Part 5, Beijing

Date: 3/31/2017 & 4/1/2017

2005 was not all that long ago … you’d think we’d recognize SOMETHING in Beijing. Not so. The airport terminal is brand new built for the 2008 Olympics, and there was no sign of the terminal that we arrived at when we came in 2005.

Our air arrival from Osaka, Japan was at the new Beijing Capital International Airport, completed for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games at a cost of $3.5 billion, with its dazzling dragon design motif making it one of Beijing’s most interesting architectural attractions.  It is huge and glitzy, and has an internal shuttle train to get you from one end of the terminal to the other.  It was designed by a consortium of NACO (Netherland Airport Consultants) and the UK architectural firm Foster & Partners, and is the 2nd largest terminal by area after Dubai International’s Terminal 3.

Photo 2154-5, the new $3.5 billion Beijing Terminal 3, completed for the the 2008 Oympics
(Source: fosterandpartners.com)

Traffic in Beijing compared to our 2005 visit is worse, there are more cars, a LOT more cars, and fewer bicycles. Traffic is crazy. On the taxi ride into town from the airport, it became evident that getting anywhere in Beijing traffic is dependent on one’s mastery in the art of cutting off the other guy. They are merciless, even taxis cutting off other taxis. People will cut in anywhere, and the concept of taking turns to merge into traffic hasn’t been discovered yet. As we merged onto a freeway on the way from the airport to our hotel, there was a line of bicycles and scooters riding on the freeway (yes bicycles on the freeway!) in a lane made for them. And when it came time to exit the freeway, the exiting cars cut across the line of bicycles and scooters and I was sure I was about to witness multiple traffic deaths. The exiting cars would jam together coming to a near standstill and the bikes would filter between the cars riding left, right and directly across the paths of cars. It was hard to watch! But through it all, somehow everyone survived and moved on.

Photo 2287, our taxi cut off by a concrete truck in traffic

Hotels in Beijing are relatively inexpensive. We got a room at a hotel called the Nuo which was the top-rated hotel in Beijing by Tripadvisor travelers, and which turned out to be totally over-the-top in every way: lavish lobby, a gorgeously finished room with every amenity you can think of (except Japanese toilets!), highly attentive service, and great food to top it off. In New York, I’d guess this room would go for $500-$600. In Beijing? $130/night, $155 with the tax. This will probably be the high-water mark for our accommodations on this trip!

Photo 9927, over-the-top Hotel Nuo, and reasonable!

Whereas the room rate was an excellent value, the meals on the other hand, were definitely on the pricey side. But the spread! They had a breakfast buffet and a dinner buffet like I’d never seen before (dangerous!), and they were HUGE! And it was all delicious! The breakfast buffet was spread all over the restaurant with specialty stations for you-name-it: an egg station, a cold-cut station, a fish station, a sushi station, an Indian station, an Arab station … all with a cast of dozens to keep everything replenished and to clear away every sullied plate. Chatting with one of the chefs, he told us that this was the biggest and best buffet in China … and I believe it.

Friday 3/31/17 was “tour day” in Beijing. In 2005 we visited what you would call the great engineering sights (the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, etc.), so this time we felt free pass by those places and visit the more architectural types of sights in the city. We started with the Olympic Sports complex, which included the iconic Bird’s Nest Stadium, and the Water Cube. Only about ¼ of the Water Cube is devoted to the Olympic swimming venue, another quarter is a public pool, and about half of the big building is a big water park … the kind with all the water slides that go all over the place, and a wave pool with an artificial beach.

Photo 9963, the Water Cube, swimming venue for the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The Birds Nest was closed for some kind of maintenance or renovation with several very tall hydraulic lifts WAY up there with workers doing some kind of inspections. But even the exterior of the stadium is a remarkable visual spectacle with all those structural elements look like they were designed by throwing pickup sticks on the floor. I can’t even imagine the difficulties of fabricating and erecting all that maze of steel.

Photo 2235, Cheryl & Scott at the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium

Next stop: the CCTV (Central China Television) Headquarters. Every taxi trip in Beijing surprised us on the distances involved, which were so much farther than it looked on the maps, and took forever to get anywhere in the traffic. The trip from the Olympic Village to the CCTV HQ was no exception. You have probably seen photos of the CCTV HQ building – it looks like two upside down “L’s” with the two horizontal portions meeting at a right angle in mid-air. It was designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the same firm that designed the Seattle Public Library, also a wild geometric design. The CCTV HQ has quite a visual effect. And it turned out to be directly across the street from the new tallest building in Beijing, now under construction, the China Zun, which will top out at 1,732 feet (528 m) and 108 stories, not even close to being the tallest in China though. The glass curtain wall was about half of the way up, so you could still see the form of the steel structure. And like most new skyscrapers, it has a big beefy reinforced concrete core to provide capacity for lateral loads (like earthquakes or wind) and a steel structure built attached to the core. This is Pacific Rim earthquake country.

 

Photo 0069, the CCTV (China Central Television) Building, Beijing

 

Photo 0074, the new 108-story China Zun going up across the street from the CCTV Building — to be the tallest in Beijing (4th tallest in China … for now).  The three 60-story buildings going up around the China Zun are hardly worthy of notice.

The next day was a rest day, and we hung out, napped, read, and caught up on processing photos and updating our journal. We wandered out late in the afternoon to take in the street scene, and found a perfect lovely health food restaurant right next door where we had dinner for half the price of the hotel.

Taking a step back, I see a considerably different vibe going on in China than in Japan. Japan is notably egalitarian with a vibrant middle class. It seems like 90% of the population drives a Toyota, and houses in the suburbs are small by our standards but prosperous-looking. You don’t see any slums. Japanese people take pride in their work, and seem more interested in doing a good job than chasing a buck. It looks to me that they have found a way to hang onto to a very healthy middle class … something that we have been slowly losing in the U.S.  For better or worse, Japan is a homogeneous society … there is not the diversity that we are accustomed to. And the Japanese manners are impeccable!

China on the other hand still has big gaps of wealth and low income. I don’t say “poverty” because we did not see much real poverty in China … not abject grinding poverty like we expect to see in India. But living standards are still low out in the countryside, which is more the norm outside of the big rich cities of Beijing and Shanghai. But in Beijing — I saw more luxury cars in one hour at our hotel, than we saw in 6 days in Japan … there are tons of BMW’s, Mercedes, Range Rovers, Porsches everywhere… there was even a Tesla charging station at our hotel. It’s like the China of Beijing and Shanghai is a country on the make, and those that have it want to show it off. But even in Beijing there are still a lot of those old drab apartment blocks left from the 50’s and 60’s, and a lot of them look half empty – they are apparently being replaced by newer stock. The eye-popping building boom that we saw in 2005, which I thought had slowed down over the past couple of years, is still very much alive and well. There are massive numbers of new 20-story apartment blocks going up everywhere: redevelopment in the city and even more in the “edge zones”, i.e. on the boundary of development at the edge of the city. There are still tower cranes everywhere you go where the new high-rises are going up. You have to wonder how much longer this can go on. Japan looks like a country that has been very well off for a long time, confident and stable – China looks like a country in the midst of a major transformation that must feel like upheaval to the population.

In a nod to “old China” we had the taxi driver take us by the Forbidden City gate and Tiananmen Square on the way to the train station on our way out of town. Mao’s huge portrait is still up there looking out over his people … one of the few things that hasn’t changed in Beijing.

Photo 2403, Entrance to the Forbidden City, from Tienanmen Square

And from here we are on our way to the Beijing South Railway Station to take the bullet train to Shanghai.