Haven’t written much for the last few weeks, but will I get back on schedule soon. My excuse: a two week trip to Beijing, China. The other two weeks has been reentry into our time zone and the work that piled up while I was gone.

There is so much in the news about China and I must say I had some media driven ideas of what China would be about. This trip busted up most of those ideas. China is filled with people who are living their lives just like we are. Of course, it is filled with a lot of people. Beijing proper and the outlying suburbs are larger then Belgium. It is a huge city with millions of people in it.

I found the city to be fecund mix of ancient, old, modern and cutting edge influences. We stayed in a hostel located in a houtong neighborhood. Our hostel house was 600 years old. The houtong was a bustling collection of single story houses and buildings that created a labyrinth of alley ways in which you could get lost if you weren’t being aware of where you were.

The alley ways always had people in them. The grandmothers would be sitting along a wall from morning to evening, the deliveries by bikes and scooters honking to announce their arrival, cars trying, sometimes futilely, to drive down the alley and coming and going of all the people who lived there filled the alleys.

This was old neighborhood contrasted by the massive amount of high rise apartment buildings. There were miles and miles of then ranging from old, although hundreds of years younger than the houtong, to very new and very modern buildings. This contrast was also made visible by the ancient temples, the Forbidden City and palaces compared to the new Olympic buildings and western influenced shopping malls.

In all the places we visited and moved through there were crowds of people. In the malls, people were in every store and restaurant. The temples and ancient places filled with people. The streets and alleys had constant movement and crossing the street could be an extreme sport. This city is alive and moving at all times.

This might sound a bit frightening; however, we were treated with graciousness and friendliness by all of the people we had contact with. A smile, a bit of Chinese and a willingness to find a way to communicate would return a warmth and connection that was very lovely. Go and visit China, it is worth it.

So, that’s my excuse for not writing. Thanks for hanging in there.

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