July 2, 2006
Beijing is refuge--not the highlight of any journey, but a welcome break. Generally, it's an easy place to visit, has few traffic problems (for pedestrians), far less honking, plenty of English speakers (handy when you need information about a visa extension; painful when you are forced to listen to an American yell, "This is not acceptable!"), supermarkets, and restaurants with pictures of the food. On the down side, the air pollution is some of the worst I've seen, and so thick, I feel I could cut out a little piece of smog as a souvenir. Covering more kilometers than can reasonably be walked, the subway (which is inconveniently placed from our hostel) and the local buses are compulsory.
Local buses costs Y1 (12 1/2 cents) and are relatively clean and easy to use. While we're too lazy to just get a map of the bus routes, we've found that we can just hop onto a bus heading down the correct boulevard and then hop off, if it turns. Combined with the GPS, this worked really well on our visit to the Temple of Heaven, originally a Ming dynasty harvest temple.
It's described as the "perfect" example of Ming architecture. The buildings are enormous and impressive, but overall somewhat lacking in personal feel. The park has a vaguely artificial feel because it is overly groomed and restored, but made for a relaxing few hours of strolling, especially since the cement and stone paths are sprawling.
Afterwards, trying to live up to our blog's namesake we decided to walk from the park to a "nearby" mosque--an incredibly draining experience. In the countryside or mountains, the distance, elevation and terrain are about the only logistics to consider, and once that's out of the way, the land, animals and views can be enjoyed. For big cities, though, high levels of pollution, traffic, noise, sewer smells, intermittent sidewalks, obstacles, missing street signs and the blinding heat of sunlight reflected off of cement can make even relatively short walks miserable. Especially since "we" miss estimated that the walk was about 1.5km, when it was closer to 4km. Still, the mosque was worth the trip.
Cow Street Mosque is very Chinese in design and character with brightly painted and highly glossed tiles integrating several roof components into one sophisticated piece of ceramic (classically Ming, as we had learned from the Temple of Heaven.) If we hadn't poked our heads in the doorway and seen the beautiful Arabic script on the west wall we wouldn't have even guessed it was a mosque, given the overall architecture and lack of a minaret. Unfortunately, non-Muslims aren't allowed in the mosque itself, though we were free to wander the grounds of the complex. (Ever since our trip to Turkey, I've found mosques relaxing and am always disappointed when we can't actually go inside.) This mosque has a great history, since it was founded in the 10th century, but it must be showing its age, since most of if was covered in scaffolding and being restored. As such, we didn't actually get to see very much other than green construction cloth draped everywhere, but one of the funny things we did see was a photo of the former Iranian president on his last visit to Beijing, with the Imam of the mosque.
-David
