Beijing: Initial Impressions

This is totally serious: the first thing I thought upon deplaning was "Wow, there sure are a lot of Chinese people here." Mind you I was dead tired.

I've decided I'm not quite in love with this city, though. Maybe having come from London and Paris affected my standards but Beijing is just too overwhelming in a bad sense: the streets are too wide; the pollution is so bad that the city lies in a permanent haze; the old and unique is being replaced by the new and soulless.

I saw vestiges of that old Beijing but they were mere shadows cowering beneath Soviet-era apartment blocks and pre-Olympic building-frenzy office towers. Plus, this is a city where the Sun has decided it can no longer shine. SL