Beijing

Beijing was cold and dry, and just like I remembered it almost 2 years ago.  When I arrived for the first time in Beijing, it was the tail end of the Chinese New Year, and firecrackers were still going off throughout the city like gunfire.  A dark cold night, wide abandoned streets, and constant popping and crackling were my first impressions.  We were hustled to a jiaozi guar, with an unfamiliar deformation of the pronunciation of the mandarin "guan," just like the word fuwuyuar, "server," that the old-hand students shouted at the top of their lungs for someone to take their order.  This was a necessity to get served in the human sea of Beijing.


It's still like that, of course.  The roads are wide and the sidewalks are paved with slate stones.  The whole city gives you the feeling that you are small within something expansive.  Things go on forever: the plain-like land below the city rails, the broad avenues, the airport terminals.  This is China that the Chinese histories celebrate - great forces of people, land and power.  Taiwan is cramped and trapped in comparison.  When the KMT moved the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, I think they left China behind.  The sweeping grandeur of Chinese history can only be played out on the mainland's landscapes, with its plains, mountains and deserts; not the claustrophobic jungles and precipitous mountains of Taiwan.


What am I saying?  I'm just saying mainland China's big, that's all.  And Taiwan's a funny place to call China.  Please don't take this politically, dear reader.