Jaunted - Tag: Beijing Field Trip

Beijing: Beijinging: Accessibility Is a Pipe Dream

femmefatale — 2008-05-30T16:45:01-05:00

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

How many people with disabilities are there in China? It's a tricky question. The China Disabled Persons' Federation say it's 60 million, a recent BBC report says 83 million and estimates based on the World Health Organization's population model are upwards of 125 million. But discrepancies of few million make little difference in a country of 1.3 billion people, and until now at least, nobody has much cared about the actual number.

In fact, when Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain's Paralympic athlete who's earned 11 gold medals, first went to Beijing, locals would to poke her to determine whether or not she was real.

The expected visit of just 4,000 more disabled people to Beijing this September seems, bizarrely, to have galvanized the Chinese authorities into action over accessibility. In terms of numbers, it's like a pinprick on an elephant's rump. But these disabled visitors are special: They're the Paralympic athletes, and they'll be trailed by 6,000 journalists.

Beijing: Beijinging: Polluted Air (Made in China)

femmefatale — 2008-05-30T11:17:44-05:00

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

If you want blue skies in your Beijing holiday snaps, invest in Photoshop. If you want to blow your nose in the city and not turn your hankies black, wear a mask. And if you want clean air, take an oxygen tank.

Drastic measures, sure, but they're just some of those being contemplated by Olympic athletes and their hangers-on this summer. Other cities are capitals of culture or cuisine; Beijing has well earned its title of Air Pollution Capital of the World.

Beijing: Beijinging: Keeping Fit with Pole Dancing and Fitness Paths

femmefatale — 2008-05-29T10:45:01-05:00

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

There's so much hype around the Olympic Games in Beijing that you might forgive the sponsors for counting their Chinese gold medals before they've hatched.

But what's going on at the more modest athletic level is far more interesting. Even NPR reported on the latest fitness fad to catch on with Beijing's women: pole-dancing. (The Chinese gracefully call it "steel-tube dancing.")

In sports clubs and community halls across Beijing, girls young and old are gyrating their hips and swinging their thighs to Western pop music, sometimes paying up to $1,200 for a year's worth of pole-dancing lessons.

Belly-dancing, yoga and bungee-jumping are also at the top of the list of trendy new sports to try. Yep, gyms and exercise salons in Beijing are becoming a voyeur's paradise.

Beijing: Beijinging: Do You Sit or Squat?

femmefatale — 2008-05-28T10:00:01-05:00

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

It was all going so well at April's inaugural event at the shiny new National Stadium in Beijing.

Bottoms were wiggling as a women's 20 km race-walking event got underway. Sexually frustrated male journalists were wriggling in their seats as they watched, and Chinese investors were rubbing their hands in glee. After all, they'd poured four billion yuan ($576 million) into the concrete-and-steel lump. It all looked very promising.

Until the Westerners began to visit the restrooms. A ripple of consternation spread through the watching crowd. Squat toilets, someone whispered. You know, Turkish toilets. State-of-the-art Swiss-and-Chinese design, 36 km of twisted steel and great solar power systems, and the Chinese had installed squat toilets.

Beijing: Beijinging: Tick the Great Wall of China off Your List

femmefatale — 2008-05-27T11:15:01-05:00

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

"Badaling Expressway" officially refers to the new highway linking Beijing and the Great Wall's most popular spot. But it could easily be used to describe that section of the wall itself. Previously the site of a wall separating deserted wilderness from more deserted wilderness, it's now an ants' nest of photo-snapping tourists and Chinese kiss-me-quick hawkers.

Why is Badaling so popular? Richard Nixon left his footprint here in 1972 and millions of Americans (and Japanese, Europeans, Australians and the rest) have followed suit. We guess because it's the easiest way of scratching the Great Wall itch--just 43 miles north of Beijing and served by a horde of tourist buses--it's the obligatory day-trip from the capital.

Badaling is the Great Wall for Dummies, the easy way to earn another tick on your things-to-do-before-I-die list. It costs a whopping (for China) 40 yuan ($6) just to see the thing, which tells you something. There's a cable car (another 50 yuan, or $7.20) if you can't be bothered to walk up, and there's a rollercoaster slide if you can't be bothered to walk down.

Here's the rub: It's not actually the Great Wall at all. Almost all of what you see at Badaling is a modern reconstruction, built roughly where the wall used to be.