Danny's Long Walk

The Saturday after our 4th of July, the program’s planned trip was to the Summer Palace, a beautiful park on the outside of the city proper. Having been there that week already with my friend Bill (visiting from the US), I decided to take the opportunity venture out on my own, and started out from my dorm walking southeast, in the vague direction of the center of Beijing, with nothing but my iPod, a map, and a bottle of iced tea as my companions.

I set out thinking that my first destination would be Tiananmen square, and I might take the bus from there to another site, but I quickly decided that walking was going to be my only method of transportation that day. Walking along Fuxingmen Dajie, the street that the subway runs parallel to, might be slower, but it made for a much more interesting trip in several ways.

First, seeing the buildings, museums, and monuments along the way put a face to the names that cover subway maps and populate guidebooks. Seeing how they’re laid out, too, gives you a feel for how the streets and buildings of Beijing are organized, and how one district differs from another. You also notice some things that aren’t printed in guidebooks, such as how the biggest buildings along Fuxingmen aren’t banks or government buildings, but chemical companies like Cosco and Sinochem.

Second, walking also provides you with access to places that aren’t as frequently visited by tourists. A handy barometer of this is how many strange looks you get from the locals (although I guess that could also just be me). You also get to see plenty of entertaining non-landmark constructions, such as this bridge covered in physics equations (which I think was part of a series, as it was followed by one with a musical score). [picture missing]

Finally, walking is especially valuable because it lets you travel without knowing where you’re going. After reaching Tiananmen square about three hours after I started, I meandered South, then further East, passing through closed-down shopping districts, collapsed houses in Hutongs, the Beijing train station, and what appeared to be a large gated forest. At one point, I ventured down a dirt road with a large crowd of people, thinking I might find a market or something else of interest. After walking for about 10 minutes, the crowd dispersed, and I found myself surrounded by China Post trucks and bins of packages – as far as I could determine, I was in the middle of a postage sorting facility, and the crowd of people had been non-uniformed postal employees returning to work. I walked back out the way I came (noting a security checkpoint with an evidently lazy guard that I hadn’t seen on the way in), and headed out to the Chaoyang business district (of the CCTV building and China World Trade Center fame). By the end of the day, I had wandered for about 8 hours from the West Third Ring Road (my dorm) to the East Fourth Ring Road (past Chaoyang). At that point, I gave in to my blistered right foot and took a cab back to the dorm where I immediately fell asleep, even more tired than after the previous night’s escape from the flooded subway.