Wednesday 5/30/07 |

My first trip to the Forbidden City was also my first trip to downtown Beijing. Somehow, I expected the trip from the office, near the Fourth Ring Road, to take maybe 15, 20 minutes. Somehow, I thought 14 million people wouldn't take up that much space. My colleagues laughed.

The still heat of the buses was nothing surprising, but as my friend and I made our way down line 62, I imagined our progress on a map, a speck of a bus inching painfully through traffic with perhaps a centimeter of progress every half-hour. This was a big city. When we dove down the subway stairs into a climate-controlled haven, I was pleasantly surprised to see not just English on the signs, but a clear timetable with estimated trip lengths to each stop. I tried mentally comparing the city's subway map with that of Washington, DC, whose underground extends into neighboring states Virginia and Maryland. Stretching roughly 100 miles from east to west, Beijing would reach far into both states, well past any town considered a DC suburb. This was the plight of every goliath world city: One could live there years and gain just a spotty knowledge of its layout. In my summer here, my picture of the city will likely consist of isolated dots on a subway system, never filled in by the buildings and people overhead.

This overwhelming largeness continued at the dwarfing gates of the Forbidden City. But here I fit right in, a tourist in a tourists' parade. Packs of foreigners followed cartoonish umbrellas that bobbed over their guides' heads, tours of uniformed schoolgirls drifted with the universal listlessness of historical field trips, and Chinese elderly spat from under matching baseball caps. I was quickly outfitted with my outsider's identification: an electronic guide strapped around my neck and an earphone. Anywhere else in the world, I'd have stuck out like every embarrassing father on every family vacation, bogged down by cameras and maps as though on an urban safari.

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