Asia, the next chapter: A week in China!

It was a week ago that l have landed in China! Contrary to all my expectations and weather forecasts, I was received with a beautiful sunshine and mild temperature! As the picture shows below, upon my arrival I was blessed with a healthy air which lasted for a couple of days! :) At the time of the print-screen, Tuesday the 22nd, the air was really nasty!

Beijing Air Quality From Friday the 18th to Tuesday the 22nd of October 2013

When I travel to a new country, either for a couple of weeks or to live for a period of time, I try not to get much information about it. This may seem an odd approach to one that travels, but I prefer not to receive biased information which can influence my expectations and opinion about a place that I have never visit before. Usually, I read about the geography, the history, and the most important places and sometimes I draw a sketch map (e.g. My Morocco travel plan Ago. 2006) with my preliminary travel plan but I always avoid getting to know in advance about the food, or the people, or our beautiful is the scenery and so forth. If I’m traveling to a place, for sure I will get to know all these things and they will be based on my own experience. That is why I love this feeling of getting out of the plane in a country for the first time and feel the knowledge emptiness, just like a tabula rasa although full of questions to be answered. From the very moment that one starts to disembark from the plane (boat, car, bike, etc…), everything that happens, everything that one sees and experience is written in that blank slate and then transformed into our journey history. Is from that moment, which we start to gain knowledge about that unknown place and from that we formulate our perception and opinion.

This time is no different, I arrived in China Saturday the 19^th of October, and I have so many questions to be answered about this country, fortunately, l also have the time to discover it!

First walk through the streets of Beijing

A journey ought to start by feeling the place where we are; no matters if it is a city, or the country side or a mountain we should exposure ourselves as much as possible to our surrounding. That is why, I like to walk and dwell through the city streets so I can feel and grasp with all my senses the places where I’m in. Last Sunday I did an ambitious walk that took 9 hours; almost 37km from my hotel to Chaoyang Parkt, Tiananmen Square, Drum Tower, Confucius Temple, and then back home!

It was the perfect start and I had a good glimpse from this huge and impressive city. According to the UN Statistics Division data, Beijing is the 7th biggest city (according to the concept of city proper) in the world which means that everywhere you go you will see a lot of people!! And its definitely like that, when you cross a street you must not look only in two directions rather, you need to do a 360º view before daring to cross the street because cars, buses, bikes, motorbikes and all kind of vehicles can appear from anywhere! It is amazing how many types of transport vehicles there are and how much stuff people need to move around the city. You can see old bikes, homemade three wheel electrical bikes, motorbikes, wheelbarrows, you name it, carrying stuff/goods from one point to the other. It's beautiful staying at a crossroad just looking to the maze drawn by the people crossing it.

There is much more to tell but I rather leave some photos and continue to describe in my next post!