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Far away, so close!

I write from Beijing, China, where a spell of hot, dry weather has just broken through the summer humidity. A thirteen hour trip – direct from NYC – landed me here just three days ago.

Although I've just traveled around the globe, it sometimes feels like I've only traveled around the block. Perhaps, in part, it's the phenomenon of coming home to my parents. I still get pampered with yummy home cooking, and my mom still frets about how I'm managing in New York (if only she knew!). Perhaps, in part, it's the fact that I was here barely a year ago. I still remember the smoothly-diplomatic personalities from the Canadian embassy, how to get to the forbidden city by subway, and where to find bootleg DVDs within a ten-minute walk.

There's also a much more prosaic sense of familiarity to being here. The Canadian embassy complex, where my parents reside, is a kind of gilded cage within the rougher reality of the city. There's 24 hour security, an outdoor pool, tennis courts, and glass-sheltered walkways. The apartment itself has a spacious patio, air con, high-speed (actually, medium-speed and highly-censored) internet, and a 1:1 bathroom-to-bedroom ratio. Really, it's a slice straight out of suburban North America.

To add to the surreal sense of being close to home, this part of the city has a hot real estate scene. To the South of the ChaoYang district, there's several multi-building highrises that fly under the banner of SOHO (which apparently stands for "Small Office Home Office"). To the Northeast, there's a townhouse residential development that bills itself as "Upper East Side". And to cap it off, just a few minutes away is a huge park with a lake, amusement grounds, and golfing, which advertises its gardens as "Central Park – Landscape World Capital". To look at a map, one would wonder whether I'd really moved from the Upper West Side at all.

Determined to get a sense of what exactly has happened to the neighborhood over the past year, I brave the streets (and the heat) by bicycle. The hoards of bikers that I remember clogging the dedicated lanes have thinned, and within the population still riding, there's many astride hybrid electric bikes. (These look particularly cyber-tech when ridden by women in A-line skirts, wearing headband-supported plastic visors that mask their entire face.) The streets themselves, although dusty with the desert air, are practically trash-free – the result of a fierce campaign being mounted to clean up the city in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

And then there's the skyline. The city of Beijing saw more construction in 2004 than all of Europe combined – and it shows. The Central Building District (CBD), where much of this development has been concentrated, is rife with new skyscrapers and construction sites, including the site slated for Koolhaus' CCTV building – still currently a hole in the ground with an attendant entourage of construction cranes.

Guided by my A+U Beijing Architecture Guide, I cruise past several barely opened, cookie-cutter ëscrapers in search of what the Guide's editorial gurus deem to be architecturally-worthy sites. (As a sidenote, the guide – a Japanese publication – was purchased at full US price from a bookstore in the DaShanZi art district, where in 2002 an entrepreneurial group of over 100 emerging artists began inhabiting a former East German-designed factory, converting its rooms into production and exhibition spaces. A network of industrial pipes crisscrosses overhead throughout DaShanZi's streets, giving the area an ominously Brazil-esque atmosphere… a grittiness appropriate to a nascent Chelsea.)

Sticking to the bike lanes, which are mercifully separated from the onslaught of taxis and private cars that careen through the eight-lane DaWanQiao thoroughfare, I arrive at the Southern edge of the CBD. Here, there's a new residential community sprouting called Pingod (roughly translated as "Apple," although its logo bears more resemblance to a flaming comet rather than a fruit, and one can only guess at what its slogan – "Transgenic Pingod" – is meant to refer to. Genetic engineering meets architectural parlance?). My guidebook points me to Pingod's smartly designed sales center that doubles as a contemporary art museum, and indeed, both the renovated industrial building and the room-sized rubbings of the Great Wall exhibited there are excellent, smartly postmodern pieces.

But my imagination is equally captivated by the third tenant of the building. It's an Extreme Adventure store, selling everything you'd need for a hard-core outdoor excursion, from ice climbing shoes, to compact propane stoves, to Swiss army knives – all at full Western prices, which are exorbitant by Chinese standards. Somewhat anomalously, there's also bottles of hand sanitizer next to the GPS navigators – both being obviously a "must" on any extreme adventure. A café is set within to the facility's bouldering gym, though noone's climbing when I pass through.

Returning home and recounting my adventures of the day, my dad is unfazed. "There's a big push to catch up with Western lifestyle," he shrugs when I tell him of the availability of ice-climbing picks in Beijing. He points to a development taking place just next to the Canadian embassy, where a large hutong that existed last year has now been razed, a forest of concrete framed highrises rising in its place. "XiFuCun: A Village? A City?" its billboards ask. "Will there be Villas there? Is one unit per floor a new standard?" The planned apartments are, dad informs me, Toronto-priced. Mercifully, these new gilded cages aren't New York priced – yet – but perhaps by the time that the olympics arrive, an Upper East Side townhouse with a view of Central Park will be equally coveted on either side of the globe.

Subscribe to TravelBlogs Posted by Elsa Lam on April 25th, 2006 in Articles.