China is so big and varied that a lifetime is probably not long enough to experience it all, much less understand it. I didn’t have a lifetime to spare, but 17 days was long enough to see, do and eat many strange and interesting new things.
First up, we flew from the hustle of Hong Kong to the bustle of Beijing. Like all tourists, we were there to see the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and so on. These we duly saw, and they were wonderful – I would happily have spent a day or two looking around the beautiful and peaceful Summer Palace. We also saw Tiananmen Square in a very unusual state – it was empty. (There was apparently to be some sort of race, related somehow to the 2008 Olympics.) It was funny seeing such a big empty space in the middle of a city – living in Hong Kong, you forget what such things are like.
