TRAVELOGUE: CHINA Part 1

“Because my manager is a vegetarian”, this is what I said to everyone when I told them about my impending trip to china. I’d been ready to go to the US but China came straight out of the blue. I was excited coz US, Europe etc.. was passé in these days of Company sponsored Onsite trips…but china, now this was new. So I started my preparations with my first of many visits to the Lonely Planet website. I was supposed to be going to Beijing, so the first thing I tried to find out was the weather there. I turned out that Beijing was experiencing one of its coldest winters in the last 15 years. With that in mind I packed for a heavy jacket, some woollen socks and skull caps.

Mumbai airport was crowded yes, but due to more security personnel than travellers. In the security check, I found myself in the line with a smiling Australian, while we watched the guy infront of us being so thoroughly frisked it almost looked like he was being groped. So agreeing to the fact that in these days of terror alerts and bomb scares, its best to leave our self respect at home, we submitted ourselves the same ‘process’. It so happened that my flight to Beijing was going to be a convoluted one. Mumbai-Dubai-Beijing. So I started from Mumbai, onboard the Emirates Air flight bound for Dubai. Dubai airport was everything I expected and more. The duty-free shops were packed with some extremely desirable stuff and I had to control myself hard not start using my credit card there and then. The airport transit lounge looked more like a high end shopping mall than a lounge. With a Bentley up for grabs and a miniature Gold Souk present I found myself in quite a spot and messaged my friends of my status: In Dubai. The onward flight to Beijing was long but not uneventful. I met a Saudi student on his way to the Beijing university to study Telecommunication. The great thing about him was that for the first one year of his tenure he studied Mandarin and English and then started with the technical courses. My perception of saudi’s changed at that instant coz I always thought them to be a decadent lot and not very much interested in education. We had lively conversations about his experiences in china and he gave me some valuable tips about handling myself on the mono-lingual streets of Beijing.

Beijing airport took my breath away. It went above and beyond any expectations or even imaginations I had. The runways were so numerous that we were taxing for more than half an hour after landing just to reach the apron for deplaning. The airport terminal, the new one built for the Olympics, was enormous dwarfing even the Dubai terminal and making Mumbai airport miniscule in comparison. At the immigration counter I saw a mixed crowd of Asians which included Chinese, Japanese and Indians but also a lot of Arabs. I thought my passport was given more than thorough look considering the fact that the immigration officer took out a magnifying glass to check it. I took a monorail from the new terminal to the arrival lounge and was hit by a wall of cold. Beijing was welcoming me with one of the coldest days of winter.

Thanks to the McAfee sponsored hotel I got a pick-up in an Audi, which allowed me to enter Beijing in style. The hotel I was booked in was bang in the middle of the central business district (CBD). I was surrounded by banks and malls and office complexes. I first took care of work by making a quick visit to the mcafee office and returned to the hotel. Since this was my first day I decided to walk around the hotel and get the lay of the land. Apart from the biting cold I found the business district almost empty after 6.30. Even when I walked by a very Las Vegas style mall with a football ground sized tv screen for a roof, I found only a few people there for taking pictures. I returned to the hotel, promising myself a walk in daytime to see more people. The next two days were a blur of activity and after work I just took a long bath and took to the bed, watching tv. Thankfully, since the hotel was a chain that catered to a lot of Western tourists and business people, it also had some English tv channels along with BBC. It was fun though to watch Chinese soaps without any subtitles and trying to guess what they were trying to say. I must say soaps don’t change much across countries. I saw marked similarities between what we get in india and the ones in china, though the the mythological shows had some outrageously made-up actors. The only thing that was lacking were the “saas-bahu” sagas that we have. So I think its time to outscource Balaji telefilms to china.

Finally, I had the time to enjoy Beijing after 3 days of work. I had bought the lonely planet guide for Beijing. With that I had outlined the places that I had to visit and things I had to do. I started with the Forbidden City and the Ti’ananmen Square. Lonely Planet advised to use the Beijing subway, which according to them is the best way to travel. Thankfully keeping in mind the Olympics, there were a lot of ticket vending machines with language of operation as English. So for just 2 yuan I could travel any distance on the subway. Be it the next station or from one end to other. The subway was extremely clean, efficient and overall very impressive. Even though it was jam packed, there was no pushing and every one got on or off the train without any trouble. There was a lot of staring in the subway as at that time I was the only foreigner in the train. I could see from the reflections in the glass that people were pointing at me and talking but no one stuck up a conversation. I just smiled at my neighbour and he gave a polite nod. That’s it.