Monday, August 23, 2010

The Beijing I miss

It being a particularly gorgeous day today (autumn seems to have arrived two or three weeks early; only fair recompense for the non-occurrence of spring this year), I decided to walk home from a morning recording gig up in the university district - a matter of some 8 miles; 10 or 12 if, as I did, you take 'the scenic route'.


It's the first time I've done that in a year or two. In fact, it's the first time I've undertaken a major ramble (outside of the familiar hutong districts near where I live) for ever such a long time. And it took me back to my early days in Beijing: simple pleasures, chance discoveries, going with the flow.


I wandered through the gorgeous little strip park along Beitucheng Lu (I think I probably haven't been there since before they gave it a major facelift ahead of the Olympics), discovered a great little open-air market alongside it, got happily lost for an hour or so in the maze of decaying '60s apartment buildings around Rendinghu Park (Is there an exit to a main road through this courtyard? Er, no...), tried - and once again failed - to pick up some of the intricacies of mah jong from a streetside game, and generally chilled out to the ramshackle charm and the unhurried pace of community life you can still find in the city's unreconstructed neighbourhoods.

There isn't very much of this within the 2nd Ringroad any more: far too many ten and twenty storey apartment blocks, far too many garish new office buildings, far too many sprawling shopping malls (which, if the developers took my advice, would all have catchy English names like 'White Elephant' and 'Hubris'); not so much of the deep, deep shade of the narrow back streets and cluttered alleyways, and everyone just hanging out on the sidewalk, passing the time of day.


It's good to venture a little further afield once in a while; good to reconnect with that sense of why I used to like living here.

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