tour days

My dreams here are driven. They follow patterns that elaborate on each other. Each new bed is like a new interpretation of the same things, and I wake up every morning with multifaceted viewpoints.

Everywhere we go now, we are fed with buffets. Buffet breakfast, lunch, dinner with tea and coca-cola. The amount of food is overwhelming and we leave so much of it to waste despite our attempts to ingest all that we can. At some point now I begin to avoid the meals and return to my room to eat crackers and peanut butter. We watch cute anime films and drink strong tea on hotel beds. This seems to sustain us and I continue living healthily.

One morning Rachel, Allison, and I head out in the early hours to visit the Temple of Heaven. This place is like an outdoor YMCA but with a beautiful, pristine, temple setting. There are groups of retired friends playing hacky-sack, practicing Tai Chi, laughing, dancing, chatting and stretching. The air of the place is wonderful and we travel through the groups taking it all in. We are the youngest people there by at least 30 years but the situation feels right so we walk and smile and don’t even take any pictures. Finally we have to take a taxi to school and all through class I am imagining myself in other places.

These days we are tourists. We are tourists in a perfectly beautiful post Olympics Beijing. We all find it hard to follow the man with the blue flag. These days we only do what is on the plan and our plans last all day with little room for rest. We wake, get on a bus, get dropped off, listen to a tour, get back on the bus, get dropped off... the regiment is draining. We make due somehow and this way we see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and many other attractions. These moments are when I can really see the 19 million people in Beijing.

The crowds at the Forbidden City are amazing. We follow literally thousands of people through small arches that spit us out into vast courtyards, hidden niches, and gardens that lose all their peaceful qualities when jam packed with people. There are groups of school children all dressed in their blue or red sweat suits. There are many foreign tourists, but even more Chinese tourists all gathering, crowding for a glimpse of a royal thrown or the beautiful royal relics. A few of us pay a little extra money to enter a museum section of the city. Here they have collections of jewelry, Buddhist paraphernalia, and huge royal seals. We visit temples with titles like "Mental Cultivation Temple" and "Spiritual Cultivation Temple". It is relaxing here and we stay for a moment and sit as a tiny group enjoying the "cultivation".

The Great Wall requires a bit of a drive out of the ring roads of Beijing and up through the surrounding hills. We drive on the same route as the Olympic cycling teams did. All along the road up to the Great Wall I notice little painted bikes on the road bearers. These lead us past the huge, shiny, Olympic Velodrome. I try to convince our tour guide to stop at this amazing location, but those tour guides... they stick to the plan... do or die. Finally we get to the entrance and we all stumble off the bus and stand in a huddle as we wait to file in. The wall appears smaller than I imagined, but as I begin to climb up the stairs and ramps I realize that although it is short, at times it is very steep. The tour is nice because we are left to our own devises for much of it and allowed to climb and explore at our own pace. I find myself wondering how I got here. I plot all of the planes, buses, passport stamps and footsteps it took for me to get to a place with so much history. It is almost as if I would have forgotten if I had not looked up past the wall, passed the hills, passed the city in the distance, to realize I did not recognize anything. The realization that absolutely nothing in my sight was familiar to me, but that I was standing on a structure familiar in concept to almost everyone was worth all the travel. We are poor tourists in both senses of the word and we never buy anything. I always take pictures though. They are far better.


The Beijing train station is hectic and crowded. After we all come together with our bags and our buddies we file onto a tiny train and squeeze into the next 6 hours of our lives. We slowly putter our way towards Detong in four person sleepers. We cut through the country, in and out of tunnels. We talk about nothing too serious. We share our sparse future plans and some of us read while some of us rest. I fall asleep easily to the lull of a moving train and the sound of rollers on track. We arrive and carry our packs up and down and out into the evening. It is always so rewarding arriving in a new place. I discover a sense of accomplishment watching all the packs bob up and down in front of me. But it is not until we get to our destination that I can really be pleased. I lye on my bed with all of my things in two little bags and I look out the window. This is the new view for a while.

It is raining out now. My roommate Rachel sleeps and I write about all sorts of past loves. There are no sounds but my pen on this paper and the ping of the rain on glazed tile roofs. I wish to go about in it on a bike. I wish to touch the earth and the sky at the same time.