Walkabout

Sorry for the delay in posting these last couple of days – after getting very little sleep the first couple of days here, I ended up crashing on Saturday night for ten hours before hustling out to make my Olympic events on Sunday.

Saturday was a day of epic walking. From the subway to the hotel in town where I picked up extra event tickets, and from there to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. After only five hours of sleep on Friday, I was a bit worried that I was going to give out before the day was through, but hey! There’s an Olympian in all of us.

Tiananmen Square is smack in the heart of Beijing, and in and of itself is in much to speak of – a vast expanse of pavement, the largest town square in the world, marked only by the presence of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum in its center. Unfortunately the mausoleum was closed today, so I missed the chance to pay my respects to he waxy eminence. But, as is the common thread in this trip, I met a very nice family from South Africa whose son is competing in archery today. And, as is another common thread in this trip, the government inexplicably decided to close the event to spectators, so they were left unable to cheer their son on, left only to hope that he makes the semifinals where they can finally see him compete.

On the north end of Tiananmen is the Forbidden Palace, build six hundred years ago as the exclusive home of the emperors. It somehow managed to survive myriad regime changes over the years, including a planned assault by the fanatical Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. Today it stands as one of those rare historical sites that emanates a timeless power of its own, rivaled in my experience only by the Acropolis in Athens and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain.
I’ll leave descriptions of the site to the guidebooks, and note only two facts about the site, one historical and one current. Historically, the only men who made the cut, so to speak, to serve the emperor in the palace grounds were eunuchs, so as to ensure the purity of the royal bloodline. For boys of low birth, it was their only path to higher station in life, thus their willingness to subject themselves to a gruesome procedure that it is said killed many of them in the process. I’ll also skip a description of the procedure, save to say that a eunuch’s “precious” was saved in a jar until his death, when it was placed atop his body in his casket so he could enter the afterlife whole once more.

On a more modern note, when visiting the site, resist whatever urge you may have, no matter how hungry you may be, to stop off at the small restaurant just inside the walls for a quick bite to eat. A greasy spoon of the most literal kind, I was served white rice with beef and a pickled chicken and vegetable mix. Good enough. But when I took my tray from the woman serving up the chow, the slimy layer of grease and God knows what else on that tray made it nearly slip out of my hands. I did what I could to eat what I could, but was as careful as possible to skim off the top and steer clear of contact with a coating of something that was a far cry from Teflon.

From the Forbidden City, I made my way north through the hutongs, the ancient, low-slung neighborhoods that still populate a few areas of Beijing, to a hole-in-the wall restaurant called the Caribou Café, of all things. Run by a globetrotting former photojournalist, I had that most traditional of Chinese meals, spaghetti carbonara. And a brownie. What can I say – I was starving and needed a break.

Finally, the day closed with my first Olympic event, watching the USA’s women’s basketball team hammer Czechoslovakia. President Bush was on hand to watch the first three quarters, and got almost no notice. The USA men’s team, however, showed up at half-time and caused a near-riot as the Chinese fans and even the seating ushers went a little crazy for Kobe Bryant. I’ll touch on this more a little further down the line, but this country LOVES it some basketball, and whereas Michael Jackson and Coca-Cola may have been the USA’s defining contributions to world culture in prior decades, basketball may so far be the cultural bridge of the twenty-first century, at least here in China.