Where are my trees!?

(please back date to 2/6/13)

View of the Forbidden City from Jingshan Park

I’ve been pretty ill the last few days. It came on suddenly, like a switch. And it came on in the evening time so I was conscience when I felt like I was hit by a wave of disease. People tell me it is the Chengdu air being cleansed from my lungs. They’re probably right. And in Beijing of all places. We’ve had another two stellar days for weather. One for sun, the other for a light snowfall to add to the snow already fallen. I studied for the winter semester in Beijing in 2007 and it did not snow or precipitate in any way that winter at all. Beijing borders the Gobi Desert and the air during the winter is very, very dry. But since I’ve been here, a total of four days, it has snowed twice.

I’ve been stricken with a head cold. A head cold that has moved to my lungs. Just a wet mess in there. But I’m feeling on the up today. In fact, the remaining symptoms are just an occasional cough and no voice. But it’s getting better rapidly now and I suppose it is better to have been sick early in the week and not at the start of the Trans-Siberian leg of this journey, so I’m fortunate.
Despite my sickness, I’ve been with my friend Flo and his friend from home (Berlin), Daniel. We walked around Tiananmen, Flo and Daniel to sightsee, I to take some good photos and film clips of the most exemplary communist place I know, shots that will identify well with Beijing. We wandered around the square, circled the Forbidden City (it was closed for tourists that day), and walked about Beihai and Houhai (北海／后海), two lakes north of the Forbidden City. And next to the lakes, just behind the Forbidden City’s northern moat, is a park consisting of a reasonably sized hill (for a flat city) and some temples called Jingshan gongyuan (景山公园). This park centers around the hill, a man-made one, made from the resulting rocks and dirt dug up in order to create the moat that surrounds the Forbidden City, a big moat. It is said that the Ming Dynasty Emperors (who resided in the Forbidden City) would have their generals scale all of China in search of the most beautiful trees so that they may be uprooted and replanted on this hill. They would transport these trees from all over the country on the backs of elephants. This is also the site where the last Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (along with his most faithful Eunich) hung himself on one of these beautiful trees as his kingdom was falling to the hands of the Mongols. But we went here because it is the perfect place in Beijing to watch the sunset over the Forbidden City which sprawls out quite majestically to the south from the hill. And it was a clear day so the Forbidden City quietly grew darker in shades of orange and brown. It was an incredible view.

A rare Beijing sunset

A dinner of Peking duck

The next day we did much the same. But we also visited a camera shop on my request. The shop, of which there are few around the world, goes by the name of "Lomography" which is a company that makes specialty cameras that use good old fashion film. The company, over twenty years ago, started out by renewing an old Soviet style camera and played with the lenses to make different types. I bought a cheaper version (pretty cheap) which uses 35mm film to take photos in motion over four lenses. It produces photos with four frames and is designed to make cool images of objects in motion and you can distort the film to further be creative with the shots. I look forward to playing with this...
Last night we also ate the famous Peking (Beijing) duck or in Chinese, beijing kaoya (北京烤鸭). Flo and Daniel had been couch surfing (a recent traveling phenomenon in which people join the website and offer their couch for free to travelers) and their host joined us as well. They treated her as a way to say thank you for the couch surfing. Her name is Helen, originally from Khabarovsk, a city in Russia’s far east, and she works in Beijing as a Russian, English, and Chinese translator. The duck was great but what was even better was that we had gotten to talking about my upcoming trip to Russia and when I told her I was having some troubles finding cheap places to stay in some of the Siberian cities I am visiting, she told me she had friends (who speak English) in those cities and she could probably hook me up with places to stay (for free!). This is pretty ideal because not only would this save me a lot of money and a lot of hassle finding a place to stay (in a place with no hostel, there is also likely no English) but it also links me with a host who is a local of that city and can help me broaden my experience. They can recommend the food, the places to see, what things to do, and since they speak English, can help me with practical matters such as SIM card buying, ATM finding, etc. So we’ll see if this works out - I’m crossing my fingers.

I just bought a train ticket to Tianjin, another big city close to Beijing along the coast and it is here that I plan to get some good shots of the Pacific Ocean. I need this if my trip’s catchphrase is coast to coast. They also just built a new high speed train that travels between the two cities and after three weeks of taking slow rust buckets across the country, this should be a pleasurable experience. I’ll spend the day in Tianjin in the port area (hopefully it is a nice day) and then I’ll return to Beijing tomorrow night which will leave me with one more day of preparations before I depart for Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia on Saturday morning. I spent part of the day today at the Trans-Siberian agency that helped me buy tickets and obtain my Russian visa in order to finalize some things and pick up my first tickets. The ball is rolling!