Sun 29/06/08 23:01

It’s 8 pm right now and I’m sitting on the roof of the hostel I’m staying at… a beer in one hand and a cigarette burning to my left. All the big city sounds are around me, the horns honking, dogs barking and the hum of traffic not far away. So is this perfect or what? It looks like I spoke too soon. I was sitting here and a friend came up to work on his computer too, and as he sat down it started to rain…So now I’m sitting in my room, the beer is at the other side of the room and I’m out of cigarettes… I guess one of life’s little jokes.

The Forbidden City was impressive. The first impression that I had was how large it is. Not large in the sense of tall, but large in the shear amount of space that it takes up. If you’re into Chines movies and have seen movies like Hero where the city, or stage made up to look like the city, is used– that’s what it looks like. For some reason I thought The Forbidden City was more of a palace, but somewhere along my walk around, I realized that it was indeed a city.

One of the things that kind of surprised me is the Chinese people. I was walking around today, actually I was lost looking for The Forbidden City, stopped at an intersection and a kid comes up to me and starts a conversation. Now I’ve lived in Dubai for about a year, and no one has ever done that, anyway it turns out that he’s having an exhibition at a local art gallery in the cultural center of Beijing. So as we walk I find out that he’s graduating from the local art institute and has some of this work displayed there.

It’s been a real experience so far and although I could probably keep writing, I think I’ll end for now.

Tomorrow is Tiananmen Square.