(Beijing subway) Lost in an ocean of people…
Despite the frequent exhortations of station attendants to “先下后上” (let passengers get off before you board) and to respect “中华人民传统美德” (traditional Chinese values), taking the Beijing subway at peak hours is like an epic battle.
(Beijing) Nick loves dogs!
Despite the ‘one dog policy’, Beijingers still have a lot of dogs. There must be at least a million small dogs in the city - maybe there are more dogs than kids. I walk by dozens every day on my way to work, and usually none of them are leashed. They just roam around while the owner walks behind. You have to be careful because they leave plenty of deposits everywhere (surprising for their size), and dog owners don’t seem to pick up after.
(Arirang Mass Games, Pyongyang) I wonder what they thought seeing all these fat Chinese tourists.
I try to avoid telling my Korean friends in school that I went to the North, because they always look at me strangely and ask why I would ever want to go there. I don’t blame them – some have family histories and bad memories of the place. The immediate assumption is that I’m some kind of sick tourist that delights in seeing the suffering of others, or worse, that I perpetuate it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
(Yonghegong road, Beijing) Actually, I prefer menus with pictures.
I had a conversation with an entrepreneur friend who told me he had hired a Beida grad to join his AI-development team, and I jested that his Mandarin must be much better than mine to have cross-lingual collaboration, to which he replied that he was also learning Spanish. When I asked him why Spanish, he proceeded to list languages in order of the number of speakers worldwide.
(Zhongnanhai, Beijing) The red sign reads “Long live the great Chinese Communist Party”. A similar sign on the other side reads “Long live the undefeated Mao Zedong theory”
When I was in Washington DC last summer, I really wanted to join a White House tour, but it never materialized – our internship coordinator put one together before I had joined the think-tank. Instead I got to see the Capitol and various congressional buildings through the course of the summer. The closest I got to the White House was with all the other tourists on the South side of the park, peering through the fence, trying to identify which little speck in the distance was the oval office.
