It is good to be the emperor

Needless to say, people in Beijing love Saturday night. I started at an interesting club called Vic's. It was gi-normous and quite cavernous. I got there pretty early and it was a mostly non-English speaking crowd, so I left before it got huge. With a group it would have been fun. I then found the ex-pat bar area (though I can not remember the name). Checked Blu Bar and Poacher's Inn. Both locations were decent bars, but nothing too cool to write home about. I ended up speaking a little Mandarin (see below), a little German (I remembered more from school than I thought) and a bit of English. Never quite found my scene so I went home early.

Any delusions of Mandarin-speaking grandeur I had have been washed away :(. I went out to dinner last night and could not order anything. Luckily they had a picture menu and a very patient waitress. I learned that I can say a couple of cute phrases and some numbers and then reach the end of the conversations. I will just keep working on it!

Today I visited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace. While Tiananmen was very interesting from a cultural and historical perspective, it is not all that interesting aesthetically. Ditto Forbidden City... though some of the stone carvings are incredible and the buildings themselves are large. Glad to have seen them, but unless I were to become a historian, no real need to go back. The Summer Palace, however, was beautiful. There is a large lake surrounded by forested hills of willow, bamboo, cypress, etc. It was absolutely gorgeous and I highly recommend.

The best part of travelling, for me, is connecting with people. While I love connecting with history and being at important places, the most interesting piece for me is trying to make sense of the hear and now (clearly history plays a role in that). Whether talking with locals (natives and ex-pats) last night or speaking to my tour group today these are the key memories and impressions that will last for me.

Speaking with people, I have seen a fair number of Westerners, but not many Americans. Maybe I am in the wrong place or time to see Americans, but this disappoints me. China is an amazing place to learn and do business (yes... I am ardent capitalist) and I think it is important for more Americans to visit here. Actually, I think it is important for more Americans to see more of the world in general. I am sure something like this might exist, but maybe there should be a program where all high school students are funded to go see a foreign country.

The US WWII generation, while not perfect (and with all respect to Tom Brokaw... it may not have been the greatest), I think benefited from exposure to different parts of the world. I am clearly not advocating for WWIII to provide this exposure, but I wonder how different US foreign policy would be if more US citizens had seen outside our borders.