under gone what I would call 'Culture Shock'. I had a friend who went to Mumbai and spent the first 48 hours in her hotel room as she was just so amazed and confused by the noise, smells, and crowds she saw when she arrived. Obviously, my trip to Beijing was not that extreme, but I did find myself simply staggered by the scale of the city.

The first moment came when I stepped onto Tiannamen Square. The scale is out of this world and images of mass rallies came sweeping trhough my mind. I was surrounded by huge groups of Chinese tourists, apparantly, it is very common for villages or towns to make pilgrimages to see Mao, and see the Forbidden City. In my youth I used to frequent rock concerts, seen Guns 'n' Roses, Metallica and been to summer festivals of a hundred thousand people, and yet shuffling through the square felt massive on a scale I have never seen. Follow this up with a trip on the Metro on a random Wednesday afternoon worse than Paris in rush hour, and you get an idea of simply how many people there are around you all the time.

Beijing is almost too big to explore, you couldn't walk from one end to the other. But it is exactly this that made it such a fascinating place to visit, huge spaces, a self contained secret city that took hours just to walk though, streets that have been there for years, some that seem to have popped up in a matter of weeks, it's all there. It took me a few days to get my bearings, there are so many taxis, metro changes and buses to get anywhere it seems like you are travelling across country to get to anything. I still don't know if Beijing is heaven or hell, but I know that it was a wonderful experience, one that is going to leave me thinking for a while. In the mean time, Budapest seems so much more friendly, more walkable than ever before.


This post first appeared on Warsaw To Paris To Budapest, please read the originial post: here

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A Billion People

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