Being as how I had a day’s layover here in Beijing before catching my train up to Mongolia, Meg and Bryan were kind enough to devote much of their day to showing me around town and generally making sure I didn’t get myself arrested/sold into slavery/drafted into a boy band.  Anyway, we decided to take a bit of a whirlwind tour of the city, taking in the various and sundry sights to be seen.  Though both of them maintain that putting me up is no trouble at all and they rarely get to entertain friends from back West, I suspect that they also don’t want the most unenviable task of explaining to my sister how I was shanghaied/abducted by pirates/enlisted in the French Foreign Legion (which would be a bit of a trick, since I’m fairly certain that France hasn’t technically had a legion of any sort, foreign or otherwise since at least 1940).  At any rate, I am most grateful to them (my hosts that is, not the French Foreign Legion; they never did a thing for me even after I went all the way to France just to fix their stupid Gamecube).

            After a most refreshing thirteen hour night’s sleep (which sounds like a bit much, but after running the numbers, I believe it was actually about the first time I’d really slept in the better part of a fortnight) we set out for Peking University, where we mingled with the students, saw much of the campus, and I engaged once more in an epic, yet ultimately unsuccessful battle to eat with chopsticks without looking like Stephen Hawking trying to do brain surgery with an angry marmot on a stick.  Indeed, I have come to suspect that the nigh-universal fitness of the Chinese people has less to do with an active lifestyle than it does with the fact that eating too much with chopsticks is about as practical as excavating the Suez Canal with a spork.

            Next, it as off to catch a bus, which often takes a bit of doing, since more often than not, the one you want is already insanely crowded, leaving you no choice but to through your lot in with a pack of fellow roving bus wranglers and then sort of tackle a passing bus as if it were some kind of diesel-operated caribou that had strayed away from its herd.  While on the bus, my grim and alien appearance served to get me a little bit of extra personal space, allowing me to observe the ticket lady randomly yelling out the window at various people, cars, and urban donkeys.

            At length, we arrived at the Old Imperial Palace, which is actually newer than the New Imperial Palace, though since that loveable old scamp the Emperor liked messing with people, the names got mixed up somewhere along the line (he also liked concubines, eunuchs, and those little golf cart trams that carry people around, though not necessarily in that order).  Though normally a place of many artificial lakes, when we got to the palace, it was more of a place of many dried up, frozen over craters, which pretty much killed my notion of renting a little Imperial Paddleboat and feeding breadcrumbs to the assorted Imperial Ducks (The Imperial Duck, by the way, would be a fine name for the Emperor’s garage band, had he not been overthrown some 90 years prior to my visit).  Next, we got to walk around the Imperial Palace Ruins, which were all that remained of a Western-style portion of the palace that as destroyed during one of the Opium Wars by an allied army of the British and French in 1860.  I know this last bit for a fact because every single one of about 20 different signs there reminded me, word for word, of this unpleasant bit of history (And here are the ruins of the Emperor’s Royal Outhouse, which was destroyed by the allied British and French army in 1860).  I wondered if I ought not try to make amends while I was there (Sorry about all the opium guys, and the sacking and pillaging and whatnot, my bad.  Look, if any of y’all ever want to come over to Richmond and lay waste to a Hardee’s or something, we can call the whole thing even and go out afterwards for slurpees).  But I didn’t want to cause a scene or anything (for once) so I just let it slide this time.  I really hope that the allied British and French army of 1860 never go back there for a tour though, because I’m sure they’ll feel perfectly aful once they see how bummed the Chinese still are about the whole unsavory affair.  Also, all these signs were up forbidding us from either climbing or depicting, which was a bit of a disappointment to me since I really had to fight the urge to just sit down right there and do a nice little freehand charcoal sketch of the Imperial Concubinatorium.  On the way back, we were most unjustly denied access to one of those little golf cart things, which tempted me sorely, as a representative of the allied British and French army, to sell them a bunch of opium and then knock down a few buildings.

            After this, we hit up a little coffee shop where they had posters of such great American movie stars as Gregory Peck, Che Guevera, and Richard Nixon, and where they played Kenny G Does Mulan nonstop for half an our straight before the record finally broke and they threw on some traditional Chinese Mariachi Christmas music.  Next it was off to an ATM where, much like Sheetz, the government doesn’t charge you a service fee just to show that communism can be user-friendly after all once in a while.  All the money here has Chairman Mao on it, and I am most pleased to report that, like George Washington, you can fold his head into a mushroom as well.

            After that, it was off to a very nice Korean restaurant where everything was written in even more new and wonderful languages that I couldn’t understand, but where they do an excellent job of making beef stew and having one of those tables that’s also a burning pit of fire.

Well, here I am at last in Beijing, the City That Never Plays Music That Makes Any Sense Whatsoever.  I landed yesterday and after going through customs and immigration (including a sign with the refreshingly un-PC label “foreigners” on it), I found myself at that part of the airport where you meet up with people.  So there were all these folks holding signs and shouting and carrying on, and it really felt rather like being a rock star, except that none of them were really looking for me anyway, and even if they were, the only vaguely rock staresque qualities I possess are godly phat kazoo skillz, and a knack for trashing hotel rooms and dating crazy women.  Here at last I met up with Meg and Bryan, two of my sister’s friends in town who were ever so kind enough as to put me up (and put up with me) whilst I’m here in the sunny and socialist People’s Republic.

            Beijing is, in many ways, a thoroughly modern city; there’s lots of taxi cabs and high rises and neon signs with demonic hell pigs n them that would make South of the Border proud.  Really, it’s almost like Northern Virginia, but with slightly more statues of Chairman Mao.

            I was warned before heading out to dinner with my hosts that many people here would stare at me, which struck me as a terribly considerate thing for them to do since it reminds me a great deal of home where everyone also tends to stare at me, the only difference being that in Beijing I’m not wearing a hat made out of duct tape.

            In what seems like a delicious bit of irony, I have discovered that every single showerhead here in Asia is at least seven feet off the ground, and that instead of coming in cartons or bottles, juice routinely comes in these freakishly ginormous juice boxes which would require, all other things being equal, a second grader the size of a special bus to do them proper justice.

            Many people here seem to drive proper American cars like we’re used to back in the states, like Hondas, Volkswagens and so forth, as well as a few weird-looking Chinese cars, like Buicks.  Traffic laws are completely optional here, and it is generally the case that anything flat enough to drive a car on counts as a road.  The drivers here a most friendly, and regularly hail each other by honking repeatedly and looking insanely angry.  Never in all my travels have I encountered a place so very ripe for the introduction of the Dixie horn.

            The labels on just about everything here are written solely in Chinese (though a few are in Spanish too) and since everything is packaged entirely differently here, it requires a good deal of faith to assume that none of the five flavors in your Cheerios is, in fact, cat.

            The architecture here is all most interesting from a Western point of view.  Many things here could easily pass for modern American buildings, though often whoever built them will just go ahead and throw on one of those old-timey pagoda roof things just so you don’t forget that you’re not in Richmond anymore.

            Of the few things over here written in English, only a few make any sense whatsoever.  The apartment water heater, for instance, proudly bears the legend “King of Thumb” and never having been one to pick a fight with a water heater, I’m just going to take its word for it.  Also, the other night we ate at a restaurant advertising “heartworming service” which I earnestly hope is a typo.

            This being China and all that, I had rather hoped that I might be witness to more awesome spontaneous kung-fu battles then I could keep track of.  Unfortunately, all the local street fighters and battle emporiums seem to know when I’m around and keep a low profile, because the closest thing I’ve seen so far is a couple of construction guys exchanging spirited wedgies at a bus stop (though The Spirited Wedgies would most certainly be a fine name for a band).  At any rate, I have decided to move on to my secondary Chinese quest, finding an elderly man in a dusty shop somewhere to sell me a mogwai or five.