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Busy day in Beijing

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I prefer to blog as I travel while the images and impressions are fresh in my mind but our whirlwind tour of China didn’t allow time for that. Now that we’re home and recuperating from jet lag, I’ll do my best to recap for you over the next few days.

As we walked toward Tiananmen Square on our first morning in Beijing, I felt completely overwhelmed. Many times during our months in China, we commented on how surreal it felt to actually be living there but in early June of 1989 when tanks rolled into that square and mowed down hundreds of protesting students I couldn’t possibly have imagined that I might someday stand on that very spot. The exact number who died that day has never been officially confirmed. The reality of being there brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes. When I mentioned my feelings to our tour guide, she quickly changed the subject pointing out the Great Hall of the People where the nation’s government meets, the China National Museum, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and the Mausoleum in the centre of the square where Chairman Mao’s embalmed body has lain in state since his death in 1976. I was later told that tour guides are not allowed discuss the Tiananmen massacre with foreigners.

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Tiananmen Square

Joining a throng of visitors, mostly Chinese, we passed beneath the gigantic portrait of Chairman Mao and through the Gate of Heavenly Peace into the Forbidden City. It was from high on this gate that Mao proclaimed the formation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949 and we truly felt that we were at the heart of the country.

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The Gate of Heavenly Peace

Our Beijing guide chose to pack too much into our first day there making our tour of the Forbidden City, so-called because it was off limits to the ordinary people for its first 500 years, a rushed one. Originally constructed over a 14 year period in the early 1400s when China’s third emperor, Zhu Di, moved his capital from Nanjing in the south to Beijing in the north, the Forbidden City is China’s largest and best-preserved complex of ancient buildings. We would have liked more time to explore it but fortunately, it is not unlike many other similar complexes that we’ve seen in Asia.

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in the Forbidden City

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Next on the day’s agenda was the Summer Palace, a huge park complete with gardens, pavilions, temples, bridges and man-made Kunming Lake. The soil that was excavated to form the lake was used to build Longevity Hill which overlooks it. The Summer Palace was vandalized during an Anglo-French invasion in 1860 but rebuilt in 1888 as a palatial summer resort for the Empress Dowager Cixi, also known as China’s Dragon Lady. She spared no expense even using money that was earmarked for a modern navy to build an enormous marble boat at the northern edge of the lake!

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Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill

Our third historical site for the day was the circular Temple of Heaven with its three levels representing God, the emperor and the people. Sally, who we dubbed the “reluctant tour guide”, dismissed it as unimportant because “we have no God anymore”. She told us that Mao gave the Chinese people “freedom from religion”. She didn’t appear to share the hunger for something to believe in that we sensed in many of the young Chinese that we were acquainted with.

Temple of Heaven

Temple of Heaven

Again, we would have liked to have had enough time to explore the peaceful park surrounding the temple but that was not to be. These are only a few of the highlights of a very busy day that ended with a Kung Fu show that was a fantastic combination of martial arts and dance.

In one way, we were very blessed while we were in Beijing. Did you notice the sky in the photos? Beijing is usually shrouded in heavy smog. It reaches such dangerously high levels that some people actually wear gas masks outdoors but just before we arrived, the air was cleansed by heavy rain and we enjoyed clear skies and unusually fresh air!

All steamed up

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When you step out of an air conditioned car back home in Alberta, your glasses don’t steam up! That’s one of the things I’m still not quite used to.

You really only need two words to describe Saipan’s weather; hot and humid! Saipan holds the Guiness World Record for the most consistent temperature year round. So how consistent is it? Well, I just looked up the weather forecast for the next 7 days and every single day says “with a high near 87” and every single night, “with a low around 78”! Now that’s consistent! Those are Fahrenheit temperatures, of course. Saipan is, after all, an American territory. For those of us who think in Celsius, that’s a daytime temperature of 31 and a night time temperature of 26. The numbers don’t sound all that extreme but when you add the very high humidity, believe me it’s hot! And it’s not just like this in the summer, it’s like this all the time! Imagine twelve months of summer. Never having to own a coat. I know there are lots of places where this is true but it’s still difficult for this Canadian girl to get her head around!

Saipan does have two seasons, the rainy season from July to November and the dry season from December to June. I don’t imagine that the dry season is all that dry, however. If it was, we wouldn’t be surrounded by such lush tropical growth. When I learned that we’d be here at the beginning of the rainy season, I visualized day after day of gloomy grey skies and never ending rain. It hasn’t been like that at all. It may rain several times a day and when it does it’s literally like someone turned on a tap but it rarely lasts more than a few minutes and in between, it’s often sunny!

The past couple of days have been different, however; more like what I imagined. This is also typhoon season and Typhoon Ma-on passed by approximately 300 miles north of here. I suspect that that’s had a lot to do with the blustery weather we’re experiencing right now. The sun didn’t shine at all yesterday and every once in awhile the wind picked up and howled through the palm trees surrounding the property. Whenever that happened, it also poured rain. The power went off several times but each outage only lasted a few minutes. The internet was also off from time to time. Conditions gradually calmed as the day went by and I’m hoping that things will be back to normal soon. In the meantime, we’ve enjoyed the slightly cooler temperature that the storm brought with it. It’s all relative though. My glasses still steam up when we get out of the car!

There are air conditioners in every room throughout this big house but it would cost a fortune to run them all so we only air condition the bedroom at night. Each room is also equipped with at least one ceiling fan and by keeping the windows open and the air moving, we can keep the house reasonably comfortable most of the time.

In addition to Ma-on there’s also a tropical depression about 600 miles west of here that could develop into another typhoon. It’s moving in our direction but it’s expected to turn northward within the next 24 hours and should miss us by a wide margin. If not, we’ll be prepared. We’ve learned to use two typhoon tracking websites to keep an eye on things. There are boards stacked beside the house and brackets around each window to hold them in place. Those will go up first if one of these big storms threatens to come close. If a typhoon does hit, we could also be without power and water for a day or two. We drink bottled water and always have a supply on hand but we’d need to fill the 3 bathtubs with water for washing and flushing. There’s no worry about us going hungry either. In addition to the electric stove in the kitchen, there’s also a gas range in the sun porch so we’d even be able to cook. I guess we’d start by eating up whatever’s in the fridge as that sure wouldn’t last long in this hot, humid climate!