Personal Bubble Popped in Beijing

So in case you didn't know, there's about 17.4 million people in Beijing. This means that there's a lot of people on the roads, on the bus, and on the subway. In the stop-touching-your-sister culture of the United States, any inadvertent brush with a stranger results in an awkward glance and a quick apology. Here, I feel that I've gotten to know strangers and friends much more intimately via the Mosh Pit Theory. Its every man for himself when you want to go from one place to another, you shove people out of the way to make every step possible, but if you're just standing there you're propped up by everyone else and when someone falls down you pick them back up again. Some places are hard to bear if you are claustrophobic or have a good nose, which is why there are several large spacious areas to go to relax away from the clogged central arteries of Beijing. One of these places is the Temple of Heaven.

Across the street from the crazed Pearl Market, the Temple of Heaven's gates open to a long tree-lined stone walkway that calms our nerves before we reach the temple. As we approach the Hall of Sacrifice, we see elderly women twirling long ribbon (you know, the kind that rhythmic gymnasts use) and hear voices singing in the distance. When we pass these people though, we see that they are not master twirlers and their music sounds more like an Irish pub than a church choir. They do not dance and sing for money or recognition, they do it to get away and spend time with others. Within a culture where any hesitation walking down the street might get you run over, this is the greatest sense of community I have felt during my entire stay here. Walking past the Hall of Sacrifice, there are four or five different groups each singing different songs with different instruments separated by about fifty feet each - overlapping songs does not seem to bother them one bit.

We continued on to see the Hall of Good Harvest along with all of the intricate stone engravings of dragons and phoenixes around them. This area hosts a cluster of tourists from China and America (a couple of whom had mullets!), so we took our pictures and kept moving. One cool story from this area is that of the "70 year old door." In 1420, the emperor of China was seventy years old and did not have the strength to walk up the many steps to get to his throne, so he had a door constructed to bypass the long walk. A few years later, he noticed that the princes and imperial officials were becoming lazy and using the door rather than go the traditional way. He made a new law that only people older than seventy years old could pass through the doorway. Needless to say, it was several hundred years before another resident was allowed to use that door. We went to and documented several of the other tourist attractions around the temple, including the Imperial Vault and the Circular Mound Altar.

But the places we found most satisfying were in between and away from these tourist clusters. In the area around the Hall of Abstinence (where the Emperor needed to do without meat, drink, music, and women) and the Thousand Rose Garden, we found inner peace and serenity so lacking in our lives for much of this trip. I don't know if this has anything to do with zen, chi, ying or yang, but I could find myself here on a day off when the Olympics running at full tilt.