Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Beijing To Kunming

'tis nice to be back in Kunming. Nevertheless, I must grudgingly admit that Beijing is slowly beginning to grow on me. Alan was once again a generous and gracious host and Chris an excellent sight-seeing and cafeing companion. We walked along one of the few parts of the old Ming Dynasty walls still intact in the city. We also traipsed around in search of a temple Chris wanted to see; alas it was closed. At no point did we pass a popular tourist site: as Chris says, "the boring parts of Beijing are actually the most interesting"

Indeed, I enjoyed getting a glimpse of how the residents of one of the world's largest cities go about their daily lives. Riding the subway, in any city, provides a valuable cross-section of life, and Beijing is no exception. There were poor young men offering to sing for money, cherubic young children with rosy cheeks, teenagers with defiant piercings and hairstyles, and businessmen in fancy suits trying not to let the confines of the subway rumple their appearance. People were jabbering away, just as they do on subways in San Francisco and Paris and Tokyo. On Beijing's sparkling new Line 5, classical music filled the station as passengers disembarked from the train.

Beijing is cleaner than most cities in China. Beijingers drive better and spit on the ground less; they also queue. But the usual intimacy of Chinese cities doesn't really exist in Beijing with the exception of the rapidly disappearing hutong areas. The roads are so wide and the buildings so tall that few of its neighborhoods are really walkable; the car is now king. The ring roads reminded me of the freeways in Los Angeles- everyone knows they're congested and slow, and everyone uses them anyway. Surface streets don't suffice in a municipal area the size of Belgium.

The wind in Beijing cuts both ways: it clears the pollution, but slices through you like a sharp knife, so on one of the city's rare "blue sky days" it was too cold to walk for very long. I read in a newspaper that traffic will be reduced by half for the Olympics, which everyone knows amounts to ordering cars off the road. Part of me wants to be come back in September

The flight to Kunming was unpleasant: turbulent and uncomfortable. We arrived an hour behind schedule with no apparent explanation despite boarding on time. When I arrived it felt warm and humid, but the taxi driver complained of the cold. Relativity!

Now I'm sitting in my pajamas, blogging and drinking coffee, and it's as if I never left.