Dancing in the Streets

Our second day in Beijing (I wasn’t paying attention just now and almost typed Bangkok by accident), we made the circuit of the rest of the obligatory UNESCO World Heritage Site tour, stopping at the Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City, and Summer Palace. Even though I’ve only been here a week or so, I find myself constantly drawing parallels between China and Thailand (including accidentally peppering my rudimentary Chinese with slightly-less-rudimentary Thai), so I figured that these attractions, like their Thai counterparts, would be swarmed with tourists. I was pleasantly surprised to figure out that, with the exception of the Forbidden City, these major Chinese landmarks actually had Chinese people in them!

The Temple of Heaven is a series of buildings spread throughout what is now a large city park where past emperors would go to pray for good harvests, long life, and, if the modern activities that take place there are any indication, good cardio exercise. Wandering around, we were struck not only by the number of people playing shuttlecock (hacky sack with a large badminton birdie) and Tai Chi Ball (badminton with a beanbag thing), but also by their demographics. We were there at 9am on a Tuesday, and the Old Ladies Athletic Club were out in full force, most of them pulling off sweet behind-the-back-left-footed-heel- kick-save-maneuver-things. The Brooksby Village Asian Branch seems a little more active than their friends back home. As obnoxious T-shirt wearing wandering outsiders we got invited to play regularly. We repeatedly accepted, and repeatedly got flattened.

Towards the far end of the park we ran into some larger groups of people, both of which we heard before we actually saw. The initial group provided the first “whoa” moment of my time in China. For some background into this term, see my previous explanation at http://onenickinbangkok.blogspot.com/2008/07/exploring-northwest-territory-part-4.html (for some reason I can't make hyperlinks work, I guess we'll have to go with URL copy/paste. Speakers throughout the park had been playing generic Chinese music all day, but as we walked it quickly became apparent that something had changed. Moving closer, we discovered a crowd of at least 100 (I couldn’t see where it ended from where I was) all clustered around a guy standing on a chair who conducted the entire ensemble in multi-part song. Here are a bunch of random people standing around singing in the park who sounded better than a lot of organized choirs I’ve heard. This was really impressive. Now, it’s been shown that if you get a big enough crowd of people singing together, the group will agree on a pitch and sing reasonably in tune even if the individuals are completely tone deaf. You can ask anyone who’s ever joined the 39,000+ voice rendition of Sweet Caroline at Fenway Park. These guys, though, were on a whole different level, with complex harmonies and clear diction, at least I think so, they were singing in Chinese…

After the singers, came the dancers. Again, as we approached we heard the ambient music shift, this time into something that sounded like a cross between the Dance, Dance, Revolution soundtrack and the Spongebob Squarepants song. Public Jazzercize? Let’s do it. Our tour guide for the day had no clue why on earth participation in this activity was even an option and even seemed a little annoyed at the delay, but we ran away before she could talk us out of it. This group, like the singers, was entirely impromptu, leadership being determined apparently by who brought the boom box, so we didn’t feel too bad about jumping in. The moves were easy enough, imagine that last part of the Macarena where you put your hands on your hips and shake your butt back and forth on repeat for about five uninterrupted minutes and you’ll be pretty close. Yes, there are pictures. No, I can’t post them (yet).

After our spontaneous workout, we drove off to the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, both former residences of the Emperors of China. Any China tour book, or Wikipedia for that matter, will be able to give you much more efficient rundown of the fun facts pertaining to these two sites, so I won’t talk about them here except to say that they’re both very cool and very big and full of very large tour groups who will consume you if you stand in their way and will find their way into the background of every photo you take. They may also decide that you are interesting enough to warrant your own photo in their album, in which case one of them will furtively sneak over and attempt to “look casual” while posing near you with the standard Asian Tourist Peace Sign Picture Gesture. Trying to do this without attracting attention is impossible and utterly hilarious. I think they don’t want to just ask for the picture because they know we’d do something ridiculous in it if they did. Maybe we’ll eventually meet a brave soul willing to test us. Time will tell.