Laowai's Daily A Russian in China

Idiot Tourist’s First Steps

When you arrive to a new city, the first thing you are pressed to do is to visit all the stupid standard sights, before you start doing something really interesting.

These standard sights in Beijing include the Tiananmen Square, Forbidden Palace and Mao's Mausoleum.

It's no use to tell about them again when there are millions of photos and thousands of pages of text written already. I'll just point out some interesting things.

In the 1990s, the Russian TV was showing a social ad with a phrase that became hugely popular - "Dima, wave your hand to your mother!" In this ad, a crowd of people was trying to convince a Kremlin guard to wave to his mother, but he couldn't - he was on duty.

Turns out Chinese soldiers guarding the central square of the country can even afford to drink a nice cup of tea, like the guy in this photo - see this Thermos cup to his left?

Another interesting activity is to try and find plain-clothes agents on Tiananmen Square. There's a bunch of them in Moscow, on Red Square and in Kremlin, too. One wrong step aside and they jump up to you - "Young man, this area is restricted".

For about 15 minutes I was watching a muscled guy who slowly walked in the square trying to look natural, sometimes taking photos of the same dull monument from different angles, and inspecting everyone around him with a professional look. He definitely wasn't going to leave the square.

In Mao's Mausoleum I nearly started giggling - when I looked at Mao's body similar to a wax doll (in fact, there is a wax copy of his body for emergency cases, so at any time you cannot be sure whether you are shown the original or a copy), a catchy internet phrase "That looks shopped" occured to me, and I felt like laughing so much that I had to quickly get out before I attracted attention of the guards. Indeed, the face looked like the work of a very unskilled photoshopper. I know, I'm bad, shouldn't laugh at this - even though Chinese people do not really believe too much in Communist ideology, their feelings for Mao are very deep, and it's definitely not the kind of personality cult you'd see in Soviet Russia or modern Russia - it's sincere.

Just in case, the Mausoleum is the tall rectangular building in the southern part of the square. We had two Swedish girls here who told me their story of horror: they didn't know about the Mausoleum and "just went the same way that everyone else was going", and ended up seeing "this corpse".

Later, when I was already leaving the square, I was confronted by a pushy granny selling warm hats and gloves. My mood being quite playful, I took out my own gloves and attacked the granny shouting "hallo! looka-looka! shi kuai!" (hello, look, look, ¥10!), waving the gloves in front of her face. The foe was instantly defeated and ran in dismay. I liked the effect and I'd recommend to use this method all the time when you come across these annoying guys in the streets.

Finally, the best of the sights near Tiananmen is Jingshan Park located to the north of the Forbidden Palace - the place that many tourists fail to reach (alas!).

Well, the thing is that according to feng shui (however much I hate the expression "according to feng shui"), the sweetest way to build an Emperor's palace is to the south of some hill. It also spares you of the problem with cold north winds. But when these guys built the Forbidden Palace back in 1420, they didn't have any suitable hill at hand. OK, let's just build one then, they thought, and they did - a 50-meter high hill made with just manual labour.

Having a hill in the middle of the city is so cool: you can see the whole ancient Forbidden Palace, and the skyscrapers district, and the one-storey historical downtown Beijing.

The results of this small walk are as follows:

Kilometers walked: 9

Taxi drivers told to get lost: 6

Fraud attempts: 3 — and all of the three wannabe fraudsters were men! I was so disappointed: earlier the fraud in downtown Beijing was attempted by pretty girls who were quite pleasant to talk with.

Photos of me taken by strangers: 2 - only two! I'm disappointed again. Earlier people were much more active in taking pictures with foreigners. Stupid Olympics, spoiled my country.