Part 1 of our June 2009 trip to China with the Speizmans.
Sunday-Monday, June 7-8: Washington to Beijing
We flew non-stop from Washington-Dulles to Beijing on United Airlines. We departed on Sunday at 12:22pm and arrived at the impressive new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital airport on Monday at 2:20pm the next day. The ultra-modern terminal, completed the year before in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, put Dulles (and nearly every other U.S. airport) to shame.
We arranged for a minivan to transport the six of us from the airport to our hotel in central Beijing. The 20-kilometer drive gave an initial sense of the vast changes China experienced in the decades since our last visits. What had been a two-lane road with horse carts on the side when I first visited in 1982 was now a superhighway that passed over multiple other highways (four ring roads, each at least as big and busy as DC’s Beltway) to get into the city. The traffic, once rivers of bicycles, was now an often immobile sea of cars and trucks. Fortunately, our inbound lanes were relatively open and there were restrictions on vehicles in the core of the city, otherwise it would have been a clogged mess all the time.
The city itself was a vast sprawl of modern high rise apartments and office buildings where dusty old low buildings and homes once stood. The transformation, accelerated by the Olympics, was astonishing. We whizzed past the Olympic “birds nest” stadium and the blue “water cube” swimming complex, set among an array of very Blade Runner-esque towers and parks. There were massive video screens incorporated into the buildings showing non-stop advertisements, the first I’d seen of that in real life. We went too fast for photos this first time but we would return in a few days.
We checked into the Raffles Beijing adjacent to Tiananmen Square. The Singapore-based Raffles Hotel Group renovated and operated two buildings (Blocks B and E) in the historic Beijing Hotel complex between 2006-2016. Making distinctions between the blocks or buildings was something new. When I first came in the 1980s, what now seems to be called Block D was simply called the Beijing Hotel and was the most coveted place for foreigners in the city, home to many diplomats. The other buildings in the complex had been off-limits to foreigners. I never stayed at the hotel but had a number of meetings and meals inside. I fondly remember a simple dish in the lobby restaurant of cold noodles, shaved scallions and hot oil that was magical. This was also the hotel from which the famed “Tank Man” video/photo was shot in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In the wake of the Raffles renovation, Blocks B and E were the in-spots for foreign travelers and Block D had been relegated to lower status.
We got settled in the hotel (we were in the newer Block E) and took a late-afternoon stroll into Tiananmen Square to get oriented and stretch our legs. It was still a daunting, overwhelmingly vast urban space, made even more resonant after the 1989 protests.
We weren’t hungry for a big dinner but walked near the hotel to Wangfujing, a pedestrian shopping street with “food alleys,” both new phenomena in Beijing since my last visit. There were several blocks of market stalls selling all sorts of dumplings, noodles, skewered tidbits and other less readily identifiable things. We found enough items to keep us satisfied before retreating to our rooms and letting jet lag take over for a night’s sleep.
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