Beijing is not for the faint of heart
“Do you speak English?” The woman asked me in desperation, like an animal about to get slaughtered. I answered that I did, knowing this would open the floodgates to a meaningless conversation outside in Beijing’s meaningless heat. “Oh great. Could you tell me where the entrance to the museum is? Is this the National Museum? We want to see the Louis Vuitton exhibit. What are you doing in Beijing? Oh, you work for a non-profit. Are you a social worker? How do people here stand the heat? How do you like it here? We just arrived yesterday and you know our company didn’t even send a car to pick us up. We had to take the subway all the way to the hotel and the hotel they reserved for us was barely satisfactory…” The large woman kept blabbering in this fashion. Even if the woman wasn’t wearing that grey ARMY shirt that all American moms with a son in the army proudly wears, I could have guessed she was American by just a single glance. It was the way she stuck out like a sore thumb; the way she hobbled around like a lost sheep and branded herself a victim for being jostled by the subway crowd and being subjected to Beijing’s blistering heat. I hate to break it to you sister, but this is Beijing in its purest form. I don’t know what you were expecting but maybe you should have read The Lonely Planet more carefully. I may speak English and I may be happy to help out a fellow foreigner, but I have little sympathy for a woman who unloads all her frustrations and petty complaints about the city to a random girl on the street who just happens to speak the same language and who happens to really love this city. I wish the woman the best of luck. Hopefully she will learn to like the city as much as I do.
(So I’m honestly not this harsh. The post just wouldn’t be as amusing if I was as nice as I actually am now would it?)
