First Day in Beijing

I had a friend visiting over the weekend. In a matter of days she’ll be moving to China which got us talking about my time there. It brought up a lot of memories and details which seemed lost somewhere in the back of my brain. Naturally, I grabbed my old hard drive to explore the hundreds of pictures left untouched since the trip. I barely made it through a dozen when I stopped on this one. This is from my first day in Beijing. There’s nothing like the first impression a place can make on you. These don’t always hold but they always seem to make their mark. After having spent weeks in the gobi desert that whole day in Beijing felt like an overdose of colours under a dirty and polluted sky. A little bit like this photo.

Firstdayinbeijing

Hard at work in Guangzhou

In large cities in China you can come across people transporting lots of different things. What’s striking is not only what is being carried but by what means. Whether it’s a fridge on a bicycle or a painfully heavy load of who knows what, it had never ceased to amaze me.

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Along the Hutong

One of my favourite things about Beijing is its Hutongs, little alleys all around the city that define Beijing in many ways. Some are very commercial nowadays, with modern coffee shops and some are more hidden and are mostly residential. And it’s the residential ones that I find representative of the city, or at least the traditional part of the city. The number of these hutongs has been decreasing over the years. Maybe because of people moving to better equipped modern apartments or development and more profitable use of the land. Whatever it is, it’s surely killing parts of the traditional Beijing.

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